Review By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 4/5
The proximity to life is not felt every day; the robust routines pruned in the nonchalance deprive us of the longing to live. We breathe; every breath is conveniently playful till the rhythms incoherently settle in the pit of the stomach. Life now stands in rebellion to our imperviousness!
There is this brute ambition to covet life, bringing phantasm into reality causing a landslide of dreams. Life speaks the gobbledygook and we are still gnarled from inside; the halberd puts an end to our hauteur and we then become the actor manqué. Now we dream again of blooming springs and cascading waterslides, we dream of pellucid love in perpetuity, we dream of illicit forebodings, and many times the dreams are just of survival.
Do dreams become reality or employ a kind of sublime pointillism into reality to create heaven or hell?
“Dream Count” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a story about four women, disparate, yet full of dreams of not in similitude to moral savoir faire but of soi-distant idiosyncrasies meshed in self-deprecation & self-doubt. These four women find togetherness in cleaning up their sorrows, and in the process discover life by creating their own boundaries of survival.
Have we ever reckoned of what survival is? Is it an intrinsic ability to breathe? Or for that matter, if the past falls hard on the present, and gradually the ‘present’ becomes the ‘past’, the ‘future’ now thus looks like a liability and we are cocooned in the ‘survival mode’.
Does the pathology of survival come from the appendage of unrestored dreams?
Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer who lives in America. In the midst of the pandemic, she reminisces about her past lovers and the pejorative overtone of ‘love. Does she now look for an absolution from the betrayal or her own aberration seems flawed? She dreams to be loved not in conjunction with the idea of ‘love’ but how ‘love’ presents itself. Will Chiamaka look for a self-absorbing love or something parochial will fit into the ‘present’ giving way to her perfunctory ostinato to be non-judgmental?
Zikora is a successful lawyer and a best friend to Chiamaka. Getting pregnant out of the wedlock is like a blizzard blithe she must conquer. Among the hidebound, she gives birth to a baby boy, and if figurative pleonasms were not enough to cast her down, she gives in to the circumcision of her son in defiance. For Zikora, do her dreams turn into a masochistic luxury? If a wrong has been committed, does she take it as a mea culpa or characterize her experience as a possible edification? But, will all this change the abandonment scuffle she went through; if men could stop looking at women with a blithe comeuppance?
Kadiatou works as a housekeeper for Chiamaka and a cleaner in a prominent hotel in America. Determined to make this world a better place for her daughter, Binta, Kadiatou travels from Guinea to America but is ransacked of her sanctity and her spirit. What for? Is it for being a woman or for dreaming to reach the unfamiliar terrain? She is raped twice and something changes in her. The scurrilous investigations make her a soporific prisoner. She is called a shyster, and imperceptibly she finds her unexpected seethe turning into ingratiating plea to be free.
Omelogor is funny and brutally outspoken. She is outrageous enough to spoke the wheel with her deprecating take on men. She pirouette around called then desperadoes and counters their self-justifying exculpation. In fact she is parsimonious by their insolence, and to wrap it up she writes short blogs to make men aware of their ingenuity to treat women and their bodies. She does not bat an eyelid to ask men, “Where did they learn about sex first”? Her interest in pornography is out of the need to validate its occupation in the minds of people. She finds it cataclysmic, a corporeal breathing of bodies in the undercurrent of ‘cesspool of inequality’.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Dream Count’ is intuitively laid as a woman’s freedom from prescriptive to proscriptive. A woman has the right to find normalcy in her nude antagonism, and what if she feels settled to ride a storm of unexpected demurs; it’s not always the obedience to moral rectitude will ripen the harvest, unless one is ready to bite the rainfall.
Humorous and contemplative, the book touches the American sycophancy and the corrugated rendition of power. It slights at the provincialism of ‘Americans for Americans’. The contretemps among Chiamaka, Zikora and Omelogor is vibrant and so is the prevaricate response to life’s contrapuntal.
TAKE AWAY
To dream is to be subconsciously driven to reality!