Literature: Chimamanda’s Dream Count vacillates between mediocre-good
This article was culled from my video review of the novel.Watch it here. Dream Count by Chimamanda Adichie — The Book Replay, Episode 6
So much has been said about separating the art from the artist. And never have I had such a deep interrogation of that idea than I did with Dream Count. The queston I was asked before this review is, “If it was not Chimamanda that wrote Dream Count, would you think it was good?”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has not been very popular among the progressives recently. I would talk about her sins but we do not have ten thousand words to unroll her weird actions over the years.
What I will say is that her latest novel, Dream Count, is shaped only in a way that Chimamanda can write a book. When you factor in the style, the narrative and the depth of thought in it, and even the reason why this book flattens out, one finds that thees things all happen only in a way Chiamamanda can flatten out a story. Because it is such an honest work written from the exact position this writer finds her self in, we are privy to Chimamanda as deeply as she is privy to the subjects. Kind of like how the abyss stares at you when you look at it. So, it is impossible to separate Dream Count from the life and times of Chimamanda.
Dream Count, no doubt, comes from the head of a master writer. I can feel the touch of great technique bleed through the page. This is the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie whose craft revived contemporary fiction in Nigeria and I have missed her so.
Because Dream Count is a Chimamanda release, ths has passed in front of many eyes. I daresay it is the most read work of literary fiction this year and will continue to be. Against my will, I have heard a lot of reactions to this story from, “It was too much,” “So much was unnecessary,” to “I felt things deeply and saw myself in this book.”
For this review, I will try to look at the book as objectively as I can through the premise I worked out for it. When it comes to the Book Replay, we are all about the premise.
The Author
Chimamanda is one Nigeria’s most famed authors. So talented that right from here debut novel, we all knew she was a generational talent. She authored Purple Hibiscus, a literary work so relevant it became educational reading in schools, so eternal that this day, people argue that it is her best work. Her second novel, Half of A Yellow Sun, also enjoyed much attention, was also adapted into a movie and sparked so many exhaustive discussions about the Biafra war. Her third novel, Americanah, which sadly I have not read did not enjoy as much attention as it was ahead of its time, right at the lip of the feminist movement. She has authored a short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, Dear Ijeawele; A Feminist Manifesto, and several short stories and essays. Being a public figure, she has been in the middle of controversies. Often positioned as the spear tip of the feminist movement for African women, being a Nigerian woman with a voice and all, is something she has never shied away from.
Her work focuses on telling the stories that she knows. The Igbo struggle in Nigeria, the internal lives of women breaking free in a society that wants to chain them, and she has often interrogated these topics, taking it down to deep levels when she writes.
Are all of her ideas about things sound? Not, exactly. But then again who is 100% correct. Per her position though, people have called for her to be more astute and educated.
Dream Count comes twelve years after her last novel and I did not expect to read the same Chimamanda from those years. I told my book buddies that the best way to read Dream Dount is to enter it as a debut novel. I imagined that here was a writer, so far removed from the world she used to be in that she would have to find a new level. And in truth, Dream Count does read like a debut novel, as some of the ideas executed did not feel cooked through and one has to do a little bit of work to get to its core.
Book Cover
I do not like the book cover.
Yes, the matte deep gray finish and the sparkling silver impressions are pretty neat. With this book on shelf, amidst all of the color, it is a sort of black hole that can hold your attention. From a distance, the silver prints will glint in the light. But it is ultimately not that eye catching and feels like there was a disagreement behind the final draft.
Narrative
Dream Count is told in five parts. We start from Chiamaka’s first person narrative, pull back to watch Zikora go through her traumas, witness the episodic horrors which Kadiatou is subjected to, dive deep into Omelogor’s sure-footed delivery of her own life and finally end at where Chiamaka comes full circle.
