Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count is well worth the wait

The Hindu

02-05-2025

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count is an extraordinary, expansive novel; a reminder of why she is a literary star. Through the interlocking stories of four women in the U.S. — Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer; Zikora, her lawyer-friend; Kadiatou, her Guinean housekeeper; and Omelogor, her acerbic banker-cousin — Adichie writes about middle-age experiences, womanhood, class, and immigration.
It is the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and Chiamaka or Chia begins to do what many of us did when our lives came to a forced standstill: overthink endlessly and count her many regrets. She starts to wonder: 'Where have all the years gone, and have I made the most of life?'
Chia begins to scrutinise her past relationships with the wisdom of hindsight, which brings with it both remorse and reassurance wrapped in humour. She recounts her relationship with a pretentious man, introduced to her as 'the Denzel Washington of academia', who loved to say things like, 'It's a structural erase, a symbolic genocide, because if you're not seen, then you don't exist', over lunch.
She thinks of the Igbo man who was perfect but boring and left her with an 'exquisite ache'. And then of a married Englishman — an ill-advised relationship doomed from the start. Chia's musings are made riveting by Adichie's assured and clever writing. And though there is no real plot line, Chia propels the novel forward.
Story of grief
While there is a lightness in Chia's reminiscing, there is a deep pain in Zikora's account. Compared to Chia's story, which spans years, Zikora's is more pointed. She, too, analyses the men in her life, calling them the 'thieves of time', but there is one particular thief she dwells on, who steals more than just her time and leaves her bewildered, angry, and distressed. Even as she navigates both the gift and tragedy in her life, Zikora's circumstances provide her an opportunity to reboot her relationship with her mother.
Motherhood, in fact, is a strong theme in this novel, emerging once again in Kadiatou and Omelogor's stories. As Adichie writes in the author's note, Dream Count 'is really about losing my mother'. It is a grief that is 'still stubbornly in infancy', she says; the grief lingers in all the stories.
Long before #MeToo
The centrepiece of the novel is the account of the long-suffering Kadiatou; it is riven by grief and evokes outrage. Kadiatou hurtles from one tragedy to another, but remains marvellously determined to make something of her life until an incident in a hotel room shoves her into the public eye.
Her character is based on Nafissatou Diallo, a West African woman working as a maid in a New York hotel, who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund, of sexual assault in 2011. Adichie's writing here is exquisite: the pages simmer with anger and also throb with a deep empathy and tenderness.
Diallo's portrait in the media, sketched with cold facts and documents, stripped her of dignity and provided an 'ungenerous, undignified representation, incomplete and flattening', writes Adichie in the author's note. By humanising Kadiatou instead of victimising her, Adichie more than succeeds in returning Diallo's dignity.
The last section belongs to Omelogor, Chia's closest cousin. She siphons funds from the corrupt bank where she works in Nigeria, into women's business ventures, calling the operation 'Robyn Hood'. In Adichie's world, even moral bankruptcy comes wrapped in some sort of strange feminism. The premise is catchy, and Omelogor the most grey character of them all, but her motivations for abruptly giving up everything and moving to the U.S. remain unconvincing.
Lens on American society
While Dream Count is primarily about the bonds of sisterhood and female desires, it carries many sharp — though sometimes reductive — observations on immigration. The women move to the U.S. in the hope of fulfilling their American Dream, but often find themselves perplexed by the ways of Americans and their language. Kadiatou observes that the U.S. is 'where the police shoot more than they run'. When Zikora is in labour, the nurse dictates, 'Bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart', while her mother tells her, 'Hold yourself together'.
Adichie is also a staunch critic of cancel culture and takes on pugilistic progressives. One character dismisses Omelogor's success saying, 'Banking is inherently flawed'; elsewhere, Chia says, 'For Daneil's friends, everything was 'problematic', even the things of which they approved'.
Dream Count is not a perfect novel — the feminism is so old-school that men are boring at best and abusers at worst. It also fizzles out towards the end. But Adichie is a master storyteller who simply dazzles and hypnotises with her satire, wit, and prose. And for that reason alone, this novel that was 10 years in the making is well worth the wait.
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