It’s been more than a decade since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie last published a novel – that was Americanah, in 2014. In the intervening years Adichie has become, unignorably, a culture hero, not just in her native Nigeria (where she is a figurehead for young women) but in the left-leaning precincts of the liberal West.
In the West, Adichie is widely perceived and celebrated as a liberal in the classic postwar mould: a critic of racism, a feminist, an individualist, a believer in love, a sceptic about “cancel culture”. How many novelists get sampled by Beyoncé? Or appear on Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list? An equivocal position: to become a liberal icon just as western liberalism totters and falls.
As if in anticipation of this predicament, Americanah is an equivocal novel – it is, that is to say, a two-voiced and two-placed novel. Americanah is a term of derision in Nigeria; it refers to someone who has become shamefully Americanised in their attitudes, fashion choices, aspirations, accent. As a title, it neatly combines the novel’s two settings, America and Nigeria; and it suggests the inbuilt doubleness that shapes its characters’ lives.
In that novel, Ifemelu leaves Nigeria, and her first love, Obinze, to pursue an academic career in America. Obinze emigrates to London, and later moves back to Lagos, becoming a mover and shaker in the new corrupt capitalism there. It is Ifemelu who is the Americanah. To resolve the tensions within herself – is she American, Nigerian, neither or both? – she writes a blog that anatomises American culture with friendly savagery, stressing the Africanness of her perspective. But it is love, in the form of Obinze, that holds out the promise of resolving this tension more profoundly, for Ifemelu and for the novel itself.
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Dream Count is also about these inner tensions, and the difficulty of resolving them. It is divided neatly into five novella-length sections and is about the lives of four women – three from Nigeria and one from Papua New Guinea – in the early years of the 21st century. The opening pages take place in the middle of the Covid pandemic but the novel is not, you will be relieved to hear, actually about the Covid pandemic. (Boring and stressful to live through, pandemic lockdowns are also boring and stressful when they happen to fictional characters. If ever an illness cried out for metaphor, Covid is it.)
The four women are friends. They appear in each other’s sections. Chiamaka, who narrates the first section, returns to narrate the fifth and wrap everything up. Like Americanah, Dream Count is a big, loose, spacious, digressive, ingenuous book. It takes its characters and their feelings seriously. It has the classic realist hunger to get in as much of the contemporary as possible. It tells you, we are all individuals; we are all connected.
If the name “Chiamaka” rings pretty closely to “Chimamanda”, then surely this is deliberate. Chia – who might also remind us of Ifemelu in Americanah – is pretty clearly an authorial stand-in. (The rule is, you get one authorial stand-in per book.) Like Ifemelu, Chiamaka is deracinated – at home neither in the Nigerian upper classes of her birth nor among the painfully woke black academics that make up her American social circle. She works as a travel writer; she has some truly terrible American boyfriends. She knows “how to wear different selves”. But what she seeks is a love that will enable her to be her true self: “the resplendence of being truly known”.
Zikora, Chia’s intimate friend, is abandoned by her husband as soon as she tells him she is pregnant; her story is told via flashbacks as she endures “the vulgar helplessness of bearing a child”, with her disappointed mother on hand. Kadiatou undergoes the deepest trauma in the book; in a sequence of events that evoke the New York sexual assault case against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, she is raped by a powerful “VIP” at the hotel where she works as a maid, and becomes the centre of public outrage. (In an afterword, Adichie writes that she created this storyline to “‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories”; the case against Strauss-Kahn was dropped – “shabbily,” as Adichie puts it.) And then there is Omelogor, a former wild-girl who now does graduate research on pornography.
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Adichie’s true subject, in Dream Count, is the conflict between liberal individualism (the thing that lets you escape from an oppressive conservatism or tribalism) and the real demands of a community in which our individualities might flourish. A classic conflict, and one that gives the novel energy even during its more digressive or sentimental passages. Adichie is an old-fashioned novelist for a new world. She is entertaining, compassionate and capable of gorgeous touches of life – as when, in a typically deft aside, Chia notes her mother’s love of shopping: “she came alive in front of displayed things”.
