Greased with Complaints

In​ 2009 the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivered a TED talk called ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, which addressed the unflattering stereotype of Africans in Western media and literature – what she called a ‘single story’ of half-truths and ‘incomplete’ tales. Adichie’s account recalled Binyavanga Wainaina’s seminal essay ‘How to Write about Africa’, published a few years earlier in Granta, in which he noted the tendency of Western writers to ‘treat Africa as if it were one country’ and ‘adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I expected-so-much-tone’ intended to demonstrate an ‘impeccable’ liberalism.

Adichie discusses this liberal condescension in her TED talk. Her college roommate in the US ‘felt sorry for me even before she saw me’ and was surprised that she could use a cooker, owned a Mariah Carey CD instead of something more ‘tribal’ and spoke fluent English. Until the arrival of Adichie’s generation, it had seemed impossible to speak of or understand the ‘African novel’ outside the colonial experience. African writers were always said to be ‘writing back’, challenging the authority of the Western canon. In the second half of the 20th century, a coming of age story set in Lagos or Freetown would always have been seen by Western audiences as an allegory of a culture clash between Europe and Africa or a polemic against the legacy of colonialism. By the 2000s, this was beginning to change. African writers seemed to be more interested in writing novels that reflected their middle-class lives and concerns. Adichie grew up on a university campus: her father was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and her mother was its first female registrar. These writers didn’t ignore politics: Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, published in 2003, explores the relationship between a 15-year-old girl and her abusive father, a successful businessman, philanthropist and devout Catholic as well as an outspoken critic of the country’s military government whose political views endanger his family. At the start of the novel, he has just ‘flung his heavy missal across the room’, aiming at his son’s head but succeeding only in breaking ‘the figurines on the étagère’.

Adichie’s second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), is set during the Biafran War. Her parents were both Igbo and came from Biafra; Adichie herself was brought up in Enugu, the capital of the short-lived Republic of Biafra. The novel centres on Ugwu, a 13-year-old boy who leaves his village to work as a houseboy for Professor Odenigbo, who teaches maths:

He had never seen anything like the streets that appeared after they went past the university gates, streets so smooth and tarred that he itched to lay his cheek down on them. He would never be able to describe to his sister Anulika how the bungalows here were painted the colour of the sky and sat side by side like polite well-dressed men, how the hedges separating them were trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped with leaves.

The horrors of the Biafran War are thrown into sharper relief by the sight of Odenigbo’s home, where his revolutionary speeches, often recited to a group of sympathetic intellectuals, are burnished by the scholarly authority embodied in his large library with its high, ‘piercingly white’ ceilings and what Ugwu sees as its ‘alien furniture’. Both of these novels reject the ‘single story’ of Africa as a place of catastrophe, arguing that Africans are not defined by war, humanitarian disaster and domestic violence. Africans also own étagères and figurines; they drive cars, win awards and read books in tasteful libraries.

In their portrayal of a moneyed Nigerian elite, Adichie’s earlier books marry a European tradition of literary realism – she has named Balzac and Trollope as influences – with a distinctly Nigerian and Igbo sensibility. But in Dream Count, her first novel in twelve years, she is more rebellious, critiquing and often lampooning the literary and media establishments that have helped to make her a household name. It’s a work born of a writer’s inflated sense of her moral responsibility: its central preoccupation is the urgent need to fix things. It was written in the wake of the deaths of Adichie’s father in 2020 and her mother five months later (the novel is dedicated to her memory). A novelist might not be able to bring back the dead, but she can at least order the moral universe her characters inhabit.

Dream Count concerns the lives of four African women: Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou, the first three of whom are Nigerian and from the same upper-middle-class background as most of Adichie’s main characters. The women’s stories are told in four linked novellas, each named after its narrator, with a concluding chapter narrated by Chiamaka. In this final section, set during the Covid lockdown, the three Nigerian women hold a group call. Chiamaka, a travel writer and aspiring novelist based in Maryland, comes from a rich Nigerian family and is known to friends and relatives as ‘Milk Butter’ because she is spoiled and self-indulgent; Zikora is a pragmatic lawyer at a prestigious DC law firm who yearns to have a picture-perfect family; Omelogor is a brash investment banker in Abuja who launders money for Nigerian politicians and redistributes funds to poor women (she calls the scheme ‘Robyn Hood’). Omelogor and Chiamaka are cousins; Zikora is Chiamaka’s childhood best friend. The three are discussing a criminal case involving Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s Guinean housekeeper. Zikora has set up the call to give the others some new information on the case; Chiamaka instinctively feels it will not be ‘good news’.