The story doesn’t progress chronologically. We are taken from event to event, not randomly, but through a stream of consciousness narrative. This story is narrated according to how the characters access memory, from cluster to cluster. So when dealing with one event, we deal with the memories and traumas surrounding that event that helps us understand why our character acts the way they act. As we are deep inside their mind, we are treated what they see and feel, and how they process these emotions. Chiamaka and Omelogor are two characters most like Chimamanda. I find that both of these characters would fit well within the ideas of Chimamanda in the public. I would liken Chiamaka to early Chimamanda; creative, lost at sea, seeking a tether, and Omelogor as her dark side, the one who could have given us Americanah. The others feel like mere imaginations, when juxtaposed with these two. Zikora’s story is short and not much is explored so it feels a little flat. Kadiatou’s story at its worst, feels like a stereotype was extended for a long time. Then there is an author’s note that talks extensively on what it took to write Kadiatou which leads me to believe that Kadiatou’s story must have been problematic before print.
Premise
Dream Count’s premise can be coalesced into this,
“At any point in her life, a woman must never forget to dream.”
For dreaming is one of the greatest strengths a woman can possess in an age that is only just waking up to the fact that she has been oppressed for millenia.
This premise is embodied strongly in Chiamaka, the ultimate dreamer who continues to fall in love even after so many failures. We see Zikora’s dreams shatter but with new information she is able to find a new recourse. So is Kadiatou, who is willing to shake off a justice she will never get so she can find enough peace to dream. And Omelogor, who is comfortable but disillusioned, still sees that death happens when you stop dreaming.
Nothing should stand in the way of your ability to dream. Nothing. Especially, as an African woman. I think this premise unites everyone’s story here.
Another idea in this book is that, at whatever state, or whatever she has gone through, a woman is not less of herself. After diving deeply into the internal lives and accomplishments of these womane. Their determination, grit and courage proves over and over that they are forces to reckon with, we see how the wider society sees them as less. It is nearly almost impossible form women to resist the internalization of these ideas even though their lives. As a woman, to free oneself from societies shackles, is to find new solutions to the new ways you drown. People will always try to push you down.
In Dream Count, we cross cities in the United States, Guinea, Nigeria and Europe. As Chiamaka is a travel writer, we are treated to small descriptions of the places that she went to.
The writing voice is conscious, introspective, emotional, but never weak. The voice doesn’t necessarily change to accomodate different speeds of thought. Rather, it relies on its content and approach to the events at hand to differentiate its quality.
Tone differs from character to character. Again, not in the physical arrangement of the sentences, but still in the content and how ideas are relayed.
Dialogue could be better. There is so much work that the off-dialogue writing is doing that I really just wanted to get back to it. You would not be hard-pressed to not find the dialogue meandering into something about the society. I badly wanted most of the dialogue to stop so I could continue reading the story.
The use of language is sublime nonetheless and it made for good reading even though it was not compact by any stretch of the imagination. There was a great amount of verbiage that did not do meaningful work in here.
Characters
Dream Count is very much about its characters, seeing as it is shaped according to their experiences and the story moves in the manner of their thoughts. The themes are thus tied up in the characters that we will explore.
Chiamaka
Chiamaka is perhaps the most well-written character here. She reads like the author enjoyed exploring where the woman was going. So much time and detail and well roundedness given to each scenario. And how can you not enjoy writing about Chiamaka. She is a sweet girl, from a rich household, where there trauma was a distant feeling. She had everything she ever needed and did not face any serious problems form childhood so she did not need to toughen up or discover a new self to manage her life. In fact, she is allowed time to discover herself, to start and stop things. She even gets a house of her own, with a cleaner in the United States where she can be whatever she wants to be.
And like every nepobaby who doesn’t want to waste away, she starts doing things. She starts writing. Thank God she is actually creative. A failed novel and a few other things in her wake before she finds travel writing. And that fits the place she is at in life. Not tethered to herself. Not truly known to anyone, even to herself. And that is why her story starts with the lines
I have yearned to be truly known. pg. 1
I will describe Chiamaka’s psychology as this. Being the apple of everyone’s eye, she has always been looked at the way anyone would look at a good thing. She is sweet. She is pretty. She has not had a chance to truly fail and that is why I was not surprised when she fell for someone like Darnell, who is more glitter than substance and full of self-loathing.
