Bookstrapping: Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta in this week's Bookstrapping reviews Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's ‘Dream Count’. It is the story of four women held loosely together; each with varied experiences of love, never quite being able to understand what to make of it.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an author that uses the simplest of worlds to convey the most complex of feelings. Like the finest of writers, she offers words to express ‘feelings’ that women suppress regularly.
‘Dream Count’, her latest novel, is the story of four women held loosely together; each with varied experiences of love, never quite being able to understand what to make of it. The characters are, the travel writer Chiamaka who is also the lead narrator, her best friend Zikora, her cousin Omelogor and her maid Kadiatou. All of them come alive in Adichie's unique voice.
Their feelings are rightfully raw. For eg. the character Zikora, who is abandoned by her boyfriend after an unexpected pregnancy, confesses to Chiamaka " it's frightening when somebody you know just changes; completely changes. It is as if an artery burst inside him and his whole body is now wired differently and he is no longer the person he was!" How scary!
Here are our five #BookStrapping insights -
1. How do women feel when a man who has feelings for them, reveals that he’s married! “I felt ambushed, unfairly and ensnared in a guilt that was not of my own making," is how Chiamaka feels when a man declares that he is married, after a most passionate kiss. He adds that his wife was lovely but his marriage was stale. For a long time after this, Chiamaka could not bear to hear anybody describe bread as stale!
2. At the time of childbirth Zikora is told, "bring your feet up and let your legs fall apart." She wonders.. how can legs fall apart? The nurse looks at her with the resigned expression of a person who had seen all the forms of madness that overtook birthing women, lying on their backs with their bodies open to the world. Zikora could only hear her own frenzied laughter...even as she reasons that 'childbirth could not be this malicious, this gratuitously cruel!"
3. The maid Kadiatou has a theory about herself. That there was ‘a bone that birthed courage and she believed she didn’t have it; or if she had it then it was feeble, soft and chewable like biscuit bone.’ So when she receives attention from a man about town, Adichie writes ‘in the blaze of his attention she melted and she never stopped being astonished that he had chosen her!’ When he promises her that he would get the visa lottery, go to America and send for her, she believes him. To the extent that the last time she saw him, she did not know it was the last time she would she him at the time!
4. When Kadiatou is assaulted in a hotel room- newspapers call her an ‘unlikely choice’ for an assault. Specifically newspapers declare that ‘ the hotel maid does not look as one would’ve expected,’ and go on to say that ‘she must’ve agreed to have sex in exchange for the money.’ Adichie painfully asks, whether there are women good enough to be paid for sex but not good enough to be raped!
5. About the relationship between immigrants and America, Adichie has one of her characters saying “ America didn’t owe me restoration and yet I felt that if did, as if it had reneged on a promise it had never made!” Novels are never really about what they’re about. At least for this writer!
Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta is a columnist and bestselling biographer. She is credited with the internationally acclaimed Red Dot Experiment, a decadal six-nation study on how ‘culture impacts communication.’ Asia's first reading coach, you can find her on Instagram @OfficialReetaGupta.
