Review of ' Dream Count' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Mohan Gulrajani
Writing a wrong: Power, privilege, and womanhood in Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel presents the female experience as a smorgasbord of tragedies, and all men as bad.
In one sense, Dream Count is what you get when you take the conceit of men are bad, yes all men, and turn that into a novel. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock
Only a handful of writers can produce new work that makes for a major publishing event: Salman Rushdie, Sally Rooney, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Since the award-winning Americanah in 2013, Nigerian-born Adichie has given birth to twins, been quoted by Beyoncé, denounced for her views on transgender women, and faced the dire fate of being “cancelled”.
Dream Count, then, arrives amidst a swirl of hype, from a literary supernova whose fame has reached escape velocity. Like in Americanah, here too we encounter itinerant characters straddling continents, strong-willed women, social realism leavened by dollops of sly humour. There are plenty of dreams—and nightmares—peppering the novel, but the title, we later learn, is a play on “body count”; as in, how many bodies have you been with?
When Dream Count opens, the COVID-19 pandemic has moored Chiamaka, a Nigerian-born travel writer, in her home in Maryland. The lockdowns have brought the world to a standstill, as people nervously speculate on what the future holds. Suspended in this strange existence, Chiamaka begins to sift through multiple doomed liaisons with a combination of regret, yearning, and relief. We dip in and out with her as she dwells on the pretentious academic, the solid but unimaginative Igbo engineer, the charming but married British man. Addled by self-doubt, and unlucky in love, this wealthy expat woman is the novel’s beating heart.
Other sections are led by Chiamaka’s familiars: Zikora, her best friend, a lawyer in Washington, DC, who is trying to reconnect with an ex-boyfriend amidst a burgeoning crisis. Then there is Chiamaka’s housekeeper Kadiatou, a Guinean asylum-seeker in the US, who faces all manner of privations in her home country and then an even bigger tragedy when she leaves. Finally, we are introduced to Omelogor, Chiamaka’s intense, sharp-tongued cousin, an Abuja-based banker who later attends graduate school to study pornography. Each of the women has strayed from the social script of marriage and motherhood in some way. Each spends the novel grappling with the consequences of her choices. Adichie is a gifted storyteller, seamlessly knitting these lives together with empathy and clarity. There is not much by way of traditional “plot”, but enough happens to keep things going.
Visceral presentation
In one sense, Dream Count is what you get when you take the conceit of men are bad, yes all men, and turn that into a novel. The bad men are not just white, or American. Bad African men abound: the father who quietly marries a second time, the CEO of a bank who spends his time looting and money laundering, the kindly childhood sweetheart who turns to dealing drugs in America.
In Dream Count, we encounter itinerant characters straddling continents, strong-willed women, social realism leavened by dollops of sly humour.
Though three of the four main characters are cosseted by money and social status, the novel presents the female experience as a smorgasbord of humiliations and tragedies large and small; from miscarriages and spinsterhood to female genital mutilation and rape. Adichie viscerally recreates scenes of circumcision, childbirth, and assault. The assault subplot, as she writes in an afterword, is closely drawn from the real-life case of the ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Strauss-Kahn was arrested (and later released) for allegedly attempting to rape Nafissatou Diallo, an employee at a New York hotel. “The creative impulse can be roused by the urge to right a wrong, no matter how obliquely,” Adichie writes. “In this case, to ‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories.” This section is horrifically and vividly reimagined, and though we know how this played out in real life, the fictional telling is no less powerful.
Writing about class
Adichie also has a canny way of writing about class, particularly about wealthy Nigerians, and their interface with the working class. And an equally sharp eye on race, particularly on how blackness is experienced inside and outside the US. Her trademark ear for the nuances of speech and language shine through. For instance, one character says, “oh great” “to sound American”. Other rails against trite Americanisms; words like “concerns” (“another slimy slippery word”), feeling “valid” (“it yawned across the room in its blandness”), or “centre” (“I didn’t know ‘centre’ had become a verb”).
In 2021 Adichie published a viral essay in which she attacked “cancel culture” and social media sanctimony. Here those same targets are viciously satirised. A certain set is described as “tribal, but anxiously so, always circling each other, watching each other, to sniff out a fault, a failing”, people who found everything “problematic”. Another time, the Nigerian woman is schooled for narrating a traumatic personal event by “perfect righteous American liberals”: “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.” Such observations work when used sparingly, but it has become too easy to pillory smug liberals—after a point such writing is simply lazy.
Chiamaka is the novel’s most compelling character. Her section and those anchored by Zikora and Kadiatou worked for me, but by the time I arrived at the fourth section featuring Omelogor, it felt like the novel had overstayed its welcome. The interludes on pornography and the style of incorporating blog posts addressing the misbehaviour of men verge on the didactic. By the end, the emotional intensity that powered the first two-thirds of the novel is lost.
Bhavya Dore is a freelance journalist who writes for various Indian and international publications.
Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)
Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi
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