After her 3 critically acclaimed earlier novels: Purple Hibiscus, Half a Yellow Sun and Americanah, I started Dream Count, her first published novel in a dozen or so years, full on anticipation. It does not disappoint.
I found Dream Count ambitious, powerful, confronting and intensely moving. Like Americanah, Dream Count presents characters transitioning from an African heritage to Western, particularly US, society however this novel does so from the shifting narratives and ‘interlinked desires’ of its 4 protagonists: Chia, Zikora and Omelogor, all like Adichie herself, Igbo women from relatively privileged backgrounds in Nigeria, and Kadi, a Fulu woman from a less advantaged background in Guinea.
Chia, likeable and well meaning if somewhat dilettantish, funded by her family’s wealth, dabbles in travel, travel writing and her pursuit of her idealistic vision of true love through a string of relationships.
Zikora and Omelogor are perhaps more grounded by their need for financial and career success although all three are apprehensive at approaching the end of their possible child-bearing years without being married.
Kadi, too, travels to America for the promise of love and a better life for her and her daughter but, without the protection of education or family wealth, is far more vulnerable and finds herself adrift in a threatening world she can neither understand nor navigate.
The novel traverses a specific recent historical period encompassing violent events in Africa through to the pandemic.
Importantly Adichie references and fictionalises an actual, infamous criminal case from 2011 in an ‘attempt to fictionally humanise a person’ as ‘a gesture of returned dignity.’ As in Americanah, Adichie depicts the conflicts between personal desires, the expectations and practices of cultural heritage and the those of an adopted culture while exploring issues of gender and race.
Historical violence, the fear of power and the easy acceptance of the systematic corruption inherent in it, within African society is juxtaposed with similar abuse behind the civilised veneer of Western justice where those with wealth and power control the narrative. The novel also suggests the orthodox ideology of self-justifying liberalism may silence the voices of those with lived experience of oppression and, ultimately, that the promise offered by ‘the land of the brave and free’ is a broken one, an observation I find particularly apt in our contemporary world.
I certainly highly recommend the novel.
-Brad Spillane
