Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks during the Congress of the Future in Santiago, Chile January 13, 2020.
It’s 12 years since Chimamanda Adichie produced a novel and Dream Count is her most thought-provoking and emotion-wrenching book yet. She says it took her 10 years in the making, so it should not be surprising that it has such a scope of themes and a depth of analysis. But her writing is as clear flowing as ever.
In an interview on CNN, Christiane Amanpour asked Adichie why it took her so long to write the new novel. ‘I have always been a slow writer,’ she said, ‘but I had writer’s block. I couldn’t write fiction, and writing fiction is my vocation. It was a frightening place to be.’ She went on to say that she doesn’t know why this happened, but she thought to herself that, if creativity is important, it shouldn’t be easy.
Cover of the book ‘Dream Count’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Dream Count is the story of four women, each with a different point of view – a different dream – but their lives are intertwined. They are all immigrants in the United States. Three of them are Nigerians: Chiamaka (Chia), a travel writer; Zikora, a lawyer; Omelogor, a former banker who goes to the States for post-graduate studies. Kadiatou is Guinean and Chia’s housekeeper and hotel maid. ‘I wanted to write about the complexities of women’s lives,’ Adichie said in the interview with Christiane Amanpour. ‘I wanted to write about their friendships, how they support one another.’
Author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Chia struggles to get her travel articles published – partly, she thinks, because she is black. She journeys in many countries, focusing on things that travel writers write about – lifestyles, hotels, restaurants. But one publisher tells her that, as a black woman, she should make her articles more relevant, like writing about the horrible things happening in the Congo – the killings and the rapes. She has had a number of relationships with men, one of them particularly oppressive. ‘It was control,’ Chia says. ‘He squashed my smallest pleasures, and I helped him flatten them, sinking myself into the mean crevices of his will.’ And in none of them did she realise her dream – to be truly known.
Zikora, Chia’s best friend, has known love, but her boyfriend abandoned her when she became pregnant. After giving birth to a baby boy, the boyfriend refuses to respond to her calls. Her dream is to be married. She feels her life is not what it was supposed to be, and she can’t understand why other women were being given what she, too, deserved. As Chimamanda writes, ‘Zikora felt a bifurcation of self; two parts of her existing in parallel. At work she was meticulous, sceptical, reading everything twice and asking questions, but with men she blundered ahead, wanting to believe whatever she was told.’
Omelogor is Chia’s outspoken and, sometimes, domineering cousin. She cleverly, but not always honestly, works her way to the top echelons of Abuja’s banking community. She has a luxurious mansion, with colourful flowerbeds and her two SUV’s in the driveway. She entertains herself by writing a blog that has many subscribers. It is called ‘For Men Only’. Here is an example:
Dear men,
I understand that you don’t like abortion, but the best way to reduce abortion is to watch where your male bodily fluids go…
Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.
But she begins to question her dissolute lifestyle in Abuja before quitting her high-flying career to take up postgraduate studies on pornography in the States. Unsettled, she tries therapy. Perhaps we can say that her dream was to better know herself.
Kadiatou is happy raising her child in the States, until her dream is shattered by a vicious sexual assault in a locked hotel bedroom by a ‘big man’ – in both his political status as well as in his unyielding body. It is an incident that mirrors the case made in 2011 against Dominique Strauss-Kahn when he was Director of the International Monetary Fund. And it is an incident that becomes the dramatic centre of the novel. ‘Immigrants are desperate to raise children who think they have a right to dream,’ Omelogor thinks, while watching Kadiatou being insensitively interviewed on TV. ‘What she needs is an America that understands this.’ The case against the V.I.P is dropped because, as in many cases there, money does the more effective talking.
In her Author’s Note, Adichie explains why what happened to Nafissatou Diallo, the victim in the Straus-Khan case, so moved her. ‘With the case dropped, with lawyers publicly calling her a liar, with no court of law to vindicate her or not, she became, in my imagination, a symbol, a person failed by a country she trusted, her character mutilated by false stories in the press, the fabric of her life forever rent.’ By creating the similar story of Kadiatou, Adichie felt that she was ‘writing’ a wrong.
In Dream Count, Adichie is not afraid to write very openly about unpleasant and embarrassing things that women have experienced – about things that most novelists don’t get into. She writes about, for example, postpartum perineal tears, fears of breaking stitches when constipated, getting a rash from a lover’s beard. More importantly, she writes about the complexities and uncertainties of loving and being loved, of changing relationships with parents, of the need to have the support of friends, and, of course, the power of dreams, whether realised or frustrated.
I feel sure that this novel will appeal to women – not only African women in America – but all women across the world. I can imagine so many thinking ‘That’s me. I’ve been there, I’ve felt that’. As for men readers, I reckon we will have a deeper understanding and a stronger appreciation of what it means to be a woman.