Kadiatou had accused a French diplomat (referred to as ‘VIP’), a guest at the hotel where she previously worked as a maid, of assaulting her. The reader knows he is guilty, since the rape was described in an earlier chapter. English is Kadiatou’s second language; she lacks the legal resources of the accused and has struggled to navigate the proceedings. Zikora tells the others that ‘the charges will be dropped … They said she’s lied about too many things and they can’t trust her.’ Kadiatou had lied during her asylum interview after her partner, Amadou, told her that ‘we need a good story that will get you to America. You’re not lying. It’s just a story.’

Dressed as if for a funeral – ‘my dull black-grey dress felt right, sombre enough’ – Chiamaka drives to Kadiatou’s house and finds her sitting on a ‘well-worn chair’ with the impatient expression of someone who expects bad news. When Chiamaka tells her ‘they will dismiss the case. They’ve dropped it. They won’t go to court,’ Kadiatou is at first puzzled, but then smiles and makes ‘a sound that was neither crying nor laughter, a low-toned keening’. Her teenage daughter, Binta, tells Chiamaka that her mother ‘has been dreading the court case. She’s been praying that it won’t happen. She didn’t want to stand there and answer all these questions about her private life.’ Chiamaka had known of Kadiatou’s anxieties, but still encouraged her not to withdraw from the process. She looks at ‘the unfolding of Kadi, a woman becoming anew before my eyes. How in a moment despair was flung away.’

Kadiatou’s character was inspired by the case of Nafissatou Diallo, a maid at a New York hotel, who in May 2011 alleged that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, had assaulted and attempted to rape her when she came to clean his suite. It transpired that Diallo had lied on her asylum application and made irregular financial transactions. She was depicted in the media and by Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers as untrustworthy. In August 2011, the judge dismissed all charges against Strauss-Kahn after the district attorney’s office said that Diallo’s lies made it impossible to credit her evidence.

At the time, Adichie wrote an article condemning Diallo’s treatment by the press: ‘on television, Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer called her “evil or pathetic or both”. He repeated “she lied” and by saying it over and over again, as many commentators have done, turned it into an all-encompassing truth. She became nothing but a liar.’ Dream Count includes an author’s note that Adichie agreed to publish reluctantly, for legal reasons:

The creative impulse can be roused by the urge to right a wrong, no matter how obliquely. In this case, to ‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories. Nafissatou Diallo had accused a man so well-known and so floridly in the public eye that it was impossible to reduce him to a single thing: a man accused of assault. But she became, in the public imagination, the woman whose case against an important man was dropped because she was said to have lied. An ungenerous, undignified representation, incomplete and flattening.

Her response to this was to write a novel of what she calls ‘clear-eyed realism’ as a ‘gesture of returned dignity’. For Adichie, this means a ‘relentlessly human portrait’. She shows Kadiatou as an immigrant with ambitions of opening a restaurant, a lover of Nollywood movies, a great cook, a daughter and friend, and dramatises the assault. She becomes Diallo’s champion, speaking for her, just as Kadiatou’s decency is recognised only after it has been witnessed by Chiamaka.

Some of the central questions posed by the novel relate to justice: what form should it take, who should be responsible for its delivery, how do identity and class complicate efforts to achieve it? For Kadiatou, justice means going back to her normal life. For Chiamaka, it’s the recuperation of lost dignity through the courts. Kadiatou and Chiamaka’s divergent perspectives are at least in part a function of their class positions, and Adichie takes pains not to subordinate the reality of one character to the other: one strength of Dream Count is the way it acknowledges the often under-represented social tensions and dynamics between African migrants living in the West. But her desire to see justice done, to ‘right the balance of stories’, makes for a rather tepid novel. The image which closes Dream Count, of a saintly Kadiatou ‘bathed in light’, casts her as a martyr to a cause she hasn’t signed up to.

