Against the backdrop of a plot so painfully littered with disappointments is the glimmer of hope offered by Adichie’s vision of female solidarity, the emergence of a feminine utopia. The friendship between the four women remains fail-safe in the face of each of their failed dreams, it is the thing that guarantees their individual survivals, the only ideal that Adichie does not let shatter. It is in the sustenance of this vision, beautifully unrealistic as it might seem, that Adichie’s superpower as a consummate storyteller shines through. She weaves each woman into the lives of the others such that each novella about one of them is really a story about all of them.  

Through Kadiatou, the most different of the four, we see quite vividly how the narrative of feminine affinity is most delicately strewn together. In reality, there is so much that separates Kadiatou’s life from the others—her economic status, her non-fluency in English, her religious and sociopolitical background. It would have been more likely that Kadiatou worked for those women and found little in common with them. Yet Adichie bridges this gap by creating zones of commonality upon which solidarity can be built, narrating this possibility of affinity in the minutest details of the text. A pointed example of this is when Chiamaka mentions her fibroids to Kadiatou and the latter repeats the words with ‘a strangled tone’. We later learn that Kadiatou’s sister had suffered and died from complications related to fibroids, so when Chia tells Kadiatou of her own struggles, Kadiatou recoils in recognition of what is at stake. 

A belaboured grouse with Adichie pertains to her seeming shift from ‘an acclaimed postcolonial novelist to pop-public intellectual’, marked by her partnerships with Beyonce and Dior. Dream Count is, however, not the novel that proves this point. Instead, the stories of the four women offer a tentative answer to a question that could form a strong basis for feminist solidarities: what must a woman recognize in another and in herself to understand their shared conditions? Dream Count offers detailed and interwoven portraits of women’s bodies—the passion, the blood, the fibroids, the labour, the postpartum. It also details experiences of what it means to be embodied as women in a patriarchal world—the love, the sadness, the rage, the ways men claim ownership over women’s bodies, the ways they take and discard, the ways women fight every day to reclaim the body. The novel starts with the body but only as a rallying call to make a broader point about the very shared human experience of yearning that the body is ultimately only a canvas for. Just as Chia gently clarifies, ‘it’s not body count, it’s dream count’. 

A more useful critique of this novel, then, is perhaps the author’s refusal to follow through in narration, on its more humanist premise. Almost surgically, Adichie excises the woman condition from the human condition as if to insist that the one is invalidated or at least corrupted by the other. On the one hand, Dream Count is heavily narrated around men, and on the other, the men that are narrated are generally silhouettes: fleeting, disappearing, and inarticulate. It is clear from early into the text that Adichie avoids exploring her male characters’ rationalities. As a consequence, it forecloses many narrative possibilities that might have let the author comment more holistically on the humanness of love and desire: the constant tension between yearning and inadequacy, the traumas that clutch themselves to desire, the cruel facticity of unrequited love. In the same breath that the novel moves its reader to mourn with Zikora for Kwame’s disappearance and betrayal, it refuses to offer a requiem for Chuka’s dreams when Chia leaves him. Chuka, the most responsible of Chia’s boyfriends, who wanted to commit to marriage from the beginning and meant what he said, whose broody silence was not dismissiveness but introspection, who came to understand Chia closely because he was attentive to her.  

‘Chuka is not Kwame,’ says Zikora’s mother in her aged wisdom, ‘No other man is responsible for what Kwame did than Kwame.’ But the point here is not about the difference between Chuka and Kwame as metaphors for good and bad men. The broader critique is that characters, good and bad, have an important role to play in the repleteness of narration—especially for a storyteller who once compellingly highlighted the danger of a single story. A book like Dream Count had the potential to comment more effectively on the messy terrain of intimacy and its gendered fallouts but it chose a narrative voice that intentionally writes off what might have been some of its most compelling characters⎈