Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has never shied away from political themes. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, narrated by a 13-year-old girl, is set during a military dictatorship. The protagonist’s father is vocal against the government of the day and faces dire consequences as a result. The stakes are even higher in Half of a Yellow Sun, where an all-consuming narrative of love and familial strife unfolds against the backdrop of the Nigerian Civil War. Then came Americanah, ranked number 27 on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, and regarded by many as her magnum opus. The book casts an unflattering light on the American socio-political landscape through the eyes of its protagonist, a Nigerian immigrant woman, Ifemelu.
Political themes also feature prominently in her latest novel, Dream Count, after a 12-year hiatus from long-form fiction. A compendium of interconnected novellas, Dream Count is about love, dreams, and melancholy. In this book, we get a robust, intimate exploration of Adichie’s archetypes. Adichie’s female characters tend to exist oppositionally as feminists and foils. In Purple Hibiscus, it is Beatrice vs. Aunty Ifeoma; in Half of a Yellow Sun, it is Kainene vs. Olanna; and in Americanah, it is Ifemelu vs. Kosi.
In Dream Count, her female archetypes are close friends in their 40s, standing side by side in a character-driven narrative of love and loss. There is the almond-eyed Chiamaka, a travel writer and flâneuse, whose greatest longing is to be “known, truly known by another human being.” The novel is titled after Chiamaka’s exploration of the portion of her mind where her memories of lovers’ past are stowed away. She excavates and explores her dream count, a play on the term body count.
Another character is the deeply conservative and upwardly mobile corporate lawyer Zikora, who nurses sturdier dreams of family bliss. Her hope is shattered after being abandoned by her partner, Kwame, when she has their baby. Zikora’s narrative is a beautifully illustrated story of generational motherhood and picking up the pieces of one’s life when dealt unexpected blows.
Kadiatou, a woman of “contagious dignity,” is loosely based on the life of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean woman who was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then a French presidential hopeful, though the case was eventually dismissed—an attempt, as Adichie highlights in her author’s note, to write a wrong. Adichie wields her pen deftly in the rendering of Kadiatou; she does a stellar job of weaving the personal and political, fleshing her out and restoring the humanity stripped away by the harsh glare of the media scrutiny that came with her case. With this character, Adichie said she felt the “stirrings of protectiveness,” and it shows.
Finally, there is Omelogor, the self-assured, successful banker who is unmarried by choice- the most politically minded of the group. She runs a blog, For Men, where in a sarcastic, coddling tone, she advises men on how to be better partners to their women.
Omelogor is perhaps the novel’s most complex character: she is ill at ease at a sex party and skeptical of sex work as real work, yet has no qualms with casual sex. She has a crush on the fictional son of real-life civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), has a quote from Thomas Sankara framed on a wall in her bedroom, and is well-versed in the tenets of Marxism. She idolizes these famously anti-capitalist figures but is a staunch capitalist at home in the morass of the Nigerian banking system. She atones for this with her Robyn Hood grants, the money she pilfers from her corrupt bank and gives to low-income women to start businesses. There is a lot of narrative fodder to work with where Omelogor is concerned, but instead of exploring these contradictory complexities, Adichie chooses to use Omelogor as a way to write another wrong: her perceived problems with American academia.
After her breasts are smacked in bed by a younger lover, Omelogor begins to “flail for meaning.” She wants to get to the root cause of male sexual behavior by going to America to obtain a master’s degree in Cultural Studies, with a focus on pornography.
America breaks Omelogor. Omelogor “showered, awake, and alive with plans,” as her cousin Chiamaka notes, rose above the ennui of COVID-19 and deftly navigated the financial industry’s wanton sexism but is somehow inexplicably felled by the insufferable soapboxing of American academia. Unlike her predecessor, Ifemelu, who passes through the American tertiary landscape unscathed, Omelogor is reduced to a shadow of herself and left with a “stinging disenchantment.”
During a class interaction, Omelogor is accused of Islamophobia for pointing out religious extremism in parts of Nigeria’s northeast. This interaction rips open the scab of an unhealed wound: the murder of her uncle Hezekiah by religious extremists when she was younger. The exchange crystallizes Omelogor’s experience with American academia, which she perceives as “heedlessly drunk on its certainties.”
As far as Adichie is concerned, American universities have become increasingly unfamiliar, and she wants an end to the “cannibalistic ethos” she believes haunts them and the left as a whole. While her observations are valid, her writing appears to be a little too informed by personal trauma. The tone of Omelogor’s academic journey is redolent of Adichie’s controversial essay, It’s Obscene, published on her website in 2021. It was written following a social media firestorm where she was accused of transphobia. The narrative voice of Omelogor’s portion of Dream Count reads like an evisceration rather than a springboard for meaningful conversations.
Adichie’s battle for the soul of American academia is in good faith. With her professor father and university registrar mother, she grew up deeply enmeshed in academia, with the sprawling grounds of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka as her playground. She came to America in the late 90s and graduated from Eastern Connecticut State University with a degree in Communication and Political Science. She has a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University. If anyone knows a thing or two about American academia, it’s Adichie.
Her experiences provide a treasure trove of material for the observations Omelogor makes. American universities are far from perfect. Omelogor perceives a lack of rigor and accuses them of being “stuck in the miasma of always exploring” without concluding. Pedagogical shortcomings aside, these institutions have historically been centers for contentious issues, from the Vietnam War to the Gaza War.
Adichie has done well to identify some of the problems, but in doing so, she throws restraint to the wind with how she writes Omelogor. She dances with danger, specifically The Danger of a Single Story, ignoring her advice from her viral Ted Talk of the same name. She tars all of American academia with the same brush, with Omelogor accusing them all of “practicing the insensitivity of quiet evil,” leaving very little room, if any, for nuance.
In a time where people across the board are failing one of the great moral litmus tests of our time, American universities are serving as ground zero for important conversations around the Gaza war. The government is rounding up students who participated in the protests at Columbia University last year for daring to speak up against the atrocities happening in Gaza.
In an epoch as politically charged as this, criticizing what has become of free speech requires a deft approach. Adichie simply saying in a Guardian UK interview, “Cancel culture is bad. We should stop it. End of story,” or asserting during another interview that Postcolonial theory “is something that professors made up because they needed to get jobs,” is not going to cut it. Nuance matters now more than ever. It is important to approach conversations about American academia, free speech, and cancel culture with clarity, leaving no room for bad faith actors to latch on to her narrative to legitimize their hateful views.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the world’s most influential writers, and she has a responsibility to approach such matters with more depth and complexity. What she does with Omelogor is a noble effort. Omelogor is right to point out the hypocrisy of “perfect, righteous American liberals” who parrot trendy theories but are nowhere to be found when it matters. She almost succeeds in bringing the reader onto her side to support her views, but Adichie’s residual anger seeps through, causing Omelogor’s portion of the narrative, like that oft quoted line from Purple Hibiscus, to totter “like a grown man with the spindly legs of a child.”
Though Dream Count falters, it is a vital and timely book. Adichie is a master of her craft, and this book, despite its failings, ambitiously tackles themes of friendship, grief, death, sexuality, and ageing. With her signature stunning prose, Dream Count reaches the core of human longing and renders its characters through the lens of empathy and unbridled hope.
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