Chimamanda’s ‘Dream Count’ isn’t innocent

 We’ve always heard of body count, that phrase referring to the number of sexual partners a person has—often used to judge women more harshly than men. But in ‘Dream Count’, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie flips the coin, shifting the conversation from physical encounters to something far more elusive: the dreams we hold dear and the weight of their loss. This is her first novel in almost twelve years, and it tells the stories of four women whose aspirations, in different ways, are dashed.

Three of these women—Chiamaka, Zikora, and Omelogor—are Nigerian, while the fourth, Kadiatou, is Guinean. Theirs are tales of exile—of being caught between places, cultures, and the expectations of others.

Chiamaka is the daughter of a millionaire businessman and a travel writer living in the Maryland suburbs. Zikora works for a Washington, DC law firm. Omelogor is Chiamaka’s closest cousin and a former banker. And Kadiatou, the one they all come together to help. Call it women supporting women.

Of all the loosely intertwined novellas that make up the novel, Kadiatou’s story resonated with me the most. She can easily emerge the most memorable. Perhaps it is because of the sheer force of her resilience, the way she clings to hope even when it is fraying at the edges. Or, perhaps because Kadiatou isn’t fully fictitious. Adichie models her after Nafissatou Diallo, a hotel worker, involved in the scandal that ‘castrated’ former IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn. The choice of her last name is some sort of memorial to Amadou Diallo, an immigrant America police shot and killed extra-judicially.

The multi-points-of-view novel re-imagines Kadiatou’s life in Guinea before she comes to America. We see how her father dies in a mining pit. We see how a man she is betrothed to marries another. We see how a man she wishes to marry disappears to America for years. And we see how he eventually comes back to get her to America. But, a lot of water has passed under the bridge before his return. She has had a child for a man, who like her father, died at a mining factory. And the respite she thinks America will offer is shattered by a powerful man whose brain is twisted by his phallus. When she takes up a job in a hotel, she is assigned a room to clean and the big man in the room forces her to perform oral sex on him and leaves sperm dripping down her mouth. An investigation reveals the man’s identity and Chiamaka, Omelogor and Zikora team up to get her justice from one of the ‘mad’ men roaming our world.

In the case of Chiamaka, one man after the other tests her patience and, in the long run, crushes her dreams. Of course, she isn’t without her flaws.

Through Kadiatou, Adichie deals with the issue of Female Genital Mutilation and punctures the myth that uncircumcised women are not marriageable.

At the time Adichie plunges us into Zikora’s story, she is in the hospital about to deliver her first child. Her mother, who she has had a ‘comci-comca’ relationship with, is there with her, but the father of the child, Kwame, is nowhere to be found. He begins to ghost her the day she told him she was pregnant. This is a man who has sex with her knowing she has stopped birth control pills. This is a man who has visited her parents in Enugu, who befriended her father and asked questions that suggest marriage is the final destination for their relationship. He has also taken her to his parents and nothing forewarned her of her present situation of having a baby whose father doesn’t want to be bothered. Through her story, particularly the part about her father taking a second wife, we see how men take the issue of male children. We also see in a revelation from her mother how guileful some women can be.

We also meet Omelogor, who once ran a secret initiative in her Nigeria discreetly funneling small business grants to women under the alias “Robyn Hood.” The fund is ‘sourced’ from corrupt Nigerians. Now, she’s enrolled in an American graduate program, researching pornography as a societal ill while offering unfiltered advice on her website, For Men Only. One of her blunt truths: “I get that you’re against abortion, but if you really want to reduce it, start by taking responsibility for where your male bodily fluids go.”

The book also critiques America, portraying it as a nation preoccupied with toilet paper, where the police “shoot more than they run,” where they shot Amadou Diallo, where maternal mortality rates are starkly divided by race, and a nation that has used razzmatazz to bamboozle us.

Omelogor told Kadiatou: “America is not that wonderful. And you are not here for free; you’re working and you’re part of what makes America America.”

The novel also reminds us of the evil Charles De Gaule did to the Guinean economy all to frustrate the country’s quest to end imperialism.

My final take: Adichie doesn’t write innocent novels. Like her polemics, her fiction tackles issues, especially man-woman dynamics and comes across as didactic. Her latest novel isn’t innocent. In ‘Dream Count’, men who make women’s dreams fail are her victims and she doesn’t just slap them, she rains punches on them like a boxer. The men in this work vary from decent yet dull to charming rogues, and from outright sexist plunderers to emotionally distant figures.

The book is particularly, and justifiably so, harsh on men who violate women. Curses are even raining on these men identified as “wild animals”.

But, not all the men in ‘Dream Count’ are mad. Despite Amadou’s flaws, his love for Kadiatou isn’t in doubt. He identifies with her in her time of trouble. Chiamaka’s father and Elhadji Ibrahima also come off as not insane.