Dream Count in the Doldrums

A few days after my trip to Scotland late last month, I went down with a strange and nasty Covid-like bug: coughing, nausea, weakness but no fever! I didn’t eat for three days and it has taken me two or three weeks to get my energy back. Even now my sinuses are clogged, I’ve still got painful neuralgia and I can’t even hear the timer on the cooker when it beeps – deafer than ever!

In doldrums like these I tend to seek consolation in a good book. And as it happened,

I had one! Thanks to our daughter's publishing contacts, I was lucky enough to get an early copy of Dream Count, the first novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for ten years. I’ve been a fan of Chimamanda since I heard her interviewed on Channel 4 News and read three of her earlier novels, Purple Hibiscus, Americanah and when I was in a mood to stomach it, Half of a Yellow Sun, her novel on the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War. Her books are peopled by characters widely different from each other in gender, age, class, education and nationality and tribe. But it is the variety of perspectives she shares from inside the minds of African women immigrants in the US that particularly impress me. And what first strikes me is that though they are all different from me as a white woman old enough to be their mother is how each of them feels like what Chimamanda calls ‘a fellow woman’.

In an interview  with her that I watched while reading the book, Adichie said something I have always instinctively believed but never quite been able to articulate. She suggests that because of the experiences with the way their bodies work, women can share a unique and precious bond which transcends race and nationality. The popularity of her books with women of all races suggests that she knows how to articulate that and make all sorts of often otherwise women feel 'seen'.

Dream Count features four women friends, a writer, a lawyer, a banker/ social entrepreneur and a housekeeper/chambermaid, all making lives for themselves in the US and with varying levels of success pursuing their dreams. Adichie explores their relationships to themselves, to each other, to their families and friends, to the men in their lives – and to their own and American cultures.  None of the women is perfect, their flaws in all these relationships are clear to see and, probably for that reason, they open the door to recognition of their humanity.

But the skill of Adichie is that she makes us gently aware not only of our common femaleness and humanity with her characters, but also our differences from them. As an educated white woman I became aware of the privileges I take for granted, my blindness to the power I hold just by being white, the assumptions I make about my safety, about my status, about the luxury of my moral and ethical positions.

I’ve read ‘Why I Stopped Talking to White People about Race’, but particularly through the eyes and characters of Omelogor and Kadiatou, Adichie has accessed my understanding on a different level. Not, I think because she is setting out from an ideological perspective but simply because she wants to tell her truth.

In the author’s note at the end of the book, she says:

The point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it. In all these forms of engagement, a kind of purity of purpose must prevail. It cannot be a gimmick, it must at some level be true. Only then can we reach reflection, illumination, and finally, hopefully, epiphany.

In the doldrums of virus, I’m grateful for this signpost to reflection, illumination and hopefully epiphany! Thank you again, Chimamanda!