Dream Count leaves no illusions that it is a repudiation of the boxes into which women are placed from birth, such as marrying before thirty, bearing their husband’s name after marriage, performing subordination at their own expense, etc.
By Chimezie Chika
How did people keep themselves sane during the lockdown that followed the global pandemic of 2020? Did they start a new remote postgraduate programme, catch up on old friendships, exercise more, despair about their loneliness, or spend time taking stock of their lives and their past relationships?
This is the starting point of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s much-anticipated new novel, Dream Count, which is now appearing twelve years after her last one, Americanah (2013) –and some of that novel’s brash feminist projections are absent here.
Dream Count follows the lives of four women; Nigerians: Chiamaka (Chia, for short), a travel writer; Zikora, a lawyer; Omelogor, a banker turned postgraduate scholar, and the Guinean, Kadiatou, a hotel maid—all linked to America by the immigrant experience.
In the novel (each woman gets a novella-like section), these women’s lives intersect and overlap with their experience of womanhood and its many confrontations and uncertainties, as well as through their steadfast friendships and sisterhood.
Starting with the pandemic, Dream Count begins with Chia’s grim recollections of her life pre-pandemic. As it turns out, the now older, circumspect Chia—she’s 44 when she begins to reminisce about her past—was none of that in her younger years; she was then a thoroughly self-limiting and abuse-enabling woman who got into relationships with the wrong kind of men and tried to justify it.
Chia’s one consuming desire is to be “truly known”. This, in many ways, becomes the Dream Count’s ever-present chorus as we go deeper into the story.
As a writer, in some respects Chia seems to be Adichie’s alter ego (note, as a writer). Her anxieties, promptings, and trauma responses in the pandemic section of the novel fits in to what Adichie has let on in the recent interviews leading up to the Dream Count’s release.
For Chia, the pandemic brought a kind of motionless grief (“every morning, I was hesitant to rise, because to get out of bed was to approach again the possibility of sorrow”), so that she could not engage in the things she wanted most to do: “I did not write because I could not write. I never turned on my treadmill.” Ditto, Adichie, as she grieved her parent’s death during and in the immediate aftermath of the global pandemic. In Chia, Adichie captures the ennui that writers can sink into in desperate times—seen in Chia’s observation that she’s “doing nothing, feeling guilty for doing nothing, and yet doing nothing”.
Adichie’s prose is replete with these kinds of aphoristically poetic parallelisms in her sentences (“how breakable we all are, and how easily we forget how breakable we are”, “unknown waiting for an unknown end”, “I thought of her accusation because it was an accusation”, etc ).
Adichie has popularised a plainspoken style that favours the creation of stories by reported observation, as from an eavesdropper, and it fits the kinds of characters that appear in her novels, though sometimes the narrative can tarry for this reason in some instances. Nothing, however, cuts to the depth of the female experience as these sentences are deployed in service of characters’ hidden and unhidden fights with their careers and aspirations.
The lives of the women Adichie writes about contrasts. Zikora is the quintessence of a young African woman who wants the conventional trappings of ordinary womanhood: a good career, a fine catholic wedding, a good marriage, and two or three children.
Chia pursues her desire for the deepest kind of human connection with often baffling irrationality. Omelogor is the rational crusader holding out for a better society with her clandestine Robyn Hood grants, in which as a banker she takes from the stashes of stolen money to give less-privileged women while also maintaining a blog titled, “For Men Only”.
Kadiatou, the one woman of these four with no wealth behind her, suffers sexual violence and the hypocrises of the American justice system. Her story has a melancholic poetic resonance that sticks, perhaps for the difference of culture she comes from in comparison to the others; but perhaps it is even more so because Adichie had drawn part of her story from a real-life case of sexual assault.
Dream Count leaves no illusions that it is a repudiation of the boxes into which women are placed from birth, such as marrying before thirty, bearing their husband’s name after marriage, performing subordination at their own expense, etc.
One particular statement by a character in Dream Count seems to be a direct reference to Adichie herself and the kind of criticisms she had received in the past (in short, if I may project, the personal can be seen reaching into the realms of fiction in this novel): Upon reading a news piece, a character named Enyinnaya said, “Look at this young Nigerian writer. She’s doing very well, we’re proud of her, but I heard she is married and decided to keep her maiden name. Why is she confusing young girls?”
Unfortunately for men who think a woman taking her husband’s name is Igbo tradition, the true Igbo tradition is the very thing the fictional young writer had done. With the arc of her characters’ lives, Adichie pitches that there are infinitely more fulfilling pursuits in women’s lives than the monolithic institutions of patriarchal expectations.