In​ 2012 Adichie gave a second TED talk, ‘We Should All Be Feminists’. It was sampled by Beyoncé the following year on her song ‘Flawless’, and later published as a book. The talk announced Adichie’s feminist credentials. But in the West at least, her position became more vexed following an interview with Channel 4 in 2017. Asked whether a trans woman was ‘any less of a woman’, Adichie replied that ‘trans women are trans women,’ adding: ‘if you’ve lived in the world as a man with privileges the world accords to men … it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman.’ She was accused of implying that trans women are not ‘real women’, a claim she has vigorously denied.

The picture in Nigeria, a deeply religious and conservative country, is more complicated. Same-sex relations can be punished with up to fourteen years in prison and even supporting LGBTQ+ causes carries a maximum sentence of ten years. One of Nigeria’s most prominent trans people, a social media personality called Bobrisky, was arrested last year and jailed for four months for ‘spraying’ naira (throwing banknotes into the air), a common practice that is technically illegal but rarely prosecuted. In Nigeria feminists are sometimes mockingly referred to as ‘Chimamanda’s children’, and Adichie is seen by certain sections of the population as a dissident advancing radical feminist ideas. I still remember the controversy caused by an essay she wrote in a Nigerian newspaper in 2014, around the time of the passing of the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act, describing her childhood friendship with a gay boy.

Adichie has to perform a balancing act between these different audiences. Whose standards should she be held to? And what makes a proper feminist? In a blog post, Omelogor describes a ‘famous academic feminist’: ‘She didn’t like women. She liked only the idea of women. She posted cryptic quotes about feminism that you were supposed to feel guilty about but not understand, and vaguely threatening conditions for how to be a feminist.’ Adichie’s argument is that feminists shouldn’t be wedded to dogma. ‘Ideology blocks different ways of seeing,’ she writes in her author’s note, ‘and art requires many eyes.’ Dream Count is a product of her more ambivalent African feminism. The novel is written entirely from the perspective of women,but their primary interest appears to be their relationships with men. Their desires are not all romantic or sexual, but they all betray a conflict between the women’s attempts to live on their own terms and the relationships that impede them.

Alone in her house during lockdown, Chiamaka tries to keep up with her self-care routine: ‘oil my thinning edges every day, drink eight tall glasses of water, jog on the treadmill, sleep long, luxurious hours, and pat rich serums on my skin’. She toys with writing ‘travel pieces from old unused notes’, in the hope that she might one day have ‘the heft I needed for a book’. But she grows increasingly introspective and begins to ‘sift through my life and give names to things long unnamed’. During one of their lockdown calls, Zikora tells Chiamaka that she has ‘found this really good online therapy site. But you wouldn’t need that, would you, Madam Milk Butter, because normal people spent lockdown suffering anxiety while you were busy looking up your exes and reviewing your body count.’ Chiamaka corrects her, saying that it’s her ‘dream count’. This becomes her way of describing the lovers who got away, the men who hurt her. It’s also a response to the novel’s central proposition, introduced early on, when Chiamaka discovers a ‘grey hair’ and is suddenly gripped by fear:

I’m growing old. I’m growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known. A rush of raw melancholy brought tears to my eyes. This is all there is, this fragile breathing in and out. Where have all the years gone, and have I made the most of life? But what is the final measure for making the most of life, and how would I know if I have?

She googles the men in her past, and grieves ‘what I did not even know to be true, that there was someone out there who had passed me by, who might not just have loved me but truly known me’. She begins by telling the story of her relationship with Darnell, the African American art history postdoc whose actions barely conceal an unacknowledged dislike and jealousy. He ignores her phone calls and messages for days on end, dismisses her as ‘hormonal’ and makes snide comments about her family: ‘You know Chia’s people probably sold my people?’ She goes with him to Paris and orders a mimosa one evening during dinner. ‘Don’t take her seriously,’ Darnell tells the waiter. ‘A mimosa is a vulgar drink. She’ll have the same as me.’ Back at the hotel, she tries to defend herself and he responds: ‘that’s some Ugly American shit right there.’

