By Sarah Moorhouse
At a time when the promise of a massive advance tends to lure superstar novelists into publishing every couple of years, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an outlier: she refuses to be rushed. Dream Count, her first novel in over a decade, is worth the wait. A pandemic novel, it’s about grief, about immigrant experiences and about friendship and love. It’s about counting one’s dreams and realising how many of them did not, could not come to pass; but it’s also about taking stock of what did. The past decade has been difficult for Adichie: having weathered a media furore in 2017, the death of both parents during the pandemic and the birth of twins, she was left, for a while, unable to write fiction. Adichie’s writing is now more wistful, cynical, and mature. Dream Count is a brilliantly formed book that, in its scope and range, sits with the likes of Middlemarch.
George Eliot comes to mind because Adichie, like Eliot, uses fiction to generate sympathy. Dream Count has at its centre four women: Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou. It alternates between their perspectives as they each try to make a success of their lives, uncovering what it means for people to understand and be in sympathy with one another. At the end of Middlemarch, Eliot writes of her protagonist Dorothea that ‘the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts’. As Adichie’s novel progresses, the ‘diffusive’ impact of these women on one another, the goodness they offer to the world, becomes clear.
The ‘dream count’ of the title refers to Chiamaka’s roll call of the men from whom she has sought, and failed, to obtain happiness and fulfilment (she declares at the outset that her dream is ‘to be known, truly known, by another human being’) but the irony of the narrative is that she already is ‘truly known’: by the women in her life. This invisible gift of feminine sympathy is Dream Count’s essential subject. It makes the book a feminist novel of the most affirming kind. Adichie’s activist credentials are well-established: she is at least as well known for her 2012 TEDx talk ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ as she is for Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun. It’s no surprise, then, that a distinctly feminist note rings through the book. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s more skeptical cousin who works for a corrupt bank in Nigeria, siphons funds in a ‘Robyn Hood’ scheme that she uses to fund female business ventures. She also writes an anonymous blog, For Men Only, that offers advice to men about how to conduct themselves with the women in their lives.
The other protagonists embody a quieter feminism: Chiamaka in her steadfast independence, despite her romanticism, as a travel writer; Zikora and Kadiatou in their resilience as they are each, in different ways, wronged by men. But Adichie’s sympathy is not limited to her female characters, nor does she idealise her narrators, especially Omelogor, who comes across as prickly and often rude. Dream Count is not just about gender; it also forms an implicit commentary on the American Dream and what it means for African Americans and Africans. We see this most clearly in the relationship between Zikora and Kwame, the man who abandons her upon finding out that she is pregnant with his child. Zikora notices that
‘His American childhood seemed fraught in ways quite different from her Nigerian one. He had grown up in Northern Virginia with his dreams already dreamed for him. His Ghanaian father’s immigrant intensity mixed with his African American mother, who was determined to open for him the many doors that history had slammed shut in her face.’
The perplexities of immigrant experiences will be a familiar theme to readers of Americanah, and here Adichie delves deeper into how the place we grow up in subtly inflects our view of the world, intersecting with other aspects of identity to constitute our individuality.
Adichie scorns generalisations. In so doing, she offers a bold interrogation of liberal tendencies towards platitudes. When Omelogor moves to America to write a master’s thesis about pornography, she is incensed by the ‘Americans heedlessly drunk on their certainties’ that she meets there. Exasperated by a badge on her classmate’s shirt that proclaims, ‘Race is a construct’, she asks them, ‘so how do sickle cell and cystic fibrosis know who to afflict? […] it’s not enough. Don’t just say that and be smug’. By examining race through fiction, Adichie develops a rich alternative to this slogan-brandishing mode of activism: she constructs deeply idiosyncratic portraits of experience that engage the reader in sympathy and, at times, outrage.
The novel inspires outrage primarily through Kadiatou’s narrative, which Adichie has based on a true story: that of Nafissatou Diallo, a West African woman working as a maid in an New York hotel who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, of sexually assaulting her in 2011. The case collapsed after Diallo was accused of lying about her background in interviews. Subsequently, what Adichie describes as an ‘ungenerous, undignified representation’ of Diallo congealed in the media coverage. In the novel’s afterword, Adichie declares her intention to ‘‘write’ a wrong’ by fictionalizing Diallo’s story, to offer her a ‘gesture of returned dignity’ by creating a ‘relentlessly human portrait, not an ideological one’.
She achieves exactly this: in scenes chronicling the fallout from the assault, as Kadiatou is subjected to demeaning physical and psychological examinations, Adichie depicts a woman failed by a system that is rigged against her. At the time that Kadiatou’s narrative concludes, the media is labelling her as a ‘prostitute’. She is filled with shame:
‘Thank God her father died, thank God he was long dead, to save him the shame of this, seeing her called a prostitute in front of the whole world. She began to cry. All the crying she had not done, all the tears held back, erupted in ferocious wails and she found herself on the floor, and all around her a terrible scattering of despair.’
This passage is arresting in its sheer physicality, as Kadiatou throws herself on the floor in paroxysms of rage and grief. Whilst Kadiatou experiences her shame by thinking of her father, the reader is outraged for her, for the dignity of which she has been stripped. By ramping up the intensity within scenes like this, Adichie galvanizes her reader into sympathy: a characteristic trait of the novelist, and one which she deploys again and again to make you care about each character that her attention lands upon.
It's too easy to line up in praise of a novelist as well-loved and renowned as Adichie, but Dream Count demands nothing less. Its scope is very specific, both geographically (the narrative is mainly set in Nigeria and America) and in terms of the events it covers, like the assault on Kadiatou. But along the way, it touches on so much else: Adichie sprinkles her prose withcertain reflections — her characters muse that ‘I was living like a person waiting to live’ and dwell on ‘half-lit dreams’ — that, in their clarity and simplicity, take the novel into the territory of universality. Dream Count is an absolute treat, alternating between rage, sympathy and hope.
SARAH MOORHOUSE is a freelance critic and journalist. She graduated from Oriel College in 2022.
Art by Poppy Williams
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