‘Don’t call it a comeback,’ warned Indian critique, Sanjena Sathian, writing for Vulture – and she then went on and got ripped a second asshole by Chimamanda’s fans on X (twitter) for what she said the book is, which, to her, is not so great.
I disagree with Sathian. Dream Count is a comeback. And what a comeback!
From an Igbo tradition perspective it is symbolic of the galactic Ijele masquerade display. No two individuals when even standing together can hope to see the same flash of colors and mirrors.
I will start from the title: Dream Count, which begs to differ from its semantic counterpart, body count. While men use ‘body count’, the number of women they are able to have sex with to garnish their mostly sickened egos, women grievously count dashed dreams whenever they dare to hope for emotional stability from their men. When women gather, Chimamanda said in a prior outing, they discuss men. So when the four characters in this story present themselves it is what their men – and other men – do to them, or with them, that take obvious central plot stage.
Equally obvious, as a counter balance, is the deeper sisterhood of the four major female characters. From Lagos to Abuja to the United States of America each of them takes a section of the four sections in the book, and what we get actually are four books in one.
Chimamanda crafts these characters with the resonant perfectionism of a champion muse waking up from the proverbial long night. They are blunt, even lurid sometimes, their desires are sharp and defined, their heartbreaks drop with a loud plop and their agony often get breaks that define tortured feminism in a world where even the strongest bond of sisterhood is not enough to bring down toxic masculinity with punches delivered straight to the face.
It is all about the penis anyways, bottom line. Otherwise why can’t women gather and forget about men?
In this melee of convoluted existence of women experiencing other women while trying not to experience dream crushing men one thing stands out: once it is to do with men no woman ever gets all she desires.
Chiamaka the travel writer, Zikora the blunt lawyer, Omelogor the eat-the-rich banker and Kadiatu, Chiamaka’s Guinean house help all share from the same shrill and vocal canvas of disgruntled girl power: all men are bad. Men will stain your white, is the real world Lagos parlance for the sisterhood who have counted enough dashed dreams to bother sorting the grain from the grass anymore.
Chiamaka longs for a soul mate. Zikora desires the best of both worlds, a great career and a perfect family, because why not. Kadiatou yearns to escape rape and scorching widowhood in America. Omelogor craves intellectually driven redemption from depression. Chimamanda weaves a narrative web around these aspirations and their underwhelming outcomes with energy and creative drama. And she retains the writing talent with her trademark ebb and flow that endeared millions in Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah.
Social commentary is not mood, of course. And mood is not depth. Affection is a second hand emotion which can stand in for the real thing and is more favorable when taken away from men and handed to a daughter, like Kadiatu did. Lowest at the pecking order when we meet all four characters, Kadiatu comes off as more original, more invested in, the realest. Watch out for her, because Chimamanda drew Kadiatu’s ebb and flow from the true story of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant hotel worker who accused IMF head and French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss Kahn of sexual assault in 2011. Kadiatu achieves elevated emotional consciousness not because of men but in spite of them.
Dream Count attempts to reverse the weight of men’s impact in the lives of women who suffer men. The symbolic adaptation of masculine input into frustrated feminine manure wasted in a dystopian landscape of dashed dreams foreshadows the start of the novel, with the emerging paranoia associated with the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. People were tapping passcodes into ATM machines with teaspoons. Zoom was the new escape from isolation.
Yet even in this unusual space in time the penis proved hard to isolate from all the energetic feminine drama generated from the frustrating presence of men among women, without any man present. One has to dig deep and far, perhaps as far and deep as D H Lawrence, to find a presentation of heterosexual synthesis of intimacy as close to the surface of girl power demarketing as this.
But maybe it is not entirely girl power demarketing. Maybe it is just a reminder of Chimamanda’s principal altruism about the inadequacy of the single story seen in problematic linear progression to say anything that should be taken on face value. It is intentional. If not, how then did it not happen that the sisterhood could connect and disconnect the brotherhood.
In Dream Count sensual energy is both lure and catharsis of sexual frustration, that final indignity that millions of women suffer in silence mostly. Both aspiration and expectation draw their fuel from this sensual energy. So when Omelogor was suffering and enduring silently with quite remarkable feminine candor the maddening grunts of a pot-bellied boo and lover who was endowed with an incredibly small penis she couldn’t believe her ears when the man suddenly stopped and asked: ‘Am I hurting you?’ You need to get Dream Count the book to reference her response to the concerned boo. Lmao.
It took over a decade but Chimamanda is back. Dream Count reads like a giant, frustrated feminine scream at small penises that waste feminine manure, feminine time and feminine affection. Crickets that want to scream like eagles, they are at the same time irretrievably woven right into the very fabrics of feminine existence and all encompassing conversation. This impasse is only successfully addressed, if you like, by Kadiatu’s little pivot from the norm.
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