Knopf
Review by Walter Cummins
Three of the four women who figure in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi’s Dream Count are attractive, affluent, successful Nigerians—the wealthy travel-writer and hopeful novelist, Chiamaka, her lawyer best friend, Zikora, and her banker cousin, Omelogor. The fourth, Kadiatou, is very different, a poor Francophone Guinean, who functions as Chia’s friend and maid, happy to have a job as a hotel cleaner and happy to have a Washington apartment where he daughter, Binta, can attend an American high school. The Nigerians are multilingual, but Kadi is barely functional in English, which turns out to be one cause of what many would consider her downfall.
Kadi, beyond references to her presence, does not enter the heart of the novel until its middle, once the stories of Chiamaka and Zikora have been established, along with the dreams made possible by their education and affluence. The contrasts of their achievements with the limitations Kadi confronts are extreme. Yet despite the nature of the dreams realized and the status they confer, the lives of the Nigerian women remain unfulfilled at a core.
Omelogor grasps this truth: “I stared at the figures in my personal account, telling myself it really was mine and not a client’s, thrilled and dizzy, thinking of what I could now do for the people I loved, how I could reach out and touch dreams that just yesterday were too impossible to be dreamed. Yet money deceives in how much it cannot prevent, and in what it cannot protect you from.”
The novel sections devoted to each woman describe their dreams and their failures. Men lie at the heart of the disappointments. It begins with Chia, often described as exceptionally beautiful, who lives in a family mansion and travels the world in her quest to become a significant travel writer. Yet men dominate her because she clings to one after another in her dream of becoming a wife and mother. The novel’s opening section focuses on her submission to Darnell, an American college professor, whose former lover is exposed as cutting herself.
The final section, also focusing on her, reveals the story of Chia’s relationship with Luuk, a Dutch executive, tall and lean like the married Englishman she had been in love with. She and Luuk openly live together in Holland and Mexico and travel widely. Seen primarily through her eyes he is very appealing, the opposite of Darnell in his open affection. Yet in Holland Chia meets the son and former partner—Brechtje—Luuk has left. The term he uses to describe his reaction to their separation is “released”—“like being freed from a prison that is not so bad but still it is a prison.” Yet after he visits Brechtje and tells Chia she would not stop crying, Chia is upset and grasps an essential selfishness about Luuk.
Chia also reveals something about herself when she admits to Omelogor that she missed the opportunity to look up her former Swedish lover, Rolf, whom Omelogor calls a Nazi. Chia denies that but admits that she allowed him to be cruel and explains, “I’ve always known I allowed things I should not have allowed.”
Almost all of the men the women of the novel have been involved with are defective as partners, the majority fitting under the category of cruel. Another strong example is Kwame, who impregnated Zikora and then refused to reply to her messages and acknowledge their son after he is born. But the epitome of cruelty is the hotel guest who orally raped Kadi when she entered his seemingly empty hotel room to clean it. In the relationships of the three Nigerians, the men are complicit. Kadi is clearly a blatant victim of brutal violation.
The aftermath of that rape is the closest thing the novel has to a plot question with the many issues involved in a criminal prosecution and a court case. Disappointing as the novel’s other men are, they have not done anything illegal. The persona of the rapist and the specifics of the rape is based on the historical evidence of the hotel attack of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant cleaner, by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund. Adichie published an essay about the case in 2011 and an Author’s Note about her use of it in this novel, emphasizing the she never knew Nafissatou Diallo and invented the character of Kadi.
Although the case against Strauss-Kahn was dismissed, he was forced to drop his candidacy for the president of France. The novel ends with its focus on what happened to Kadi rather than her rapist, her relief that she will avoid a public trial. As with Diallo, her character has been attacked because of false statements she made regarding her appeal for political asylum, lies made at the urging of yet another man, Amadou, the one she considered her boyfriend, a petty criminal imprisoned in California for selling drugs, lies resulting from her linguistic limitations.
The novel ends with an irony. The three Nigerian women had education, looks, wealth, and professional power, while Kadi is poor and naïve, happy to be a maid. Yet she has a daughter who loves her, with Chia imagining mother and daughter “holding hands, their faces bathed in light.” Kadi alone realizes her dream.
