Finding Kadiatou in Dream Count

At the heart of the essays on New Nigerian Poetry these last three years is the argument for action—and a consensus that something needs to be done. Ancci’s summative essay, “A Principle for the New Nigerian Poetry,” proves the most pragmatic of the lot. Yet even though it translates theory into practice, its proposed solution short-circuits: it is long-term, and thus vulnerable to the corruption of cynicism and bureaucracy. Had Oris Aigbokhaevbolo contributed to that debate, his thoughts might have been most effective, more immediate; he, at least, called the Sprinng MFA Orientation Webinar, a practical step, the most eloquent response to his summons on the death of Nigerian Literature. Ultimately, the poetry essays reveal, at the very least, a current of decay in Nigeria’s literature; the delicate, or even deferred, commitment of the aesthetics of Nigerian poetry to its society.

My oversimplification of the Nigerian Poetry argument raises questions. But the essays already written have answered most of those questions, whether obliquely or directly. This simplification is for good purpose, however, because it touches on what might be happening with the Nigerian novel.

The Nigerian/African novel could be defined in two ways. In his essay, “The False Crisis of African Literary Estrangement,” Tolu Daniel provides one side of a working definition: the Nigerian/African novel is one in which the writer “[rigorously] accounts for their inheritances, and [seriously] trouble the borders of nation, race, and history.” Writers within the framework of this definition are Teju Cole, NoViolet Bulawayo, Taiye Selasi. The three 2025 NLNG-shortlisted authors, Nikki May, Oyin Olugbile, and Chigozie Obioma, can also be included in this list.

The second working definition is the inverse of the first definition: the novel is one in which the writer does not account for their inheritances nor trouble the borders of nation, race, and history. For these writers, the question does not exist, and if it does, maybe only marginally so. So, while Tolu’s essay is intelligent, it is intelligent only partly and in a different direction. The essay, at least, points to the double function of the literature of Cole, Obioma and co—the kind of literature that does what Tolu says it does—but at the same time, the literature argues for the priority of its own method and of its own use. Implicitly, this double function—and the play of decentralising the other kind of literature by ignoring this conundrum, while simultaneously embracing the literature that comes from the fondness of western institutions—continuously defer attention by assuming combat where there is none.

Moreover, we know now that that double function deserves an interview or an interrogation. Does the novel fulfil its own rules, or is it merely posturing? What are the dynamics of representation in it? To what extent does its dual function undermine both its production and its reception? And of what is this double function symptomatic?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count is a novel that embodies this play of representation and multiple uses; “To trouble the borders of nation, race, and history,” while simultaneously doing the opposite—setting aspirational laws for itself, which it transgresses at best and ignores at worst. Also, in its undertaking to symbolically situate and synthesise fundamentally different characters, Dream Count fails precisely because of the model of the Nigerian/African fiction it religiously follows.

Things have significantly changed since Adichie’s Americanah. Although the same theme runs through it as with her other novels, female agency in Dream Count is explored differently. In Americanah, for instance, Ifemelu looks inward by looking outward. The male is not an abstract thing within society; Ifemelu encounters maleness in racial or economic contexts as persons. Her ability to withdraw from and go back into society becomes the basis through which she realises herself and challenges not just male dominance but the system that privileges maleness. In Dream Count, however, there is scarcely this privilege of withdrawal from and incursion into society by the female protagonists. The seclusion of the COVID-19 lockdown transforms how maleness is experienced. In consequence, the male is not someone whom the female characters meet within society; instead, he becomes more of a presence in the psyche that they constantly have to resist.

This form of resistance informs the kind of feminism we read in Dream Count. The novel shows the mockery of the female dominated by maleness, the immoral feminist but a feminist nonetheless, and the silliness of the female under patriarchy transgressing gender expectations. Zikora, Omelogor, and Chiamaka respectively share these functions in unequal measure. Although, there is much to value in Sanjena Sathian’s essay—Dream Count’s intellectual thinness, the one-note relationship to its thematic material of gender, and the political goal of Kadiatou’s character—there is also much to discard, which is most likely everything else in the essay. (If Sanjena’s ad-hominem is to be understood at all, we can understand it from the cultural context from which she writes).