Her goal is to find someone that can truly understand her. She starts out very whimsy, like any young person coming would, constantly seeking approval to affirm her identity.
I am a little critical of Chiamaka, because when it comes to self-identity, you cannot find it by exploring outside alone. It is through introspection as well as extrospection that you start to find what it is that is unique about the combination of who you are. It is much easier to introspect when you are in a quiet place and can hear the still small voice in your head. Chiamaka has not heard any of those voices. Only until the pandemic did she use the silence to take that much needed long look at herself and deconstruct her experiences. Her dream count is narrated from that silence, that point in the pandemic where everyone is self-reflecting.
With Chiamaka, we can see how a lack of personal identity can lead one to wander. Her wish to be loved lavishly without a solid self-identity is a fool’s wish. Without that base, no amounts of lavishness will be enough.
We can also see what growth is like through Chiamaka. The freedom to explore oneself and the range of experiences a woman can have. How memory is colored by age as we grow more empathetic and wiser and forgive ourselves.
I want to draw attention to the limitations Chiamaka experiences due to the color of her skin. It is the reason she rejects the offer to write a book with an editorial slant that honors an identity she doesn’t want to promote. Even in her travels, she is made well aware of her blackness. No amount of class or status can peel you away from the chains attached to your black skin.
Zikora
I find Zikora to be more of a representation of a certain class of women rather than a character herself. There are tons of Zikoras in Nigerian literature. You read about them everyday. Perhaps Chimamanda did not want to glorify this type of woman So she kept Zikora’s Dream Count short.
Zikora exemplifies the modern woman who still values ideals that women were forced to adopt in the past. She wants to have that traditional life at all costs.
We see her bristle when she meets Omelogor who is diametrically her opposite and has rejected the dream that Zikora wants. We see her put up the front of the ‘strong woman who doesn’t break’ in the face of great challenge. She carries everything with dignity and puts her health on the line to achieve things, that extra mile that women are forced to go to.
This is not without cause though.
Zikora is ultimately reacting to her mother’s situation. Her parents split, not divorced, when she was younger and her father married another wife. Her mother, now the senior wife, bears this with dignity, remaining stoic throughout the entire ordeal. In order to not have a life like that, Zikora pushes herself to have the perfect life. She goes extra miles for the men in her life as she wants to get married and have a father present in a child’s life like she missed. She calls the men who did not deliver this in her life, ‘thieves of time’.
It all comes to a head when she has to carry a pregnancy to term alone and Dr. Kwame, the father of her child, really does something bizarre and brings her worst nigthmare to life. What looked like the perfect man in her head, turned out to be the wrost possible person she could have achild with. From the moment she told him she was pregnant, she never saw him again.
Zikora judges herself too harshly for not being able to meet up with the impossible ideals society has foisted upon womanhood. She feels ashamed for needing her mother’s help inspite of the mother-daughter friction they have. However, when her mother reveals a secret, Zikora immediately realizes that what she thought was, never was. This starts her journey to freeing herself from the shackles of womanhood.
In Zikora’s story, we explore the hoops women have to jump through as they try to balance their own dreams with societal expectations.
We see what can befall a woman when isn’t bringing any of that intrinsic value she is expected to bring through Zikora’s mother.
At the end, I think more needed to be done with Zikora.
Kadiatou
One hundred pages of Kadiatou’s story and I wonder what the point was, honestly.
As Chimamanda digs deep into the life of a woman rising from a mining village in Guinea to her life in the United States, she simply fictionalizes the story of Nafisatou Diallo. For younger readers it flew, but people who lived through Nafisatou Diallo’s ordeal did not swallow this well. And perhaps she sensed it and that was why that author’s note was dripping with so much guilt.
This is where the book largely dips in quality and the strength of the philosophy ardently displayed in Chiamaka’s part weakened here. Chimamanda is clearly out of touch with women who are not in the same class as she is. Forgivable.