Then there’s the Englishman, a writer, the first in Chiamaka’s ‘tall thin white men phase’. Their romance brings humour to a novel that often portrays heterosexuality as a carnival of humiliation. But the Englishman is married, and delays telling Chiamaka because of his ‘barking mad’ fear of losing her. Despite this, and ‘a hesitation about him that might, in different circumstances, be read as weakness’, the two begin an affair. They sleep together for the first time at Chiamaka’s parents’ house in Buckinghamshire, on a ‘flowered bedspread’ in a bedroom that ‘reminded me of the year I failed my A levels, the year I lived there, mostly alone’. The sex is of the metaphysical variety: ‘It didn’t feel physical. It was a merging of those parts of us that dream, a full unmasking of two human beings.’ But he knows he must return to his long-suffering wife, an NHS nurse: ‘He got up and sat on the bed next to me. “Everything feels so precious,” he said quietly, and all became as it should be in the world.’

Zikora mocks Chiamaka’s ‘dream count’, but her story is also one of romantic frustration. At the start of her novella, she is in an ‘airless hospital’ room, preparing to give birth. Her only distraction is her phone, which she uses to text updates to Kwame, the baby’s father. She has no idea where he is. When she told him about the pregnancy, the boyishly charming Kwame, usually someone ‘who talked things through’, responded with a shrug and left her apartment. He ignored her calls and texts, then ‘sent back her apartment key by courier, in a clasp envelope, the lone piece of metal wrapped in plain white paper’. After she texts him to say that she has had a boy, he blocks her number.

At times Dream Count reads like a satire of men behaving terribly. Adichie’s determination to restore dignity and right wrongs doesn’t extend to relationships. It’s as though she is punishing the characters drawn to the most traditional versions of heterosexuality. Zikora is as driven in her romantic life as in her professional life. She is the kind of woman who has a plan: ‘She had always imagined her future in a vivid timeline – first a lucrative and prestigious job, then a splashy Catholic wedding, followed shortly by two children, or maybe three.’ She doesn’t get the idealised family she desires. All she has is her baby boy, Chidera, whose ‘tiny arms were raised high up in the air as though in salute to sleep’, and her mother’s words: ‘what blessing can be greater than this?’

Adichie also explores what a life without straight men might look like. Omelogor has an unconventional life (for a Nigerian woman). She has no husband or children and lives in Abuja in a mansion frequently visited by her gay best friend, Jide, and her close friend Hauwa, with whom there is a frisson of sexual tension, especially when the two attend a sex party.

But all of these women are in stark contrast to Kadiatou, who grew up in a village, sharing a room with several siblings. Her father died in a mining disaster. Kadiatou was close to her older sister, Binta, who wanted to get out of their village: ‘Binta was born dreaming, always talking of other places, other worlds, where girls went to school and clean water gushed from taps … you looked at Binta and wondered what she would become.’ But Binta couldn’t always shield them, and when the girls reached adolescence they were cut: ‘Kadiatou felt the metal’s warm touch and then the pressure against her skin before the exploding pain. She was shocked that she had been cut, so shocked she made no sound. Such painful pain. Her head felt like a whole waterfall trapped in a shell.’

At a beachside restaurant where she works as a cook, Kadiatou is raped by the owner, François. He assaults her in a storage room, leaving her with ‘shame, shame like hot water scalded through her. And shock. Shame and shock.’ She tells no one. But then, at the behest of Amadou, she tells her US asylum officer about a rape that didn’t happen. One rape becomes available for public scrutiny, capable of damaging the victim’s credibility; the other is ignored. The contrasting treatment of the two rapes shows the importance of the power, or lack of it, possessed by the teller of a story; the moral imperative in Dream Count is for those with power to tell the ‘right’ stories and undo the damage of the wrong ones.

