Rarely does an Author’s Note garner significant publicity in the reception of a novel, but that is the case with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, because Kadiatou, the simple housekeeper and emotional center of this timely chronicle of women’s troubles, is inspired by a real person. In 2011, Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean woman working as a hotel maid in New York City, accused one of the most powerful men in the world of rape. That man was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund and a French presidential hopeful. Diallo said he forcibly, and without her consent, performed oral sex on her in a hotel room. The case garnered international headlines. Then it was dropped and the criminal charges dismissed. The American prosecutors said that, because of inconsistencies in her application for asylum (which predated and was unrelated to the case), Diallo lacked credibility. In her poignant Author’s Note, Adichie describes her fictionalization as an effort to “‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories,” a “gesture of returned dignity.”
Adichie dramatizes that legal case in breathless detail, charting her Kadiatou’s apprehension amidst the chaos and public vitriol. Like Diallo, Kadiatou is Guinean. And like Diallo, Kadiatou is tagged a “liar.” The media declares her claims unlikely, due to her status as a “hotel maid.” That, the designation of irrelevance, is where Adichie differs sharply. She draws Kadiatou to life in small, affecting shades: she loves to cook, is content with honest menial work as a hotel worker, and adores her older sister. She moves in quiet fortitude, a Guinean Fula woman in America, her unremarkable home in Washington a refuge because she pays the rent herself. She is taciturn and single-minded and sated by little. And she dreams, modest, tentative dreams, of opening a restaurant someday, of a full life for her daughter and a future with her partner.
Kadiatou gets a past, too. Happily cocooned in an ordinary life in Guinea, her world upends when her father dies in a mining accident. Later, she endures an unhappy marriage and a miscarriage. When she is sexually assaulted for the first time, it is by her boss, during a waitressing stint. An old flame returns and whisks her and her young daughter off to America, where she settles into newfound autonomy. Her peace ruptures when she is assaulted again, this time by the prominent international figure. In the ensuing whirlwind, her character unfurls like a fledgling thrust into harsh light. Mired in a battle she does not want to fight, leagues away from her small, uncluttered reality, she has only one hope: to not to be deported.
Adichie’s three previous celebrated novels — Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah — each explore hope and fate from her own middleclass lens and relative privilege. Unlike them, however, Dream Count is devoid of the firmness of plot, a significant enough shift for an author known for her command of it. Adichie relies instead on character to pull the story through.
Kadiatou is the first major working-class female character she has written in a novel, yet Kadiatou is not as much of a departure, as her characters run the gamut of social classes, and each one, main or minor, is rounded. Kadiatou finds kin in Ugwu in Half of a Yellow Sun, who, like her, comes from lack and is the emotional centre of his own novel. By making a working-class woman — and a Guinean, not a Nigerian — the emotional centre, Adichie maps womanhood across class concerns. This is notable as Kadiatou is also her first major non-Nigerian African character.
If Kadiatou’s sole hope is to not be deported, the three other main women of Dream Count have classic Rich People Problems. Chiamaka, Omelogor, and Zikora are the kind of women we have seen before: beautiful, upper-class — lives that gleam with the sheen of privilege and success, a cream hardly untouched by the media, whose arcs of glamour and failed love have long been fodder for escapist diets as well as that fervid Nigerian shadenfreude, but whose inner-workings remain curiously banal or unknown.
The novel begins in the perspective of travel writer Chiamaka, isolated alone in America through the COVID-19 lockdown. As uncertainty bears down, she conducts a “dream count” — a flip of the term “body count” — sifting through past lovers, mourning unsuccessful relationships, and the possibility that she might never truly be known to another person, a dilemma her cousin Omelogor later reduces — perhaps aptly, depending on your propensity for romantic idealism — to “looking for a heterosexual man who will study you like a textbook.”
Encased in privilege, she entertains a near-delusive idea of love: to be known, a peculiar yet heartbreakingly familiar notion. For someone so effete, she is astoundingly, delightfully resolute in this. Predictably, it makes for a lack of luck. She leaves a toxic relationship with a pretentious Black American professor named Darnell, enters an unfulfilling one with a successful Igbo man named Chuka (a storyline edited into the New Yorker short story “Chuka”), before flitting through a trail of White men, one of whom is a married Englishman whom she believes might have been the great love of her life.
Chiamaka’s best friend Zikora — a woman who ranks her professional success behind her inability to acquire a marriage proposal and have children (in that order) — is, sadly, more recognizable. (But that is not because she appears in the Amazon short story “Zikora.”) A corporate lawyer who soldiers through crass and disappointing men to secure the “time-bound dream” of a family of her own, she despairs when she crosses the acceptable threshold of age 30. To see Zikora’s brand of frantic want rendered in stark literary focus is perturbing, this crux of modern Nigerian womanhood in all its stilted glory.
