Broken dreams, broken hearts

A fourth novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian-born and now living in both Nigeria and the United States, has been highly anticipated for some time — it has been 12 years since her last novel, Americanah, was published. In that time she has written and had published numerous short stories, several essays and collections as well as a childrens’ book, and her work has been translated into more than 55 languages. She’s also known as a style icon (having appeared on Vanity Fair’s 2016 International Best Dressed List) as well as an activist and supporter of LGBTTQ+ rights in Nigeria and Africa.

Adichie’s latest picks up where Americanah left off, continuing many of the themes found in that novel — Nigerians migrating to the U.S. and contending with a sometimes fractious relationship with African-Americans and the contrast between the lives of poor and wealthy African immigrants.

The novel begins during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when characters are confined to their homes. And while it’s perhaps a little early for some readers to relive that trauma, the story travels backwards and forwards in time as characters reflect on their pasts and their “dream counts” of failed romantic relationships.

While on the surface the novel runs the risk of being considered “chick lit,” Dream Count transcends those boundaries and is elevated to something singular through the incisive commentary on race, gender and class that readers have come to love from Adichie. It’s not quite the tour de force Americanah was, but it does delve more deeply into the lives of women.

Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, was a coming-of-age story of an adolescent girl learning to stand up to her tyrannical father; Dream Count, by contrast, focuses on mature women in their 30s and 40s who are dealing with fibroids, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, depression, being single at an age deemed unacceptable by their families and having a child by a deadbeat father.

Dream Count is told from four points of view by four very different yet connected women; there are no conventional chapters, but lengthy sections of the book titled with each character’s name.

Chiamaka, who at 44 has no husband or children, comes from an extremely wealthy Igbo family in Nigeria and is living in Washington, D.C. on her father’s dime. She struggles to establish a career as a travel writer and finds that people in the U.S. “can’t stand rich people from poor countries, because it means they can’t feel sorry for you.”

Zikora, Chiamaka’s childhood friend, is a successful lawyer in a large firm, but as a devout Catholic with traditional values is consumed with the shame of being unmarried. Eventually, she becomes pregnant by a man of African-American and Ghanaian parentage, who promptly abandons her. Her mother comes to visit her for her son’s birth, where Zikora ends up disgracing her mother “by not facing labor like a wordless stoic. Part of her mother’s philosophy was to endure pain with pride, especially the kind of pain that belonged to women alone.”

Chiamaka’s older cousin Omelogor is a banker in Nigeria who misappropriates funds from her employer, some of which she uses to help poor people, and lives a hedonistic life partying and doing drugs with an eclectic group of friends, which includes Muslims and gay men. She then goes to the United States to do graduate studies in pornography.

The heart of the book is the story of Kadiatou, a poor immigrant single mother from Guinea, who is Chiamaka’s cook, housekeeper and hairdresser. Kadiatou also works as a hotel maid and, while cleaning a room, is sexually assaulted by a prominent European man, a story based on the real-life case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

Kadiatou’s partner, also from Guinea, is incarcerated for selling drugs; the pair are the victims of the American dream. The way Kadiatou’s case is handled by lawyers and portrayed in the media demonstrates a devaluing of the lives of Black women and girls that is also experienced by the wealthier women in the book, albeit in very different ways.

The book ends with both an indictment of the United States justice system and a celebration of the resilience of African women.

At times, Dream Count is relentless in its harrowing portrayal of how “America has bamboozled us all,” how it has “reneged on a promise that was never really made.” At other times, it is hilarious — at one point Chiamaka’s mother criticizes people in the United States: “Even the way they talk. ‘Let’s go and grab lunch.’ How can you be grabbing your lunch?”

Dream Count is a satisfying read that is both comforting in its familiarity and discomfiting in its fresh take on broken dreams and hearts.

Zilla Jones is a Winnipeg-based writer of short and long fiction. Her debut novel The World So Wide was published in April.