The Interpreter of Woke Struggles

In Dream Count, her return to literary fiction, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie critiques the fetishisation of Africa and Africans by the West

- Simar Bhasin

It is clear that we live in uncertain times, what with the climate crisis, an ongoing genocide, and expansionist warfare. And that's just the daily news cycle. This note of utter uncertainty characterises the opening of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count.

The US-based Nigerian writer's long-awaited return to literary fiction comes more than a decade after the widely acclaimed Americanah (2013). It begins with the pandemic and a "new suspended life" in the midst of what her protagonist Chiamaka terms the "communal unknown". Here, Zoom calls with family and friends become "a melange of hallucinatory images" and one is constantly reminded of how even the innocent act of talking "was to remember all that was lost".

Faced with a seeping hopelessness, Chiamaka begins to look up the men from her past, and the "what could have been" scenarios, the dreams that never became a reality, the futures that never truly were. Thus, begins her "dream count".

In the face of a "freewheeling apocalypse", Adichie's protagonist is holding onto that which makes us all human: the need to be heard and seen through the eyes of another, without judgment.

The novel is divided into four main sections, each representing the perspective of one of the story's four central women characters: Chiamaka, her closest friend Zikora, her cousin Omelogor, and her housekeeper Kadiatou. Their lives and all that they have loved and lost is the focus of a narrative that embeds political critique in a representation of desire. What begins as an examination of love in its various shapes and forms, takes on the tone of a social commentary on the 21st-century woman's (over)reliance on romantic love.