Reviews have paid attention to the appearance of Kadiatou in Dream Count. These range from seeing Kadiatou as the “moral centre of the book,” through which Adichie “proves the seriousness of [the] novel’s intent,” to posing the question of “what purpose it serves for the novel to include Kadiatou’s wrenching survival alongside the tales of well-to-do women.”

It stands to reason that if Dream Count, for all its fidelity to Tolu’s model, will be marketed by the author herself as “quintessentially African at heart” and publicised in the country in that wise, that we must, in turn, trouble that quintessence. We must examine the method and quantity of its use. What kind of literature is it for different readers? Does it argue for its own priority—and, by extension, the corrosion of another kind of literature? And most importantly, what do we fail to see?

Kadiatou seems to me a suitable point of entry. She is a fictionalisation of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant working as a housekeeper at a New York hotel, who was sexually assaulted by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the then President of the IMF. Nafissatou is, of course, beyond “Guinean” and “immigrant”—words that become simple and clear the moment everybody begins to bandy them. A parallel construction of her in fiction should at least refuse to subscribe to these easy categories of “Guinean” and “immigrant,” rather than what is available in the public domain about Nafissatou Diallo. But Kadiatou does not become this character.

She is neither a character nor a person. She is a reference point for the wrongness of society, a political point. Kadiatou’s presence itself not only causes some novelistic problems; it robs the novel of the reader’s dilemma, that is: our need for a centre in order to understand, and our urge to resist the power of this centre and its dominant logic; our ability to believe contradictory views and our attempts to identify with those different views without being unsettled, just as if they were our own. To me, Adichie’s inability to write or “humanise” the character of Kadiatou stems from three notable and connected things. One is a misunderstanding of what the novel can do, while the other is an oversimplification of the difference, on one hand, between Nafissatou and Adichie, and, on the other, between Kadiatou and the three affluent Nigerian women, Zikora, Chiamaka, and Omelogor.

The Author’s Note outlines the function to which Adichie employs art in her approach to Kadiatou. There, she writes that art can function as a “gesture of returned dignity,” supposing that art could vindicate someone or something and, in turn, vilify someone or something else. In this case, the victim is Nafissatou, and every victim like her, to whom dignity is being returned; while the injurer is “the American justice system, France’s political trajectory, the media coverage of assault, the interplay of immigration and gender and race,” or simply, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. This division of victim/injurer, good/bad, the dignified/undignified, the hero/villain, not only transforms the network of characters in the text from dynamic entities to unintended static ones, corrupting the representation of Kadiatou, but it also becomes the basis for which the novel is termed “political.”

Every novel is, of course, political, but we become cynical if we realise that the author is as stationary as a political position. One reads an opinion piece in a newspaper, well aware that the writer argues from a certain perspective which we either conform to or contend with. However, a novel, and its goodness, relies on its continued audience of all ideological camps. Like a House-of-Representatives made up of journalists, politicians, anarchists, war apologists, religious fanatics, pastors, pubescents, high-school teachers, jugglers, etc. All of them, goodbad and badgood and all equally important. We love the novel precisely because everything in it, vice or virtue, is condoned. There is pleasure and play. In Dream Count, however, this is not so. The House has to be a courtroom. The novel has that judge-like, sentence-like seriousness. There is a victim to whom dignity must be returned. And there is an injurer who must become a public example.

The other contradiction seems to be an oversimplification of the difference between Adichie and Nafissatou, which in turn informs the failed attempt to correlate Kadiatou with Omelogor, Chiamaka, and Zikora. The creation of Kadiatou hangs on an almost impossible thread: “Although Nafissatou Diallo was unlike me in many ways,” Adichie writes in her Note, “she too was a West African woman living in America, and therefore familiar, intuitively knowable: sisterly feelings emerged.” Three pages later, Adichie comments: “… I do not know Nafissatou Diallo apart from what is in the public domain.” Contrasting these two statements, one conclusion, at least, seems reasonable: that it is possible to be familiar with and intuitively know a person only from what is in the public domain, and that the public domain indeed provides the information necessary to know a West African woman. Here, the argument seems apparent and even plausible that Kadiatou is modelled on an imprecise image—that she is a product of the public domain and the author’s use of it. Thus, because Kadiatou is borne committedly out of these necessities, her depth appears merely affective and superfluous, and necessarily, so is her dignity.