But from the novel, we also see the overriding paradox of the female experience: how similar it is in the way women have to face a world of institutional limitations, whether in the publishing sphere, financial or legal offices, or asylum procedures where the West chooses to turn a willfully blind eye to the real in favour of their own created ideas of violence in Africa.
But at the same time the novel showcases how the backgrounds from which these women come from tempers or heightens these indignities: the contrast between Chia’s life and Kadiatou’s, or the bridge between Omelogor and Zikora, each woman connected to the other by their own overt or covert vulnerability.
Dream Count returns again and again to the theme of fractured dreams. It appears that many of its characters often feel let down by the society or the world they exist in.
Chia and Omelogor are often caught expressing frustrations, in their own different ways, about the alienation of contemporary American life, usually seen in its atomisation into factional groupings and divisions: race, causes, ideologies, cultures, and other creations that seems to impinge upon a more wholesome experience of life.
Do we hear notes of disappointment in these pages? The novel spends a lot of time examining the role that academia and its allied causes plays in the obfuscation of human feeling: everything must be rational; there is no space or middle-ground for disagreement; any opinion that doesn’t fit into mine is bad for precisely that reason.
It is like an endless morass of stiff positionings and extremities of opinion, and yet these jaded divisions often blur the line between the genuine and other things that resemble it. In one scene, a female academic insists that calling a woman beautiful for any reason is misogynistic to the utter befuddlement of Chia and another acquaintance.
If there is anything that comes out of a discourse such as this, it is the politicisation of language in contemporary America, and the grievance one notes here. A certain kind of linguistic manipulation is deployed to confuse rather than clarify.
Example is the insufferable Darnell’s constant gaslighting of Chia with academic lingo: Why say “the reification of the subjective neo-colonial paradigm” where a simple expression of feeling would suffice?
Perfectly ordinary words are given new meanings in the shadow of causes and agendas and the women in Dream Count are either caught in its logophobic maelstrom or realise its detriment to their dreams: “center” becomes a verb “centering” in everyday speech; “struggle” for anything African (“as if affluence made Africans impurely African”); “intention” (“intentional”) to define relationships, and even falsehoods around the words “violence”, “assault”, “FGM”. This portrayal of the language anxieties of contemporary America is apt in the light of recent developments.
In the subtleties of the complexities that attend race relations and the relationship between men and women, Adichie’s understanding of human beings shines through, for she does understand people and the meanings behind their arch mannerisms and the multicultural societies that invariably raised them.
Adichie is often at her best when she examines the life of Africans and the immigrant experience in the West. Readers will eagerly lap up with enthusiasm, the immeasurable tenderness of the stories of Chia’s search for elemental love, and its fallouts or Zikora and Kadiatou’s different conditions of motherhood or Omelogor’s penetrating questions.
Despite its many pleasures, there is an unshakable grimness that threads through this novel (goodluck to a certain crop of Nigerian readers who claim they are tired of sad stories).
Adichie’s novel psychoanalyses the intangibility of dreams; how sometimes the pursuing of it can turn grossly irrational. And this is not limited to the main characters, per the nature of their individual dreams.
At the peripheral level, we see it again and again in characters such as Zikora’s mother, the married Englishman Chia dates, Darnell, and others. Adichie presents to us that the world is large enough for all kinds of dreams, whether it is those of the idealist, the pragmatist, or the realist.
The real presentation here is that dreams, as concrete as their imaginary register may appear, may in the long run turn to an intangible ideal when one refuses to adjust—although its fulfillment certainly does not reside in any such adjustments. The point then is that dreams are allowed to be imperfect.
One response to the central question of the novel (can one ever be truly known by another?)—and it is not an answer but a response—is that the deepest connections can be fleeting. It happens in moments, in pockets, above the watchful temperance of time, and then is gone.
One has to then live fully and enjoy every moment, for we always know that time and our own human creations can intrude with new and different realities. In short, our lives may be the inverse of these dreams. It is sometimes amusing when the characters in Dream Count realise this and ignore it.
In the end, “life can change because of what could have happened,” as Omelogor observed. And Adichie’s prose demonstrates this change in an extensive and fractured fictional canvas.
Chimezie Chika is a staff writer at Afrocritik. His short stories and essays have appeared in or forthcoming from, amongst other places, The Weganda Review, The Republic, Terrain.org, Isele Magazine, Lolwe, Fahmidan Journal, Efiko Magazine, Dappled Things, and Channel Magazine. He is the fiction editor of Ngiga Review. His interests range from culture, history, to art, literature, and the environment. You can find him on X @chimeziechika1