Book name- DREAM COUNT

Author- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Published by- Fourth Estate

Price- Rs 599

In the Author’s Note to Dream Count, her latest novel, the Nigerian-American writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, declares that “[the novel] is really about my mother. About losing my mother.” The bereavement that lies at the heart of the novel seeps through the narrative — notwithstanding its apparent happy ending — in a soft gloom of pensiveness and loss. Loss is the recurring theme in Dream Count — the loss of people, of hope, of trust — and how it affects those who experience these losses.

Dream Count talks about the intertwined, but very different, lives of four women who narrate their own stories in the first person — the aspiring travel writer and incurably romantic Chiamaka; her sharp and morally ambiguous banker cousin, Omelogor; Chiamaka’s part-time Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou; and her corporate lawyer friend, Zikora. All four women suffer several kinds of loss in their lives and try to plough on by building a support system that includes each other. Yet, there are unresolved tensions amongst them which Chia (as Chiamaka is called by everyone else) tries to soothe over as best as she can.

Adichie creates different narrative voices and distinct character traits for all four of her protagonists which is reflected in the language they use to narrate their experiences. Chia is prone to emotional outbursts: she is too trusting and emotionally dependent; Omelogor, on the other hand, is self-reflexive, continuously analysing her own behaviour and motivations and those of the other people surrounding her. It is through her eyes that the readers get an in-depth glimpse of the dark underbelly of financial fraud and money laundering by the powerful and the rich in Nigeria. Omelogor’s cynicism is contrasted with the hopefulness of both Chia and Kadiatou.

Adichie writes a novel that is painfully aware of the processes and the conditions that are unique to the female body — menstruation, fibroids, childbirth — and its experiences which forever remain outside the purview of the male worldview. In Dream Count, men, apart from a few like Chia’s and Kadiatou’s fathers, are either emotionally manipulative or faithless, like Zikora’s boyfriend who abandons her the moment he gets to know that she is pregnant with their child. Relationships between mothers and daughters are, however, suffused with a rare tenderness and trust — the bonds between Zikora and her mother and Kadiatou and her daughter, Binta, more than make up for the losses and betrayals that the women experience from the men in their lives.

Dream Count is also a searing critique of the corruption, greed, racism, and moral double standards that mark modern Nigeria and the United States of America. The shadow of the Biafran War still looms large in the backdrop of Nigerian politics and in the attitude of the non-Igbo people towards the Igbo. When Omelogor takes a break from her life as a banker in Nigeria to pursue a graduate course in Cultural Studies at an American university, she is stunned at the academic shallowness and the inability to accept contrarian viewpoints in a space that is supposed to be accepting of opposing ideas. Omelogor does not finish her course and returns to Nigeria with a more clear-sighted understanding of what the US pretends to be and what it really is. The same kind of disillusionment is experienced by Kadiatou who, as a hotel employee, is raped by an immensely influential person in his hotel room. Adichie bases this part of the narrative on the accusations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, in 2011. The fabled equality of the American justice system was laid bare in the impunity with which the victim’s character was assassinated in the media. Kadiatou faces the same fate, with the added pain of a hostile and disbelieving public prosecutor. The relief that she and her daughter, Binta, experience when they get to know that the charges are to be dropped is, ironically, a testimony to the failure of the law and justice system of the US.

Dream Count is a complex and thought-provoking novel standing at the crossroads
of gender, class, and race. The questions it raises are yet to be answered in this imperfect world of ours.