Book Review: Dream Count by Chimamanda N. Adichie

Have you ever read a fictional story with a character that seemed so real, it's like a person you knew in real life had been transcribed onto a page and inserted into a story?

I've enjoyed all of Chimamanda’s novels from The Thing Around Your Neck to Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americana is among my favorite books by an African author. I consumed all her novels in my adolescent years and here comes Dream Count, which meets me on the eve of my 30s. It feels like the characters in her novels accompanied me during my development. Adichie's novels, and other African women writers like Tsitsi Dangarembga, saved me in many ways. As a young Kenyan girl growing up in Germany, I had been raised with the wonderful stories of Cornelia Funke and Astrid Lindgren which featured little white girls like Pippi Longstocking who made references to cultural inheritance that I wasn't familiar with - it was hard to relate to those stories, as desperately as I tried to, because none of those characters looked like me, spoke like me or had a mixed family that looked like mine. The discovery of novels like Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun introduced me to characters who looked my mother, like myself and featured plot lines that resembled events that had happened in my family or that I had witnessed happen in Kenya. These novels had become the beginning of my self-recognition as a young African Black woman whose feet were planted in two worlds. I no longer had to see myself as a caricature of a young white German girl, and was instead given language to name myself. I could name my tribe, the language of my people, my country of origin and what my culture was truly about rather than having it dictated through a disconnected European lens.

As I grew from a little girl into a young woman Americana met me amidst my teenage angst, as I stood on the precipice of young adulthood. I navigated questions about what it meant to be a woman in the world. I was trying to make sense about why the world saw me so differently as a black woman

So, while Americana met me when I was crafting my identity in the world and Dream Count met me on the eve of my Saturn Return. Dream Count was a different journey all together.

As the title suggests, Dream Count is an accounting of various ambitions and dreams of four West African women and the challenges, in the shape of men, that have obstructed these dreams. While it is truly an inspiring novel that I couldn’t put down, it was also an autopsy uncovering all the ways in which men have destroyed many of those dreams, if not hindered them. Some events were a little too harrowing for me, which were so raw in their depiction of male violence that I had to put the novel down for those scenes. Gratefully, they were not gratuitous and added layer and complexity to the themes in the novel. Readers should approach the novel with discretion as there are graphic depictions of sexual assault.

Have you ever read a fictional story with a character that seemed so real, it's like a person you knew in real life had been transcribed onto a page and inserted into a story? Well, that was the first time in a long time that I had felt that intensely immersed into a story, especially when one of the main characters, Chia, recounted her experiences with men like Darnell and Chuka. All women have met a Darnell - the man who secretly hates you and envies you, and lets that out in passive aggressive and abusive ways; he's always a fuse short of an explosion over the most trivial of matters and conversing with him is like walking on eggshells. Chuka, on the other hand, while less volatile, is a creature of conformity who speaks in brands, traditional masculinity and moves with a curated behavior and personality that he's practiced from studying social media discourses on Black Love. Simply put, he wasn’t as much of a threat as he was boring. I laughed to myself so much while reading Chia's chapters, because it felt like reading something from my journal, or a candid conversation that I would have with girlfriends.

The novel isn't solely about Chia's dreams of love, but features the story of three other women: Zikora, Kadiatou and Omelogor. Women from different economic backgrounds, religions, customs and upbringing. Women who have such contrasting identities yet whose lives are intricately interwoven. Best believe every single time a man comes into the picture, into these women's lives, they always end up being deterred from whatever dream it is that they had.

Zikora had dreams of motherhood and matrimony but the man she trusted made a different choice. Her character is an intricate case study on how cultural conditioning, especially one with religious undertones, can lead young girls to overprioritize a man for the sake of an ideal. It is in the ruins of her fallen dreams that Zikora looks at her family, and the dreams of her mother, and comes to a profound realization. Zikora had grown to resent her mother only to be scorned by her own lover and learn see her mother's resilience to her father's cruelty with a new outlook. My personal perception on marriage and men truly had me in conflict when engaging with Zikora's character.

There is Omelogor, "strong" and self-possessed and the only woman who seems to navigate a man's world with ease and calm that leaves characters like Zikora slowly burning up inside. One could say she thrives in a man's world and she demonstrates that by leading a sex blog geared towards advising and affirming men in their sexuality and relationships. She was an interesting character who observed the world, but also actively enabled and aided in government corruption. She was a morally enticing character: she devised multiple schemes that made corruption more effective while distributing loans to market women from the profits of laundered money. She was my favorite character as she did not shy from addressing her own contradictions. She was aware of societal hypocrisies and her participation in it, but she also addressed the self-righteous and moral absoluteness of not just America and Nigeria as well. She was blunt , direct and deliciously complex, a character who refused to be liked by the audience. Ironically, that was the entire charm of Omelogor's character.

There is also Kadiatou whose story just broke my heart. While every other character in the novel had been named, the delicate and nuanced style in which Kadatu's story was written suggested that it was inspired by a real life event. The repeated reluctance to name that white character is what sent me down that rabbit hole, as writers like Adichie intentionally name their characters - names are signifiers of tribe, customs and culture. In Adichie's case, her characters often bear Igbo names (as she herself is Igbo), while other names like Kadiatou will be reflective of a character with an African Muslim background. The unnamed white man thus had to exist outside of fiction, and that made Kadiatou's story even more grim especially in light of the fact that fiction can never fully capture the horror of reality. It turns out Chimamanda Adichie was indeed inspired by a true story and addressed this inspiration in detail, citing the urge to give life to an invisible woman whose horrific experience went unacknowledged. In 2011, the head of the IMF and French presidential hopeful, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was arrested in New York and charged with the brutal sexual assault and rape of a hotel maid. I won't go in detail about that case, but Chimamanda's writing definitely accomplished in giving attention to the machinations of power and their deliberate obfuscation of violent crimes against working class women. Nafissatou Diallo, the victim whose story inspired the creation of Kadiatou, is barely mentioned in the media accounts of the case, as the emphasis is solely on the impacts of the allegation on Dominique Strauss Kahn's reputation. There was no way to read Nafissatou's and Kadiatou's stories without being angry and that accomplished Chimamanda's goal of redirecting focus to women like them. There are thousands of poor, hard working women who endure traumatizing and humiliating violence at the hands of powerful men but become invisible because the world would rather protect power than confront the reality of these powerful men represent: that they are harmful people and by extension their policies, laws and outlook harms everyone, not just the invisible poor. Our culture is so accustomed to a culture of violence and cruelty, that we don't know how to enact justice for victims without indicting the fundamental morality of our society. Things would have to change, and the powers that be can't have that.

Lastly there's Chia, the narrator of the story, who's dated African Americans, married men, European men, and Nigerian men. None of them made her happy, or at least none of them seemed close enough to fulfil her dream of a grand, consuming love. I don't think a man could have fulfilled Chia's dream of love, as she herself hadn't defined love for herself. It's easy to consider her character an idealist, but what makes her a great narrator (besides being a writer - an echo to the author), was her love of life and people.

Dream Count felt incredibly intimate; a culmination of lessons, joys and experiences that Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie chose to share in brilliant narrative prose. It definitely felt like a gift from an elder to younger women and I cherish it for arriving at an auspicious time in my life. Books have always had a way of imprinting themselves on me over the course of my emotional and spiritual development, and Dream Count meets me on the eve of my Saturn return in the most synchronous way.