Dream Count|Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

After a 12-year hiatus from long-form fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is back with Dream Count, a spanking new collection of four intertwined novellas centred on the lives of four women: Zikora, a high-flying Nigerian lawyer and subject of Adichie’s 2020 short story Zikora; Omelogor, a wealthy Nigerian banker; Kadiatou, a Guinean chambermaid and housekeeper, and Chia, or Chiamaka, a Nigerian freelance travel writer whose story bookends the novel.

Set in Guinea, Nigeria and the United States, the narrative begins during the Covid pandemic but jumps back and forth, rifling through multiple romances, unspoken desires and revelatory circumstances that link and distinguish each character.

In the cocoon of her charmed life in America, Chia reminisces about her time with an old flame, Darnell, a boring, self-absorbed black American described as “the Denzel Washington of academia,” who treats her with such glaring contempt one wonders if she has ever heard of self-worth. After Darnell, comes Chuka—an attentive Nigerian engineer who makes his intentions for marriage known from the start of their relationship. But he’s too staid and predictable for her liking.

“I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person,” she muses after an aunt pesters her about marriage.

Unlike Chia who harbours dreamy notions of longing to be truly known, Zikora, her best friend is slightly more pragmatic and just wants to get married and have children. Alas, she meets two “thieves of time” on whom she waits to propose to her “while her late thirties slid past.” One of them expects her to abandon her career after giving birth, the other wants the convenience of having a girlfriend clean up after him. Later, she meets Kwame, a charming Ghanaian-American, charming until she informs him she’s pregnant and he suddenly ghosts her. In the throes of giving birth, her fraught relationship with her mother bursts open, opening old wounds and exposing facets of the older woman that Zikora comes to understand and, later, respect as they care for her baby. 

Kadiatou’s story, the novel’s moral core, is a fictionalised retelling of the real life story of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who worked as a chambermaid in a prestigious New York hotel and endured many weeks of humiliating media coverage after accusing one-time French presidential candidate and former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of sexual assault. In her author’s note, Adichie explains her rendering of Diallo’s story as an attempt to “write a wrong in the balance of story,” and “invite willing readers to join in this gesture of returned dignity.”

Kadiatou’s life begins in Guinea, and tragedy strikes for her in rapid succession. She loses her loving father in a landslide, undergoes female genital mutilation, its horrors Adichie masterfully executes with literary finesse: “She was shocked that she had been cut, so shocked she made no sound. Such painful pain. Her head felt like a whole waterfall trapped in a shell.” Days after the procedure, Kadiatou looked “fearfully down at herself, her lower body felt detached, a thing apart, no longer hers.” Later, she’s married off to loveless man who soon dies before she finds her way to America with her lover and child. There, she meets Chia, who hires her as her housekeeper. And it is there, in America, that her nightmare with the country’s justice system and salaciously intrusive media truly begins following her ghastly encounter with a VIP hotel guest.

“She knew in that moment that he did not think of her as a person alive and breathing like him,” reckons Kadiatou as the Frenchman forces his penis into her mouth. “She was a thing, a thing to own and invade and discard, and this frightened her.”

The scene thrums with horror at the rabid indignity of the act, at the nonchalant self-importance of her attacker who emerges from his suite unfazed, heedless of her psychological and physical pain.

The fourth novella covers Omelogor’s life. Sarcastic, smart and outspoken, Chia’s cousin is content with the life she’s built in Abuja. She hosts and attends raucous dinner parties, dates and dumps men like used tissue, and flies across Nigeria to distribute grant money to entrepreneurial women from her Robyn Hood initiative. The funds themselves come from shady banking deals. Despite her vast material wealth, as an unmarried, childless woman in her mid-forties, family members don’t believe she’s truly happy. And when an aunt badgers her to adopt a child, she replies “there are other ways to live.” 

Later, Omelogor leaves her job for the US to pursue a master’s degree in pornography. And as the only character based in Nigeria, she wields her outsider perspective on American culture with a scorching sneer. Her opinions scandalise her liberal classmates, who in turn attack her, leaving a sour aftertaste in her mouth that turns bitter when her supervisor rejects the premise of her thesis. Frustrated with the programme, Omelogor starts a website, For Men Only, where she dishes wry advice to men, signing off with the line: Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.

Readers familiar with the backlash Adichie endured following her 2017 comments on transwomen may notice parallels between some of Omelogor’s wounded complaints about her liberal classmates and the Nigerian novelist’s viral, 2021 blogpost It Is Obscene, which skewered the sanctimonious, hard-hearted illiberalism of American liberals and their non-American allies. With this in mind, one would be forgiven for seeing Omelogor as ventriloquizing the author’s own anger and opinions.

“Perfect righteous American liberals,” notes a smarting Omelogor after her classmates shockingly dismiss her remarks on religious violence in northern Nigeria as islamophobic without offering any explanation. “As long as you board their ideology train, your evilness will be overlooked. Champion an approved cause and you win the right to be cruel.”

Apart from the one-dimensional, ungenerous portrayal of Omelogor’s classmates, another area where Dream Count suffers in its near saintly depiction of Kadiatou, her only flaw being that she lied, a lie that leads to the criminal case against her assailant being dropped. But these flaws are subsumed by Adichie’s sparkling commentary on friendship, class, immigration, misogyny, the vestige of colonialism, women’s bodies, and the ethnic discrimination of Igbos in Nigeria and the Fula in Guinea. What’s more, her pacing is compact, her observations of human foibles acute, her prose funny, captivating and alive with metaphors that rise from the page.

Of a mine, she writes: To look at the mine itself on their way back was to shudder at a vast harsh expanse of disembowelled earth, gaping helplessly, stark and stripped of life.

In piecing together a plotless narrative of unresolved dreams, with women who are adept at diagnosing each other’s flaws but incapable of training the same analytical gaze on their own experiences, Adichie has dutifully crafted characters that are messy and real. Through them we see our blind spots, our audacity to hope and—to quote Adichie—“how humanity isn’t an endless procession of virtue,” which, of course, is the trademark of every good work of fiction.

A version of this review originally appeared on The Johannesburg Review of Books.

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