Time stands as her great adversary, and she careens within its limits. She suffers through men she terms “thieves of time,” two of whom string her along with murky intentions and a third who promptly leaves her when she reveals her pregnancy. Her openness curdles into hurt resentment. Her anxiety roils everywhere, also, from her fraught relationship with her seemingly obdurate mother, to her implacable Catholic faith in which she seeks solace as much as portent, and her friction with Omelogor, who stands as something of a foil to her inherent insecurities.
If Chiamaka and Zikora are archetypal Nigerian women, then Omelogor subverts them as models. A successful banker living in Nigeria, who has attained wealth of her own, however morally skewed, Omelogor consists of ideals, of independence and identity, her life lit with dinner parties and contentment, ambition and sexual freedom, and unrestrained agency. Unencumbered by desire for marriage and children, she is routinely pursued by men mystified by her self-possession. In America, she seeks to temper her moral failings and enrolls in graduate school to study pornography (it is unclear how she ultimately seeks to utilize this knowledge), but her classmates do not take kindly to her philosophies, and she in turn antagonizes what she considers the country’s base, loveless ideologies. She even starts a blog called For Men Only, sarcastically doling out relationship advice to men.
For Dream Count’s four protagonists, as is the case with Adichie’s previous heroines in Americanah and The Thing Around Your Neck, America stands as mediator and regulator of their African ideals. Longtime residents Chiamaka and Zikora embrace a measure of American idiosyncrasy, but Omelogor is averse to it. Severed from the choices of the other three women, Kadiatou’s devoutness and cultural habitude persist into her immigrant life.
Chiamaka, Zikora, and Omelogor are incensed at Kadiatou’s assault and treatment in the media. Nestled in means, they are oblivious to her instinctual fear, that she is more shaken by the stress she has inadvertently caused her hotel manager employer. Hers is a vulnerable ordinariness, without power that could afford outrage.
Women’s vulnerabilities populate Dream Count. The anxiety of new motherhood. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder. The stifling pressure of coasting marriageability without success, perhaps universal but particularly unforgivable in African societies. There is pain in spades. Zikora’s excruciating labor is depicted in stark, grotesque detail, Kadiatou’s sexual assault unblinking in account. In this book, many men are a contingent of contemptible wrongdoers, sometimes as caricaturish as they are startlingly true to life. Sometimes good, but not good enough.
Adichie demonstrates her elegant, unmatched grasp of language, that surreal ability to animate often unnamable pockets of feeling and emotion into being. It is graceful and enthralling prose, varnished with thought and detail, the work of a masterful storyteller. Adapting to each woman’s point-of-view, she peppers their perspectives with brilliantly apt and tart observations of human behaviour and change under circumstances, her lens on sex and sexual desire coated in wry wit.
Yet there is some underlying didacticism here, a near-encroachment of Adichie’s famous weighty orator’s voice: on contemporary beauty ideals, in a relentlessly trenchant take on pornography, on Nigerian avarice, and, most often, America’s cultural high-handedness. It is a moralistic impulse consequent, perhaps, of her unique celebrity. It is also writing alight with a streak of cynicism, as much of the novel is bleak, a world cast in a frightful, unflattering light, even as beams of hopefulness spear though, in mended relationships and nascent self-realizations, in friendship, family, and new beginnings.
As the Nigerian reader closes Dream Count pondering the Author’s Note about Nafissatou Diallo, she is impelled to look at the news cycle coinciding with the book’s release: the allegation of sexual harassment that Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan just made against the Senate President Godswill Akpabio. Unlike both Diallo and Adichie’s Kadiatou, Akpoti-Uduaghan is a powerful woman, but, in an ugly parallel that has shocked the country, she was suspended from the Senate and labelled a “liar” without due investigation.
Between a contemporary Nigeria where women are not accorded equality before the law and an America where women’s rights are being stripped away, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count lands then in urgent, prescient fashion. As with her TEDx Talk “We Should All Be Feminists” previewing and helping accelerate the rise in popular feminism, as with Americanah arriving with the rise of Black Lives Matter, Adichie has always been a timely voice. ♦
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- Dream Count (2025)
- We Should All Be Feminists: A Guided Journal (2022)
- Notes on Grief (2021)
- Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions (2017)
- We Should All Be Feminists (2014)
- Americanah (2013)
- The Thing Around Your Neck (2009)
- Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)
- Purple Hibiscus (2003)
- The 3-Novel Collection: Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Purple Hibiscus
- The Full 6-Book Ankara Collection from Narrative Landscape Press
