Book Review: Dream Count By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Margaret Aligbe
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
I enjoyed reading Dream Count by Chimanda Adichie. I made a couple of notes on social media, but I decided to put everything together into a post on my blog. The story is very detailed and enjoyable to read if you have the patience to flip the pages and take breaks to express those emotions as the story unfolds. I have written this like I am having an informal conversation with my friends about this book, and we are in our very Nigerian element of gisting. So i suggest you read this like in "Nigerian English".
Chia deserved better because Darnell was such a very annoying character. He reminds me of Syme in 1984. People who appear to be very involved - busy intellectuals—but have a tendency for wickedness, which they can justify with logic.
He clearly knew Chia was into him, but he was determined to exhaust her with pretense and big grammar.... ewww...body just dey pepper me as I dey read.
Also, it didn't help that she couldn't help herself with how she felt about him. It's the same way she was with the Korean boy. She is someone who loves love and has no shame holding back...in practice and the idea of it.
As I am reading about Chia's aggressive "NO" rejection letters from articles she submitted to travel magazines, my mind went back to the feeling that comes with receiving rejection letters that arrive early in the morning, especially on Mondays, which are the worst. But either way, it is a bad feeling. Getting mildly worded rejection letters early in the mornings or aggressively worded ones in the evenings before bed. One time, I received such rejection letters on Monday while sipping coffee at my home office desk, seated in front of my computer screen and reeling from an exhaustive weekend.... I just didn't know when I replied back to the email that "nobody deserves such bad news this early". I guess I got really tired of the back-to-back rejections with nothing as a small constructive detail as to why my application or submission was rejected.
But again, they don't owe me that. We all have our bad days ...the sender and the receiver.
When I say Darnell is the absolute worst with Chia....I know the red flags are screaming... ha!!! Who puts their partner on the spot like this? It pains me because she is very fragile with me and takes all the nonsense... Well, love can make you accept foolishness sometimes... in the past, in the present, or in the future. With his narcissistic behavior, he is taking free stuff from people. Chia was really enamored by this host's "intelligence"...well, it seemed she was coping. And how many of us...finally figured out what we should have said because an event happened in the present and we were struggling to process it...
At least Chia could smell Darnell's "perfomance". Complaining yet indulging in every bit of it.
Being in a bad relationship and avoiding anything that makes you want to leave..."no backbone".
Okay, I have something against this Darnell character. Darnell comes across as one of those stingy, uppity men who can talk logic just to defend their stinginess. Darnell is posturing about dirty wealth, but he is benefitting by and large from it. What's painful and more ironic is that Chia had the resources, but her cycle of influence was doing dangerous numbers on her self-esteem. Imagine people who may not have even experienced such a level of wealth in their lives or the love of a family like Chia had.
One tends to forget sometimes because, again, this is life.
Darnell, like his friends, had mouths on them and had such exaggerated self-confidence and self-importance that made them intimidating, but deep down, they were just not "IT".
People who act like they're better than everyone else...at "saving the world" and "setting things straight." Big grammar that solves nothing helps no one.
Rather, you are dealing with people who are eager to show how "intelligent" they sound existing in an echo chamber they have made great effort to curate for themselves. They can't have nice things for some kind of reason, and they are pained when others do...
See how Charlotte called Chia's travel self-indulgent but didn't think her own work could also be classified as "self-indulgent" despite being in academia...because being in academia is a more morally upright endeavor?! , Don't ask me, sha...I promise you..it's not that deep.
Chiamaka would have stayed with Chuka, but one could tell she was looking for something in relationships that even she herself could not define. Moving from Darell, a full-fledged self-absorbed narcissist who was with her for pity's sake, to a married man who used their "situationship" as an escape from his "stale" marriage, but he refuses to leave his wife. She chose them over Chuka, who was nothing but good to her and very proper.
I also have to add that Chia's mother is a whole character.
I understood Zikora's mother's side, especially when it concerned polygamy, but she was just a child. It shouldn't be that deep. Our African mothers sometimes push too hard because of pressures of society to act all "put together". Also, the mother should have chilled while she was in labour because she was no longer a baby and she was in serious pain. This was the last place to be saving face.
