by Elizabeth Spencer
“The world has changed and you look back to take stock of how you’ve lived,” says Chiamaka (Chia), one of the main characters in Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The title, a play on the concept of a “body count,” is Chia’s name for her pandemic quest to look up the men in her past. As she reflects on each relationship, Chia fears she’s missed the opportunity to fulfill her deepest desire: “to be known, truly known, by another human being.”
Dream Count is Adiche’s first novel in 12 years. The success of her previous one, Americanah, along with Beyonce’s sampling of Adichie’s 2012 TEDx Talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” turned the Nigerian author into a literary celebrity. In the time between novels, Adiche published three nonfiction books, including an adaptation of her famous TEDx Talk and a memoir about the death of her father, a children’s book, and several short stories. “Zikora,” published by Amazon Original Stories in 2020, introduces a character who also appears in Dream Count.
In total, the novel tells the stories of four women at midlife. Chia and her best friend Zikora are Nigerian women living in the D.C. metro area. Chia appears in two sections at the beginning and end of the book, with Zikora, Kadiatou, and Omelogor featured in between.
Like her friend, Chia, Zikora also looks back at her life and loves, but instead of a “dream count” she considers the men in her past “thieves of time.” In contrast to Chia, a dreamy travel writer who lives off her family’s wealth, Zikora “always imagined her future in a vivid timeline—first a lucrative and prestigious job, then a splashy Catholic wedding, followed shortly by two children, or maybe three.” She fulfills her first goal, becoming a successful lawyer, yet realizing the second part of her ideal life proves harder.
The third section belongs to Kadiatou (Kadi), the only one of the four women who is from Guinea, not Nigeria, and who occupies a lower socioeconomic position. After immigrating to the U.S. on an asylum claim, Kadi works in the housekeeping department of a prestigious D.C. hotel. Chia meets her there and Kadi becomes her hair braider and part-time housekeeper.
Kadi’s section marks a shift in tone from the first two, and the pacing starts to drag as the novel reaches its midpoint. Whereas Chia and Zikora’s sections are reflective in tone, moving throughout time in a non-linear structure, Kadi’s life story unfolds in chronological order, starting with the loss of her father in childhood and ending in the novel’s present. In an Author’s Note, Adiche writes that this character was inspired by the real-life news story of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her at the New York hotel where she worked.
“The details had the addictiveness of crude melodrama: the lowly maid, the man who would be president, his arrest on a plane just about to fly off to Paris,” Adiche writes, explaining that she wanted to “‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories.” While a noble goal, its execution can feel forced at times.
The novel’s fourth character, Chia’s cousin Omelogor, is a banker in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. She tries to counter the corruption in her job by giving “Robyn Hood” grants to women entrepreneurs, then enrolls in a Cultural Studies program in America. Omelogor wants to study pornography after an experience with a younger man makes her wonder how people learn about sex and love. However, Omelogor is unhappy in the U.S. and the end of her section is devoted to the ways in which “America has bamboozled us all,” as Adiche writes. Her send-up of the identity politics of liberal, largely white academia is funny and spot on, revisiting the outsider’s perspective on the U.S. that Adiche covered in her previous novel.
Omelogor’s section also covers her present-day life in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, her vibrant social life, and her past relationships with men. Unlike Chia and Zikora, Omelogor never wanted a long-term relationship or children. Instead, she experiences “short passion attacks,” with her longest relationship lasting just under a year. Still, she is haunted by an aunt’s assertion that she should adopt a child at age 46. “Don’t pretend you like the life you are living,” the aunt tells Omelogor, throwing her into doubt about whether she is indeed happy with the life she’s built for herself.
Throughout the novel, all four women grapple with the gendered expectations of their relatives, continuing the feminist themes Adiche has explored in other works. Must a woman marry to be happy? Once married, can she also have career ambitions? What about children? Omelogor finds herself seriously considering adoption, even though it wasn’t a previous goal of hers. Zikora finally has a child, but under different circumstances than she imagined. Chia won’t settle for anything less than her utopian vision of love. Before her assault, Kadi is the only character who seems content. She likes her job and the financial security it provides, is close with her daughter, and waits patiently for the man she’s loved since childhood to serve his sentence for marijuana possession so they can marry. However, her life falls apart as she finds her appearance, economic status, and trustworthiness judged in the court of public opinion before the case even goes to trial.
Adiche’s prose in Dream Count is flawless, a deceptively simple, elegant style, whether she’s describing early-pandemic fears—“Did washing my face count as touching?”—or describing Zikora’s “frequent flare of sad longing” after the sudden end of her relationship. There is much to like about this wise and absorbing novel, even as the four women’s stories feel more separate than connected and the book could’ve benefited from a greater sense of plot and tension. Kadi is the only character who gets a resolution to her storyline. But perhaps that, too, is sage commentary on life from a gifted writer. After all, how much closure or resolution do we get in real life? “We think we have time but we don’t, we really don’t,” Adiche writes in Chia’s final section. Readers of all ages will find much to relate to in these characters’ desires and disappointments, their family conflicts and heartbreaks, and their fierce loyalty to each other.
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