Had class been considered in Dream Count as a significant differential among women, specifically West African women; had feminism been understood as often only a kind of feminism when different kinds of women are involved, there would have been an entirely different and more nuanced Dream Count novel. Kadiatou would not be forced to borrow a centre stage in a story about other kinds of women. And Omeologor, Zikora, and Chiamaka would not be props in their own story. For the Nigerian reader, what this double function means, when not named so, is the assumption that female solidarity is a thing among West African women, that unity can be absolute between women in a patriarchal system. What this means for the novel is that, by trying to tell two stories as if it is just one (again, the double function), by conflating her female characters regardless of their essential differences, by performing African quintessence without rigorously disturbing it, Dream Count simply, conveniently postures. In other words, Kadiatou must be pure and gullible, and the well-to-do women must suffer the epiphany that is due to it.

When not conflated with Nafissatou—not just the person, but what her story represents in the public domain—Kadiatou stops being the book’s emotional centre. She recedes to her appropriate space as a minor character. She is one-directional before the sexual encounter, and the same afterwards. Before migration, as a girl and a woman in Guinea, she could only simplify complex concepts, shock being her default response: always perturbed, unable to understand events beyond simple binaries. She cannot accept her father’s death, let alone the condition of it. Transgression shocks her. And, while she knows what men do not know—the signs of a pregnancy, for example—she also knows men, yet she is always shocked by this old knowledge and can do nothing about it.

“Men lit up when they heard she was a widow. They would have lit up even if she had a revolting face . . . She served at the beachside restaurant, enduring their leers, knowing they saw her as an opportunity, because men were men.” Yet when the leery man, Francois, praises her at the door of a small room, “she flushed with excitement.” And when he pushes her against the table, Kadiatou is “surprised.” Years later, and now in America, when she finds out that her long, lost husband, Amadou, had had another child, “she felt betrayed . . . [but only] because he hadn’t told her.” A feeling soon to birth the “first slender shoots of her own autonomy,” even if that is all her entire autonomy in the story. Her life innocent, in anticipation of a crime against it; her vision ideal and uncontaminated for when “an evil djinn, not human, part ghost and part animal” would desecrate it.

Kadiatou’s agency at the end of the novel, a decision culminating from her dread and frustration, remains un-entered into. There are only two cruelly short and summarised versions told of Kadiatou’s decision: Binta’s summation in six lines, and Chiamaka’s hasty conclusion from that summary. “I wanted to savour this moment for just a little bit longer,” Chiamaka thought as Kadiatou and Binta hugged out of excited relief, “Kadiatou and Binta, these two thoroughly decent people, mother and daughter, sitting on a sofa holding hands, their faces bathed in light.”

Although here the story ends, our cynicism does not. That not only has Adichie missed the opportunity to explore the inconvenient terrain of female agency, specifically that of the West African woman, but also that the opportunity has not been considered at all from the onset. That we are complicit in the faux heroism of the novel that promises returned dignity to Kadiatou.

I suppose that Dream Count might seem to make Kadiatou’s story already rendered. Nevertheless, the story has not been touched at all. Put differently, the story that is told, a convenient one, is a story we are familiar with, available also in the public domain: man rapes woman, justice fights man, justice wins or promises to win. What is, however, inconvenient, what may be inappropriate on social media, is Kadiatou’s relieved happiness about the rape case, an event the novel doesn’t explore. Instead, Dream Count only performs around Kadiatou’s story a superfluous function for which the novel itself is not made, while obscuring the need for a literature that can, and the factors hindering the development of that other literature.♦

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