In ‘Dream Count,’ Adichie again plunges into questions of sex, grief, and making a life
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brand of realism has always depended on dreamy characters dreaming of, say, exuberant sexual pleasures or the protections of extended family relations or the new freedoms arising from political revolution. Adichie’s new novel, “Dream Count,” is about the dream lives of four West African women living in Maryland, Washington DC, and Abuja, Nigeria: Chiamaka; her hair-braider and housekeeper, Kadiatou; her best friend, Zikora; and her cousin Omelogor. The novel unfurls across four overlapping novellas — each one named after a character in the above order — and one closing coda that cycles back to “Chia.”
The novel’s title, as a concept, is fuzzily defined. It’s Chiamaka’s nomenclature. A Maryland based travel writer, she has dreamed of a rich intimacy founded on telepathic communion: “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.” However, none of the men she believes she’s loved have fulfilled that dream. Parsing her relationship history becomes more than a body count. In a note closing “Dream Count,” even the author acknowledges that the work is about something larger than the “interlinked desires” of her four characters.
Though the novel’s “real time” is roughly the duration of the COVID pandemic lockdown, each woman’s narrative is a reckoning with her past and her dreams. Evading precise dates and offering few references to the characters’ ages, Adichie’s expansive, diffuse narrative design puts time out of joint.
Unable to travel or write with focus, Chiamaka spends the lockdown Googling her former partners. Searching for a man with “poetry in his soul,” her romanticism led to relationships with a brooding, emotionally-stunted African American art historian; a straight-laced Nigerian engineer; an anxious, married British poet; and a wealthy Dutch businessman. None of these complex, sometimes tortured, couplings fit her ideal. However, narrating her dream count —perhaps this defines it — allows Chiamaka to simultaneously dwell in regret and “dream of an entirely different life.”
Though an accomplished DC lawyer, Zikora’s “truest longing” is for marriage. Luckless in love, her case worsens when her boyfriend Kwame abandons her upon learning that she’s pregnant. Ashamed to be parenting without a husband, Zikora, embittered, hardens and her gaze (on men, those “thieves of time,” and the world) turns jaundiced. Chiamaka, watching her friend, wonders: “When did Zikora take on this despair? From birth an unquestioned hand had written marriage into our life’s plans, and for many women it became a time-bound dream, but when did she go from waiting to raging despair?”
Kadiatou is not despairing, though she may be the novel’s sole character deserving to be. With the exception of her daughter, Binta, Kadiatou’s story is an extended tale of woe. Adichie has based this character on Nafissatou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who cleaned rooms at a prestigious New York City hotel when she claimed, in May 2011, that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, had sexually assaulted her. When Kadiatou is assaulted in the novel, the three Nigerian women band together to support and defend her. Her case becomes the hub of this otherwise plotless fiction.
Omelogor has never fallen for marriage myths or longed for idealized companionship. But when an aunt asks her to consider adopting a child, Omelogor imagines motherhood and family life. Wealthy and well-connected in Abuja’s banking community, Omelogor’s talent for facilitating intricate financial schemes enriches her boss and other Nigerian “big men.” Skimming from this fraud, Omelogor operates a secret micro-grant-giving program for village women running small businesses. Sexually free and intellectually curious, she doesn’t suffer fools. When she learns from a lover that men turn to porn to learn about sex, she launches a website, “For Men Only” advising men away from “blue” films as sex-ed resources. Intent on becoming a scholar of pornography, Omelogor joins a cultural studies graduate program in the US. But instead of the freedom she craves, she finds sinking into a startling depression, the toxicity of grad school and American life poisoning her mind.
There’s power and promise throughout “Dream Count.” Adichie reminds readers that she’s a massively talented prose stylist and storyteller. “Chiamaka” and “Omelogor,” where the characters narrate their experiences and measure their interior lives in the first person, present the author’s strongest efforts.
The novel’s formal arrangement bears some resemblance to Nina Simone’s “Four Women” or, better, “Four African Women” by the Rwandan-Ugandan-American singer-songwriter Somi. Adichie may have also been inspired by Somi’s stunning ode, “Kadiatou the Beautiful,” as she shaped Kadiatou’s story.
Unfortunately, “Dream Count” doesn’t match the daring musicality of those jazz idiom performers. One instance of trouble: Adichie’s omniscient third person renderings of Zikora and Kadiatou flatten those characters rather than enlivening them. Though the sentences have momentum, their stories only run in place. Perhaps the novel’s weaknesses stem from its referential quality. We have seen some of these Adichiean riffs run more effectively in her best novels, “Half of a Yellow Sun” (2006) and “Americanah” (2013). “Dream Count” also appears to dramatize the cultural criticism Adichie unfolds in her book-length essays, “We Should All Be Feminists” (2014) and “Notes on Grief” (2021).
Chiamaka’s litany of global lovers and Omelogor’s digital commentary are reminiscent of Ifemelu’s string of partners and the blog she maintains in “Americanah.” That blog, “Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,” is a fascinating narrative device, allowing Adichie to develop Ifemelu through a “historical” record of her thoughts about Africanness, American life, and Blackness.
Omelogor’s site is a kind of online finishing school for heterosexual men. But the posts do not advance that character’s development. Instead, they offer Adichie space for threading her arguments about gender constructs and American provinciality into the fiction.
While humans have evolved, Adichie argues in “We Should All Be Feminists,” “our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.” Instead, we have taught girls and women that should they reach a certain age and remain unmarried, they ought to recognize this “as a deep personal failure.”
Zikora struggles with this sense of “deep personal failure.” Chiamaka’s dream count, her “longing for what could have been,” addresses that failure from another angle. Omelogor offers a third angle of approach: escaping Abuja’s corruption for grad school, she hoped to find repair, re-enchantment, and the “noble and good” part of herself.
The lockdown allows these newly middle-aged, cosmopolitan, Nigerian women to finally grieve for their failed, youthful dreams. Though Adichie claims that gender “prescribes how we should be” rather than freeing us to be “our true individual selves,” strangely, “Dream Count” does not fully release its Nigerian characters from gender’s strictures. Adichie glances toward an alternative, never fully embracing it. Maybe that’s another novel.
Instead, the characters are left considering next steps, facing the ineffable. This is grief’s cruel instruction. “Writing in Notes on Grief,” Adichie calls grief an especially substantial, oppressive, and opaque thing; it’s a cruel educator.
In Adichie’s previous works, when her characters have faced the ineffable, they’ve frequently located narrow lanes to freedom, routes to refashioning themselves. Ironically, Kadiatou may be the only protagonist in “Dream Count” to gain freedom enough to dream up her reinvention
Credit: bostonglobe
