Many Epiphanies

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a literary sensation. Few contemporary writers have her kind of public appeal, which unites signature glamour with intellectual heft. Quotes of the 47-year-old Nigerian author on stories and stereotypes, feminism and love, can be found gracing fridge magnets to classroom walls. Even Beyonce has quoted her in a song. The reasons for her appeal are many. Her writing is as profound as it is accessible. She writes of love and heartbreak, mothers and daughters, in a way that penetrates the soul. She is both sage and funny, cutting and soothing. Adichie’s women characters (not so much her men) are “relentless human portraits” written with empathy and treated with dignity. As she writes in the Author’s Note, in her new novel, “The point of art is to look at the world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it. In all these forms of engagement, a kind of purity of purpose must prevail. It cannot be a gimmick, it must at some level be true. Only then can we reach reflection, illumination, and finally, hopefully, epiphany.”

Her fourth and her latest novel Dream Count, ten years after Americanah, is rich in epiphany. It tells of three Nigerian women—Chiamaka (Chia), a glamourous travel writer, Zikora, a lawyer, and Omelogor, a highly successful banker who decides to go study pornography, and Kadiatou, a Guinean hotel maid. The early days of Covid provide the ominous setting, it is a time of uncertainty and isolation. Is the pandemic arriving, are the rumours true, how is one to keep safe? The events outside also reflect (and worsen) the inner turmoil of the characters. All are battling their own demons, inside and out.

The novel opens with Chia’s voice and the reader is submerged in her many relationships with men. Her guiding question (and the question of the novel indeed) is—“We are in love and then we are not in love. Where does love go when we stop loving?” Some of her relationships are more successful than others, but most leave her wanting. Chia’s career as a travel writer and her family’s affluence allow Adichie to raise vital questions. A cruel boyfriend dismisses her as not a “real African” because of her affluence. As if wealth makes one an impure African, and as if struggle is the only African story. Chia will battle these stereotypes not only in her personal life but also in her profession. Editors are not interested in a “light, quirky travel book by a Black Nigerian woman,” instead they want stories of war and conflict, struggle and survival.

A very different story from Chia is that of Kadiatou, who is working as a hotel cleaner. When she goes to clean a room which she thinks is empty she is raped by a guest, who ends up being a dignitary. Her story is inspired by Nafissatou Diallo who in 2011 accused the hotel guest Dominique Strauss-Kahn (head of the International Monetary Fund) of rape. In creating the character of Kadiatou, Adichie creates a “fictional character as a gesture of returned dignity”. In Dream Count, Kadiatou is not a mere hotel cleaner, instead she is a mother and an immigrant trying to secure the future of her daughter, she is a woman who has known hardship but who never succumbs to victimhood.

The title Dream Count is a play on body count, or relationships. The women in the novel are wonderfully fleshed out, we see their pain, their joy, in all its bloody and glorious detail. The men are mere shadows. We see them only through the eyes of the women, and mostly as “thieves of time”.

Dream Count is a difficult book to review as it deals with so many issues through the lives of these women. While relationships—between them and men—might be the fulcrum, the novel also serves as an anthropological text. It immerses us in the Nigerian community, their food, their customs, their beliefs, the various tribes and factions, and the hierarchy between them. We are witness to tantric parties, where women enjoy massages and ‘happy endings’. We also have a bedside view of “cutting” or genital mutilation. Through her characters, Adichie examines nationalism and masculinity, race and ritual, colonialism and cultural relativism. This is a feminist text. It is a political text. It is a sociological text. It is a love story. It is a heartbreak story. It is a reminder there is no single story.

booksChimamanda Ngozi AdichiefeminismfictionHarperCollinsNigerianovelsstorieswriting