Four women and the dreams that bind them
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Though she's an accomplished D.C. lawyer, Zikora has not been chosen for marriage. Seemingly luckless in love, her case worsens when her boyfriend Kwame abandons her upon learning that she's pregnant. Ashamed to be parenting without a husband, Zikora, embittered, hardens and her gaze (on men, those 'thieves of time,' and the world) turns jaundiced. Chiamaka watches her friend and wonders: 'When did Zikora take on this despair? From birth an unquestioned hand had written marriage into our life's plans, and for many women it became a time-bound dream, but when did she go from waiting to raging despair?'
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Though Kadiatou is not despairing, she may be the novel's only character who deserves to be. With the exception of her daughter, Binta, Kadiatou's story is an extended tale of woe. Adichie has based this character on
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Though Omelogor has never fallen for marriage myths or longed for idealized companionship, she does imagine motherhood and family life. Wealthy and well-connected in Abuja's finance and banking world, Omelogor has a talent for facilitating intricate financial schemes that enriches her boss and other Nigerian 'big men,' and funds her secret micro-grant program for village women running small businesses. Sexually free and intellectually curious, she doesn't suffer fools. When she learns from a lover that men turn to porn to learn about sex, she begins an advice blog called 'For Men Only' to steer men away from sourcing sex-ed in 'blue' films. Intent on becoming a scholar of pornography, Omelogor enters a cultural studies graduate program in the US. But instead of the freedom she craves, she finds herself sinking into a startling depression, the toxicity of grad school and American life poisoning her mind.
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Throughout 'Dream Count'
Adichie reminds readers that she's a massively talented prose stylist and storyteller, but she is especially strong in 'Chiamaka' and 'Omelogor,' where those characters narrate their experiences and measure their interior lives in the first person. There's power and promise in the novel's formal arrangement; 'Dream Count' could read as a 21st-century revision of Nina Simone's 'Four Women' or, better, a provocative pastiche of 'Four African Women' by the Rwandan-Ugandan-American singer-songwriter
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Unfortunately, 'Dream Count' can't match the daring musicality of either jazz performer. One instance of trouble: Adichie's omniscient third person renderings of Zikora and Kadiatou flatten those characters rather than enlivening them. Though the sentences have momentum, the stories only run in place. Perhaps the novel's
weaknesses stem from its referential quality. We have seen some of these Adichiean riffs run to much better effect in her best novels, '
(2013). 'Dream Count' also appears to dramatize the cultural criticism Adichie unfolds in her book-length essays, '
Chiamaka's litany of global lovers and Omelogor's digital commentary are reminiscent of the string of partners and the blog, 'Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black,' that Ifemelu, 'Americanah''s protagonist, maintains. That blog is a fascinating narrative device in 'Americanah,' allowing Adichie to develop the character through a 'historical' record of the character's thoughts about Africanness, American life, and Blackness. Omelogor's advice site is a kind of online finishing school for heterosexual men. But the posts do not advance the character's development. Instead, they offer Adichie space for threading her arguments about gender constructs and American provinciality into the fiction.
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As Adichie argues in 'We Should All Be Feminists,' while human beings have evolved, 'our ideas of gender have not evolved very much.' Instead, we have taught girls and women that should they reach a certain age and remain unmarried, they ought to recognize this 'as a deep personal failure.'
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Zikora struggles with this sense of 'deep personal failure.' Chiamaka's dream counting, her 'longing for what could have been,' addresses that failure from another angle. Omelogor offers a third angle of approach: escaping to the US, she searches for repair, re-enchantment, and the 'noble and good' part of herself.
Though Adichie claims that gender 'prescribes how we should be' rather than freeing us to be 'our true individual selves,' none of the men who pass through the lives of these dreaming women become representations of human complexity. This is a disappointment because Adichie has a keen understanding of men and the skill to build strong versions of male experience. See, for example, Adichie's pitch perfect description of Obinze's wonder and trepidation in London and his shame upon deportation back to Nigeria in Part 3 of 'Americanah.'
'Dream Count' does not release its Nigerian characters from gender's strictures. These newly middle-aged, cosmopolitan, Nigerian women must face their ineffable grief. Writing in 'Notes on Grief," Adichie calls grief a cruel educator; it is an especially substantial, oppressive, and opaque thing
.
In Adichie's previous works, when her characters have faced the ineffable, they've frequently located narrow lanes to freedom, routes to refashioning themselves. Ironically, Kadiatou may be the only protagonist in 'Dream Count' to gain freedom enough to reinvent herself.
DREAM COUNT
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf, 416 pages, $32
Walton Muyumba teaches literature at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is the author of '
.'
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