The latest novel from the woman labelled one of Africa’s most influential literary voices was born from tragedy.
With twin boys soon turning one, Nigerian-American author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is very busy. But she is happy to make time to discuss her much-anticipated fourth novel Dream Count, about four women of African heritage whose lives in the US overlap.
Adichie grew up in Nigeria and, aged 19, moved to the US to study, little knowing she would become one of Africa’s most influential literary voices. “I was finishing the book last year when my twins were born by surrogate,” says Adichie, 47. (She and her husband, Nigerian doctor Ivara Esege, also have a 9-year-old daughter and the family split their time fairly evenly between Nigeria and the US.)
Adichie is direct, candid and self-assured – and the wry humour that punctuates Dream Count and 2013 novel Americanah is very much evident. She seems somewhat similar to the intelligent, self-possessed, blunt, belly-laughing character of Ifemelu in 2013′s Americanah. In that novel, a young Nigerian couple separate, each struggling to make a new life. Ifemelu attempts this in America. Straddling what Adichie calls “her two worlds” of America and Nigeria, Americanah highlights Ifemelu’s struggle to adjust to a very different culture, and how racism manifests in lazy stereotyping and micro-aggressions.
Adichie’s previous novels, Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) were well received, as was her short-story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). But Americanah made Adichie a major literary figure. It sold more than a million copies in the US alone and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2013. As The New Yorker later stated, Adichie became “regarded as one of the most vital and original novelists of her generation”.
She hasn’t been idle in the 12 years since Americanah. In 2014, she published a slim volume containing her long essay We Should All Be Feminists which, based on her TEDx talk, asks us to imagine a world beyond the limitations and definitions of gender roles.
That was followed in 2017 by Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, based on an email to a friend who had asked advice on raising a feminist daughter. And in 2023, Adichie released children’s book Mama’s Sleeping Scarf.
But no novels. Adichie explains that when she was pregnant 10 years ago, she experienced something like writer’s block, though she dislikes that term. “It felt like being shut out of myself. Fiction is the love of my life – the thing that gives me meaning – and I thought ‘what if I never write fiction again?’ It was a terrifying place to be because it was a place of helplessness.”
That “blocked” period ended not with her child’s birth, but with her parents’ deaths. In June 2020, Adichie’s father, James Nwoye Adichie, died. “That was the worst period of my life. Horrible. Overwhelming.” She wrote the short memoir Notes On Grief.
Nine months after his death, her mother, Grace Ifeoma Adichie, died. “That destroyed me.” Adichie felt unmoored, fearful, frightened by the finality, perpetually sad and angry. But out of this, she found she could write fiction again. The result, Dream Count, took more than three years to write. “I’m a much slower writer now. I think it’s age.” Self-doubt had also crept in in the long gap between novels.
She felt a certain amount of self pressure in attempting another book after the success of Americanah. “I didn’t feel I had to write a book that would do well. I felt I had to write a book that I would like.”
There is much to like in her first two novels. Purple Hibiscus – about a Nigerian teenage girl who grows up in an unstable home – won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book; Half of a Yellow Sun – about the 1960s Nigerian Civil War – was voted the best book to have won the Women’s Prize for Fiction during its first 25 years, and Americanah went stratospheric.
African overlap
Divided into four sections, Dream Count tells the story of four women – three Nigerian and one Guinean – living in America, whose lives overlap to varying degrees. Some parts are set in Africa. The bonds between the women bring light and warmth to the novel. We also get brief glimpses of each woman through her friends’ eyes.
Covid is on the periphery. “Covid affected us deeply, and looking back at one’s life during that time just felt natural,” Adichie says. The novel begins with travel writer Chiamaka’s friend Zikora telling her that “normal people spent [Covid] lockdown suffering anxiety while you were busy looking up your exes and reviewing your body count”. Chiamaka calls it “my dream count”.
Adichie has also combed through her past like that. “I think more about other possible lives I might have led,” she says. “What if I’d stayed on at medical school in Nigeria? What if I hadn’t moved to America? We make small choices that can completely change the shape our lives take. I’m almost addicted to nostalgia, so I find myself thinking about what I know will never be.”
Fiction allows her to create female characters who can perhaps change the shape of their lives. In Dream Count, Chiamaka is a kind, sweet person who sees the best in people. Her friends dislike her callous boyfriend. “I’m interested in the way people looking from the outside can see a woman shouldn’t be in a relationship, but the woman herself can’t see it.
“All my characters are me. I mean that seriously.” But there are, of course, differences. “I’m a dreamer like Chiamaka, but not as dreamy. I’m also quite practical. I think I’d say to her, ‘Get a grip, darling.’”