Silently dealing with pain is like the typical suffering and smiling. Trying not to be vulnerable because of what people will say, but you are being ripped apart. You might as well just scream....silence at this point is useless.
Thinking back, I am starting to see why Chia wanted to speak with Zikora rather than Omelogor when she was dealing with Darnell. The kind of mum Zikora had growing up had "caved" her into being very polite even in the worst times... she isn't someone who would scream outright like Omelogor. With a mum like that, you grow up to politely manage life and pain and discomfort "gracefully" as a "woman should".... The mum was letting her daughter carry the burden of dealing with a rival wife and raising her to be so uptight even at a young age. The good intentions of mothers are nearly unquestionable, but Zikora may have carried their baggage even as an adult.
Being in labour, but the mother still by her bedside whispering to her to "hold it together"...the woman still more bothered about what people would say than the pain her daughter was dealing with. Not like there were some laws or rules that said she couldn't shout.
Zikora is such a polite and very calm person. The kind of person that is likable but very slow at expressing discomfort and displeasure openly. It took Zikora giving birth for her to discover a softer side of her mother. It also took the baby to smooth things between her distant parents. Her father stayed true to his actions, and Zikora's mum didn't get over the betrayal. Like she taught Zikora to swallow too many things, she sucked up her husband, sticking to his new wife....angry but still saving face.
That was who Zikora became... a different version of her mother with those underlined traits. That's how she coped with 2 time wasters and kept checking the phone for Kwame instead of focusing on her own survival through childbirth. It's also obvious why Zikora couldn't stand Omelogor and was happy at her misery because deep down, she envied Omelogor's audacity to see things as they were despite Omelogor's imperfections... both existed in how she expressed herself. Zikora misunderstood it as pride sometimes.
Kwame is his parents' son. They would know about the pregnancy, but his mother was trying to make Zikora look bad, like she was trying to smear their son's perfect image and taint the "perfect life" he already had. A child outside wedlock? No way.
Her character is so lukewarm to me. One can't say she was really happy, the way she truly deserved, at any point in her life. It is more a sad story. With every progress she made, there was a tragedy somewhere ahead. She just had so much to deal with, and as much as she wanted the audacity of her Kate sister Binta, she wasn't going to be like that. She struggled so much to break out of the "good daughter" mold, but it made her life even more complicated.
Life is a journey, and I think we continue to explore and grow. Happiness is not a destination.
I just knew when I was reading Kadiatou's story, before I even saw this author's note, that the story sounded familiar. Reading this note at the end of the book, I see the similarities in the story even though it inspired the character.
Honorable mention of Ninth Mile Okpa....If you know, you know .This will be like those gigantic Ibilo-Igarra fried yam. Then there is satisfying pounded yam with ọrọ okoyo at some of those Makurdi garages for public transport , Nataco Lokoja fried fish and plantain....These foods are like indulgences tied to these places. No rivals.
Omelogor was my best character. She is someone confident in herself and her beliefs, but she was exhibiting overachievement as a way of escaping trauma. She mastered the "facade" of always being too logical and non-emotional, or should I say objective? She came across as very rude with no emotions. I dare say her behaviour was more of a trauma response.
I see why Chia and Zikora avoided her because her bid to always "straighten things out" or be the "truth teller" ruffled many feathers and brought some sort of violent and disruptive energy to spaces. Which, in retrospect, you have to ask if people really want to embrace the "hard truths" about situations or things or people. There is some comfort in the farmiliar. There is comfort in avoiding questions that would upend things already "working". As they say, if it is not broken, don't fix it.
Even in her postering and seemingly uppitty nature, her hands have been soiled with laundering money for the Nigerian elites. An act she played down while she exaggerated the weakness of others. Even in her bid to keep a staright face with her aunt who was pestering her about marriage and always acting like she had it together, she was a human being who still struggled with self-esteem (see how she told a man who was willing to love her, that she didn't deserve him). The need to always remind herself that "she liked her life" to prove this was true was also a problem. Playing to hard to love, understand and even sometimes, she could not allow herself enjoy simple things.
Thank you for reading. Leave your comments, and please don't forget to share to keep the conversation going.
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