By Helen Wieffering
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Dream Count” feels like a homecoming. The Nigerian author’s first work of longform fiction in over a decade reminds us of the sharp wisdom and sturdy empathy that have made her one of the most celebrated voices in fiction.
At its face, “Dream Count” is about the emotional lives of four women living between Nigeria and Washington, D.C., each grappling with a search for purpose, stability and love. Deep into its pages, the book turns to darker questions of justice and exploitation when one character’s life is irrevocably changed.
The novel begins with the perspective of Chiamaka, or Chia, a Nigerian-born woman who has spent her adulthood and career in America. Living alone amid lockdown in the pandemic, she begins to reflect on a cast of former romances — each one part of her “dream count,” a loose tally she keeps of her efforts to find a complete, all-knowing love. Her voice and memories connect the many threads of “Dream Count” that follow.
In turns, the book shifts its focus to three other women and their dreams. There is Chia’s friend Zikora, an ambitious lawyer who is desperate to be a mother, and Chia’s brazen cousin Omelogor, a banker in Nigeria who has a crisis of confidence upon coming to America.
The novel starts to crackle with urgency and outrage when we meet Kadiatou, Chia’s cook and housekeeper who also works as a maid in an upscale hotel. Far from the Guinean village of her youth, Kadiatou has finally found steady work and contentment in America when she is suddenly, horrifically assaulted by one of the hotel’s prominent guests.
Adichie renders the moment of her assault in quick, shuddering details. Though Kadiatou is surprised to find her bosses believe her account, she soon learns that the rest of the world wants a say, as well. Reporters and photographers stake out her apartment within hours of the assault. Her body and life history are dissected as evidence in the lead-up to an international trial.
Kadiatou’s tale isn’t born completely of imagination. Nearly 15 years ago, a New York hotel housekeeper named Nafissatou Diallo came forward to accuse the then-leader of the International Monetary Fund of sexually assaulting her when she arrived to clean his room. Adichie explains in the novel’s endnote how she was hooked and gutted by Diallo’s testimony. “Dream Count” is Adichie’s way, she writes, of dignifying her story. “Imaginative retellings matter,” she says. “Literature keeps the faith and tells the story as reminder, as witness, as testament.”
The novel’s undercurrent of politics hums louder in the aftermath of those scenes. This is, after all, a book by the same author of “We Should All Be Feminists.” We see Chia’s dream career as a travel writer hampered by American editors who would rather publish outdated stereotypes of Africans. The saucy, sharp Omelogor is willing to play in the corrupt games of powerful men to build her wealth, but feels ridiculed and dismissed in America for that same spirit.
One could question what purpose it serves for the novel to include Kadiatou’s wrenching survival story alongside the tales of well-to-do women. Though Chia and her friends root for and support Kadiatou, they’re ultimately embroiled in their own growing pains. At points, the novel’s sense of time speeds up too quickly or fails to fully develop a thread. (The character Zikora, especially, fades away from later parts of the book.)
But none of these weak points ever risks dampening the novel’s vibrant energy. “Dream Count” succeeds because every page is suffused with empathy, and because Adichie’s voice is as forthright and clarifying as ever. Reading about each woman, we begin to forget that we’re separate from these characters or that their lives belong to fiction.
(AP)