The second character, lawyer Zikora, is wronged by a man, and part of her “decayed into a bitterness which she imagines is wisdom”. The third character, Kadiatou, from a Guinean village, moves to the US with her daughter and becomes Chiamaka’s housekeeper. The fourth, Omelogor, is straight-up, abrupt and appears fearless. During her “short passion attacks”, men fall in love with her “while I glancingly dip in and out”. Omelogor, abandoning a thesis about pornography, starts writing a blog called For Men Only, not sparing her readers. For example: “Dear men, I understand that you don’t like abortion, but the best way to reduce abortion is to watch where your male bodily fluids go.”
I didn’t feel I had to write a book that would do well. I felt I had to write a book that I would like.
Many men behave badly in Dream Count. From Zikora’s point-of-view, “every woman has a story like this, where a man has lied to her or betrayed her and left her with consequences”. In the novel, this includes abandonment, emotional abuse and assault.
Adichie wants to humanise what she calls heavy topics by showing how such things affect people “rather than them being [only] theoretical. But also, I don’t want to be self-righteous or sanctimonious. For example, I think female genital mutilation is horrendous and needs to stop everywhere, but I also know some women are conditioned to accept it, saying ‘I need this’ [to be ‘marriageable’]. Contradictions interest me.”
The character of Kadiatou is inspired by the story of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant to the US. In 2011, she accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn – then the International Monetary Fund’s managing director – of sexual assault and attempted rape in a hotel room she’d entered to clean. Adichie applauded the US justice system for an arrest that wouldn’t have happened in Nigeria; she was angry when the case was dismissed because Diallo had been untruthful about some aspects of her past.
Adichie couldn’t stop thinking about Diallo, after watching her, and her West African mannerisms, in a TV interview. “Her daughter, she said, had told her, ‘Mom, promise me you will stop crying’. That anecdote broke me open and moved me and lingered in me for years.”
Her mother’s spirit
Dream Count is dedicated to her mother, Grace, who had six children, a degree in sociology and anthropology, and became the first woman to lead the administration of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as Registrar. “I didn’t consciously set out to write a book about my mother. But when I read back what I’d written, I very strongly felt the spirit of my mother – and realised how much of the book is about mothers and daughters.” She thinks her mother would have liked Kadiatou.
Adichie – whose work has been translated into 55 languages – has Igbo heritage. This ethnic group is found in Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Influenced by Igbo culture and its oral storytelling traditions, Adichie’s writing gives voices to Igbo people – and more widely to African people.
In her TED Talk The Danger of a Single Story – which has had nearly 39 million views – Adichie recalls moving to America and finding that her roommate “had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals”.
Adichie gives voices to African women and girls who would otherwise be underrepresented in African fiction. She bristles at having been described as “a central figure in postcolonial feminist literature”.
I’m actually kind of a hopeless romantic, but like to hide it behind sarcasm.
“I don’t at all like my work being described in those terms. I don’t want my novels to be an accumulation of themes. I want them to be novels of human beings and human things like love, desire, resentment. I want to be allowed to simply be a fiction writer.
“Obviously, I’m fiercely feminist – and my lenses are feminist – which simply means I believe in justice. Dream Count is more overtly about women than my other novels, so I can see how it will be labelled more feminist than the others.”
She has been considering a power dynamic. “I’ve met so many women whose lives have been stifled because of their experiences with men. I don’t want to be dismissive of how painful those things can be, but it would be wonderful if women no longer gave that power to men.”
Adichie notes that, of course, there are many good men, including her father, brothers and husband. She is determined to raise her twins to be good men.
Several of her characters feel lots of pressure – self-imposed, family-imposed or both – to marry and procreate before it’s too late. “I did get some [pressure] but I made it clear early on that I was a bit strange and odd, and that marriage wasn’t a priority for me, so I was mostly left alone.
“But for women of my generation in Nigeria, that pressure is a very present thing that I find deeply intrusive in women’s lives – and in some ways dangerous, because it doesn’t give them room to be who they really are. It can take up too much space in life – including thinking about this early in life – and can also force you to make poor choices because you want to get married, even if a man isn’t right for you.”
Americanah certainly contained a beautiful love story. “I’m actually kind of a hopeless romantic, but like to hide it behind sarcasm.” Dream Count, like Americanah, contemplates how you can love the wrong people – and want to love other people, but can’t. “I think most of us have experienced that. I’ve met wonderful people who I’ve wanted to like and just couldn’t.
“And sometimes you’re drawn to people you kind of know are arseholes. The human heart is a strange organ.”
Does she have an idea of what she will write next? “If there was something in the works, I wouldn’t tell you because I’m incredibly superstitious.”
I try another question: now that she has twins, how long until her next novel? “Twenty-five years, once they’ve graduated from university and left home,” she says, wryly. Hopefully, she’s joking. l
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie will appear by video link at the Auckland Writers Festival on Sunday, May 18.