Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Vincennes, a Paris suburb on March 27.JOEL SAGET/AFP/Getty Images
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Dream Count, is a heartfelt story following four friends through continents, desires and love affairs as they grapple with all the relationships and all the relationships in between. Twenty-two years after her first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), the 47-year-old author continues to question cultural identity and the interpersonal legacies of colonialism. Yet, the backdrop of Adichie’s storytelling has changed. In the shadow of losing her parents to COVID-19, it is now the grief and love between mothers and daughters. “Novels are never really about what they are about,” she writes in her new novel.
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The story begins with what is a not-so-distant memory for many: keeping up with loved ones through Zoom calls during lockdown. Dream Count temporally shifts back and forth as Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer living in the U.S., weaves us through the pasts shaping her and her friends’ futures.
Chiamaka’s dearest friend is Zikora, a lawyer abandoned by her partner while pregnant, who turns to her mother, the person least expected. Omelogor, a bourgeois graduate student and Chiamaka’s closest cousin, is confident, calm – and everyone’s fiercest critic. Kadiatou, a Black Muslim who is Chiamaka’s housekeeper, speaks broken English and is problematically positioned as subservient.
And then there are all the lovers and mothers. Chiamaka calls some of the men in Dream Count “thieves of time” as she and her friends ponder “biology’s hysterical constraints.”
Our protagonist feels familiar. She is an affluent writer and an Igbo expat from Nigeria who studied in the U.S., navigating dichotomies of ethnicity and race across homes. Adichie, who was raised in Enugu, Nigeria, moved to Philadelphia for educational pursuits at a young age. The author is working through many of the griefs written into Dream Count.
Adichie, celebrated as a leader of postcolonial feminist literature, yet more recently shunned for her obstinate ideas of gender essentialism, has returned to the themes her work began with. Purple Hibiscus was a coming-of-age story about a teenager with family intricacies set amid political unrest in Nigeria. Her follow-up, Half a Yellow Sun (2006), is set in Nigeria during its civil war, and reflects on the complexities of love and relationships in the legacies of colonialism. In Americanah (2013), the story is of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian immigrant attending university in Philadelphia who is dealing with love and identity while straddling two worlds.
Dream Count, then, is an amalgamation of Adichie’s writing and personal transitions, merging the through lines of her life and body of work: the effects of colonialism and living in diaspora as a cisgender woman. The novel, however, lacks feminist characters or plots, and contemplative ideas about different diasporas, challenging her positioning as a postcolonial feminist author.
In place of social analysis we see Adichie’s personal growth on the pages concerning motherhood, where she offers tenderness in her writing. Her reader is inspired to consider the limited choices of mothers who are born into colonial constructs and then raise children in diaspora. We especially feel this in the stories of Kadiatou and Zikora, who empathize with their mothers’ past grievances shaping their unwonted values. It is a long way from the title of Adichie’s 2000 short story My Mother, the Crazy African.
Despite this blooming, biology and gender essentialism remain harmfully paramount in Dream Count. An incessant focus on the women’s biological clocks consumes many pages, and a patriarchal framing of love and family plagues each character. The onus of society perennially remains on women, sentiments echoed by mothers.
Then, there are the diasporic clichés. The world of Chiamaka and her friends involves discussions about race, gender and, less reflectively, class. Their perceived hierarchy of Blackness surfaces in awkward dinners with lovers and in tensions the author inserts about “international Black” affluent immigrants versus Black Americans. The lack of intricacies is also evident in the arguments Chiamaka has with her lover, Darnell, who is still not over slavery, and in the character of Kadiatou, a representation of African Muslim migrants whose story begins with female genital mutilation. Adichie’s ruminations on the conundrums of global Black life suffer from, as she once critiqued, the dangers of a single story.
Still, Dream Count is an inquisitive analysis of mother-daughter relationships. Its magic – and, yes, it has some – lies in Adichie’s apt analysis of grief and motherhood, and the personal tragedy she is writing through. Dream Count claims to focus on four friends, but, as the author shows us, novels are never about what they are about.