Four Women and Adichie’s Feminine Utopia

The stories of the four women in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel, Dream Count, address an essential feminist question—what must a woman recognize in another and in herself to understand their shared conditions?—with a curiously tentative answer.

Written by Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju

Apr 6, 2025

Illustration by Sarah N. Kanu / THE REPUBLIC.

Whenever there is talk about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s much-anticipated return as a novelist, I remember that I was one of the sceptics who thought it would never happen. A friend of mine reminded me recently of how, in 2018, I pronounced to a small party of friends that Adichie had ‘exhausted her feminist concerns and could not write another novel.’ I don’t remember using those words, but I know I said it, the way one always knows things they would have said. That certitude of moral judgment, the implicit critique of brand feminism dished out in exacting language was certainly my style in 2018. Then came Dream Count, to prove me wrong on, well, many counts.

THE POETICS OF THE CARDINAL FOUR

Dream Count tells the story of four women. In using the cardinal four, it joins a tradition of writing that brings together four points of narrative into a meaningful whole—in literature, T. S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ and Wole Soyinka’s ‘Four Archetypes’ are prominent examples. Soyinka uses his four (male) archetypes—Joseph, Hamlet, Gulliver, Ulysses—as allusions to his experiences of imprisonment, wandering and isolation. Of the four, ‘Ulysses’, narrated in first-person, is the most lyrical rendering of the poet’s personal voice. An even closer model to Adichie’s female quartet, is Nina Simone’s song, ‘Four Women’. As her band plays the opening instrumentals in a 1965 live performance, Simone introduces the song in her characteristic hoarse and melancholic voice: ‘Four women… Each one with a different colour, each one with a different grade of hair and one them’s hair is like mine.’ Simone’s archetypes are Black women who have lived through the horrors of American slavery, survived it by different means. By highlighting the difference in their colours (as both skin and metaphor for being) and her personal affinity with at least one of the women, Simone offers a sharp commentary on the varied but familiar experience of Black womanhood, a commentary that Dream Count makes afresh for our current epoch.

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About the Author

Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju

is a doctoral student of Anthropology in the department of African and African Studies at Harvard University.

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