Dredging up Nafisatou’s global embarassment in a stereotypical flat fictional manner, I wonder what was the point of it?
Kadiatou’s story shows that there are dangers lurking everywhere for women and they can never tell when it would happen. Chimamanda sought to give more complexity to Nafisatu Diallo’s situation but this is one idea that should have been one of her essays. Her fictionalized version potentially does moe harm than good.
Why is Kadiatou written like she doesn’t dream? Does she think that is what Nafisatou is? Again, why Kadiatou?
Omelogor
On the surface level, she should be a complex character. There should be a lot going on under the demeanor of a sure woman who is making her way up in the world. If anything, Omelogor has been herself for a long time. She has not changed, but evolved, refusing to take the roads that are not great for her identity no matter how tempting it is. She should be satisfied as she has steered herself down her own path, by herself. Yet, there are pockets of unhappiness and loneliness that her detractors capitalize on, which frankly, they should not be able to.
In the briefest of sumarries, Omelogor’s conflict comes from her refusal to engage in therapy.
Don’t pretend that you like your life.
These words from her aunt throw her off into the deep end where Omelogor starts to reflect on her life. She splays it out on a canvas.
We see that while she has not had a charmed life, she has been able to surround herself with the best of material things, good people, freedom to explore fun, joys and lovers. All of the criticisms from her parents bounce off her thick skin. But underneath all of that iron, is a girl who was cut with depression from when she was a child. And to would seem that trauma has broken something inside of her.
The death of Omelogor’s uncle Hezekiah has emptied of her something she keeps trying to fill; with work, with nice things, by doing so much good like giving grants to business women, even though the reason was to assuage her guilt for stealing so much. But she once told the man whom she could have loved that she was tainted. Omelogor has internalized her misery and it colors everything that she does.
Even as she goes abroad to study, Omelogor realizes that her view of the society there has been rose-colored and returns home to just sit with her own community and do stuff. She decides that she would take one day at a time and continue to live.
Chimamanda leaves us at the end to decide if Omelogor has a full life or not. That question posed at the beginning, “Do I like my life?” is answered at the end of Omelogor’s story.
I find that the end just leaves her surrendering and a little defeatist a far cry from the woman who seem so strong at the beginning of the novel. This contrast, is not bad at all. Life is quite complex and not everyone who has the tools to heal will use them to heal.
The problem with Omelogor’s dream count is that Chimamanda ultimately deploys Omelogor as a weapon against the people who have disagreed with her so much over the years. It was weird reading that monologue.
Discourse
Generally, Dream Count is decent novel. It works very well within its premise. When it comes to demosntrating the internal and external struggles of women as they dream and try to actualize their dreams. It gets an A+. When it tries to run a commentary on society. It is shaky. Comes off as very bitter.
There are so many times we get jarred out of the story for our characters to do a running commentary on society. Thus, Chimamanda’s Dream Count refuses to be cohesive. Because there is beautiful prose diluted by what is a tongue lashing of progressive American society. It obstructs the flow of the prose and at certain times, one wonders if they are reading the same book.
If this was a new writer on the block, we can blame it on beginner’s nerves. Mixing the stories of four women who have tenuous conections to each other is not easy at all. Writers often wait for a long time to find that link before they can deliver the story. However, this is Chimamanda with two and half decades of professional writing in her belt and I do not think it is wrong to expect better from her. To have had to approach this novel like a was to make several concessions.
My biggest problem with the novel is, ‘Why Kadiatou’s story?’
You can take out those 100+ pages and still have a powerful novel. Dream Count is more cohesive when we leave Kadiatou’s story aside. The author’s note reads like she is trying to justify why she shone a bright light on Nafisatu Diallo’s case from fourteen years ago.
All of these lead me to believe that, Dream Count was rushed to the press and that maybe the editors did not exercise their full abilities. Yes, there are strong thoughts in it but it is the strength of her star power that sells the book, not the writing itself.
Chimamanda’s Dream Count is mediocre-all right, tilting towards mediocre.
It is good read though. You should read it.
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