Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has gone too far

The narrative proposal of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria, 1977) stands out for moving away from the clichés about what contemporary African literature should be and avoiding what has been called pornography of poverty, a label the author has always treated with irony. Chimamanda Ngozi's protagonists are strong, independent, and well-positioned women who assert their right to be women in a chaotic world. And they have hopes, dreams, memories, and contradictions. This is the case with the four protagonists of her latest novel, The dream counter, a volume of almost 600 pages written over a decade—during which she has worked on memoirs, children's literature, feminist manifestos, and a public lecture on freedom of expression—and translated into Catalan by Anna Puente.

Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou are the four protagonists of a story that intertwines four lives of Nigerian women who, in one way or another, whether through ties of blood or friendship, end up converging in a single narrative universe. Setting the action in the recent past of the COVID pandemic—which merely serves as a backdrop—the author blends two main settings: the United States and Nigeria. While the writer Chiamaka lives alone in the United States (and only receives visits from her Guinean wife, Kadiatou, who raises her daughter alone), like her best friend, the lawyer Zikora, in the case of Omelogor—Chiaka's cousin—where she is located in corrupt Abuja. An icon of feminism and author of, among others, the essay Everyone should be a feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi manages to balance the touches of humor with the deep emotional burden of these four women: the social expectations that grip them (especially regarding marriage and motherhood), misogyny (exercised by both men and women), the bonds between mothers and daughters and between the world of women and men, and the complexities of pornography in relationships, physical complexes fueled by social networks, fibroids in the uterus, the pain of childbirth, abortion or perinatal grief). For the first time, the author also touches on new topics, such as drug trafficking in Abuja.

A saga of brotherhood and sisterhood

But both central themes ofThe dream counter They are the oldest in the world, those that work per se and are often understood as synonyms: the nature of love and the fleeting nature of happiness. The saga of brotherhood and sisterhood that this novel represents—and which distances itself from the observation of American customs from the point of view of immigrants in previous novels—makes Chimamanda Ngozi's literary work take a qualitative leap toward psychologism and introspection. The lives of these four self-contained women lead them on four journeys to the past to take stock of their lives. They all conclude that perhaps their childhood dreams haven't turned out the way they dreamed they did—largely due to the emergence of unsuitable men along their paths—but, nevertheless, they loudly claim that they have no regrets, that they are the way they are because of the sum of their experiences.

With incisive and informative writing, the author emphasizes the cursed atavistic search for romantic love, for the soul mate, typical of women of all times. Chiamaka writes travel literature but spends her days dreaming of finding a soul mate; Zikora lives to have a perfect family; Omelogor has constant doubts about love and runs an anonymous blog in which she offers advice to men, and Kadiatou has the trauma of a sexual assault that incapacitates her (here the author tells a true story from 2011: the case of Nafissatou Diallo and Dominique Strauss-Kahn). Maybe in The dream counter, where absolutely all men are rubbish (the protagonists count men like someone counting corpses), Chimamanda has gone too far, misunderstood feminism, and somewhat left aside the moral complexities and lack of prejudice that every good social novel should have, and that every good social novel should have; literarily galdoso.