Each woman’s story is distinct, but they all have an opinion on the stories of the others. When Zikora tells Chiamaka that Kwame has left her, Chiamaka sends her a piece Omelogor wrote for her blog, For Men Only. ‘Women know more about your bodies than you know about theirs,’ it begins. ‘You watch porn and you think women are always shaved smooth and women never have periods and pregnancy can be wished away.’ It ends: ‘Stop being fuzzy and go do your homework.’ The article irritates Zikora. ‘How absurd,’ she thinks, ‘to infantilise men like this.’

Omelogor has little time for Zikora. ‘In Chia’s mind we are a united trio, as though her separate intimacy with each of us has somehow tightly knitted all, a delusion I do not understand. How blind she is to Zikora’s venom, my darling Chia.’ For Zikora, Omelogor is only tolerable on the rare occasions when she agrees with Zikora’s feelings of romantic betrayal: she wants ‘a story of how I discovered on Facebook that a boyfriend was engaged, or of how a boyfriend took my money for a fake business deal, or suddenly stopped calling me after proposing marriage’. But when Omelogor says ‘I guess I’ve been lucky to be with mostly good men,’ Zikora scoffs: ‘who all hate porn, I’m sure.’ Omelogor puts Zikora’s anger down to the fact she wants to trade in ‘love-inflicted wounds’. These differences are not resolved and no character is granted moral authority.

Adichie​ is at her most biting when criticising what she regards as the parochialism of American higher education and parts of the media. Her bogeymen are Darnell’s friends, the kind of people ‘who believed they knew things. Their conversations were always greased with complaints; everything was “problematic”, even the things of which they approved. They were tribal, but anxiously so, always circling each other, watching each other, to sniff out a fault, a failing, a budding sabotage.’

In 2021, Adichie wrote an essay called ‘It Is Obscene’ about a conflict with two former students, which began when they accused her of transphobia. In the essay she describes a particular type of ‘young person’ found in elite universities and on social media:

People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who do not recognise that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy. People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponise’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused.

In Dream Count, Chiamaka is dismissed by Darnell’s friends, who tell her that ‘travel writing is a self-indulgent genre.’ When she mentions her family home in Maryland, they say that ‘there’s a violence to the wealthy buying homes that are only occupied for part of the year while there’s a housing crisis.’ After the man she is sleeping with slaps her breast, Omelogor decides to leave her investment banking job to study pornography in the US. She senses very early that her life is ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the students she meets. ‘Their quick exchange of looks when I said something, the apartness when we gathered in the coffee area, all tilted away from me as if repelled by rays I was unconsciously emitting.’ These students, Omelogor observes, are all younger than she is, the kind of people who preface every statement with ‘as a multiracial person’ and speak excitedly about foraging for mushrooms in the Catskills. They believe banking is ‘inherently flawed’ and accuse her of moving money for ‘murderous dictators’. Her only friends are a white South African and a conservative Nigerian-American whose catchphrase is ‘the problem is that liberals are not realistic.’ The students are followers of a ‘contemporary ideology’ that Adichie identifies in her author’s note, one that ‘seems not only incompatible with, but opposed to, art, by shying away from the all too human possibility of contradiction, and reaching answers before questions are asked, if questions are asked at all’.

Omelogor ‘had come to America hoping to find a part of me that was more noble and good; I came in search of repair.’ She thinks America is a place where she can ‘look up higher and be reminded of things I could believe again’, unlike Nigeria, where ‘money is at the heart of everything, absolutely everything.’ But America disappoints; it is a set of rules she cannot live up to: ‘If you don’t know blah blah blah about Bangladesh then you’re not a feminist, if you don’t liberate this and that then you’re no feminist.’

Dream Count intervenes in a polarised discourse, though the arrests and deportations of students at American universities make Adichie’s complaints seem less urgent. The novel documents the loss of vitality in the country that launched her career. But Darnell’s friends and Omelogor’s fellow students are not so different from the college roommate Adichie described in her talk more than a decade ago. ‘You Americans need to climb out of your cribs,’ Omelogor writes on her blog. ‘You think the world is American; you don’t realise that only America is American. To be so provincial and not even know that you are.’