Dream Count

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“How can she want me to write about war in Sudan? War in Sudan!” Chuka said nothing. “I mean, don’t you see?” I asked, desperate to make him understand. “I want to write light, funny takes on travel, and to her I’m just an African who should write about struggles.”

“The problem is that many of these White people don’t think we also dream,” he said.

Zikora felt cheered by this news, by the sense that misery was now being evenly spread. Omelogor crying? Omelogor could cry? Whatever America had done to her, God bless America.

Zikora never told the boy who didn’t love her, the boy she was trying to make love her when she didn’t yet know that you cannot nice your way into being loved. He was her first lover.

He often said, “I don’t do commitment,” with a rhythm in his voice, as though miming a rap song, but she didn’t hear what he said; she heard what she wanted to hear: he hadn’t done commitment yet. From the beginning, she was of no real consequence to him.

“Men say all kinds of things. It is what they do that matters.” Zikora said nothing, feeling a little stunned. Her mother was becoming a person before her eyes.

“Chuka is not Kwame. No other man is responsible for what Kwame did than Kwame.”

Binta was her sunlight child and Mama’s heart had died with her.

by morning he was dead, already stiffening on the mattress next to her. A ghoulish blank-eyed doll lay next to her, and all she wanted was her son.

Men lit up when they heard she was a widow. They would have lit up even if she had a revolting face. She was a widow and a widow walked trailing behind her the scent of defenseless availability. She served at the beachside restaurant, enduring their leers, knowing they saw her as an opportunity, because men were men.

He would never notice her, of course, not like that. She wished it but she did not dream it, because she dreamed only of achievable things.

Her legs were trembling but she stared at him, right in the eye, to make him know that she saw him, she saw that he was a monster and not a man. He did not deserve to be a human being. His heart was full of dead leaves.

She hoped she had not heard what she heard.

With all his knowledge, he lacked the wisdom of knowing that curses were real.

She screamed and shouted at Amadou. It was unusual for her because she existed best in a low key, but she shouted to show him the roaring nature of her hurt.

she saw, too, slowly unfolding, the first slender shoots of her own autonomy.

They were Nigerians, Kadiatou could tell, from their glaze of self-assurance, and the mother’s expensive wig,

Africans who could afford to stay in this hotel made her proud, and they were nearly always Nigerians.

The daughter’s name was Chiamaka

Kadiatou had never felt so flattered, to be thought of as a person who could read.

Chia said Zikora knew somebody who could help,

they made her feel sorry for being the cause of their pity, a pity that was not in any way useful to her.

Kadiatou was mystified. Why would a guest just destroy a hotel room? “White people are strange,” Lin said. “The Black rich ones don’t do it, the Asian rich ones don’t do it, the Hispanic rich

ones don’t do it; only the White rich ones. They’re bored, so they destroy.”

She had come to understand that dishonesty had its shades, its layers, its twists and knots.

Kadiatou did not understand and she wanted to understand.

Omelogor said. “I was reading about incarceration the other day. Black and White Americans use marijuana at the same rates but Black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for it.”

Chia would leave him soon, she had not found what she was looking for,

and she didn’t know she never would, because it simply did not exist. Kadiatou wished Chia would descend from her cloud and get married; a baby would ground her, calm her restlessness.

There was a hint of instability in Omelogor, as if she might think herself to madness one day.

“Yes, what do you want to do with your life if you could choose anything?” Kadiatou thought this question the kind of thing only idle people could conceive.

“Do you feel any pain?” “No.” This time she says no because it is not pain, it is a desecration, and it cannot be healed. Another wave of anger courses through her.

The detective talks to her as if she is somebody. This is the best kind of American, a simple, wise, and hardworking man; she can tell that he sees people as people.

His tears repulsed her. He was supposed to be

stoic, like a proper Fula man. Later, he comforted her, telling her everything would be okay, and shouting about that bastard old White man, that waste of a human being, but by then his crying had already left a residue of resentment.

to think he drove from D.C. dressed up like that just to meet her. It felt to her like a waste of an outfit.

“In America, justice is money.

Kadiatou found the woman difficult to understand, as if each word was smudged before being spoken.

After the father of her son abandoned her, a part of Zikora decayed into a bitterness which she imagines is wisdom.

She relates with women only through the pain caused them by men. That I do not trade in stories of my love-inflicted wounds is my unforgivable failing.

“Look, you have to understand that lying and deceiving are not moral issues in everyday life here, they are just tools, survival tools. Compunction is not even an option, because you would need to think of these issues first as moral. And many of our people just don’t. When Nigerians talk of moral issues they really mean sex, and some of the more high-minded mean corruption. But there’s a kind of amorality in everyday hypocrisies and pretenses, because they are just survival tools.

If I were him, the director closest to CEO, I would resent my young and nimble hunger, my eagerness, the bright scarlet letter of my stark ambition.

In just a few years, I had learned to paint fraud in pretty colors.

Arrogance in women has the possibility of excitement, because it is subversive, but in men it is always reactionary and therefore boring, especially arrogance of the chivalrous kind, that noblesse oblige of the stronger sex. He had a demeanor that said, “I’m a gift to the world,” and it grated.

A woman called Eve said, “That’s right-wing!” Everything she disagreed with she called right-wing, and to call it right-wing was to punctuate it with a full stop. Case closed.

A young man with olive skin often said “as a multiracial person” before making his point. I did not know what races he meant, and I was curious to know, but to ask would of course be wrong. He was the star of the class,

Perfect righteous American liberals. As long as you board their ideology train, your evilness will be overlooked. Champion an approved cause and you win the right to be cruel.

Brilliant.

Misery always had seemed a big dramatic emotion, but I knew now that it was small and slow-dripping, a shallow submerging that felt eternal.

“Race is a construct,” said a badge on someone’s shirt, and I pointed at it and derisively asked, “So how do sickle cell and cystic fibrosis know who to afflict?”

Of course I knew the meaning, that race is not an idea set in stone, and is always about the social setting, as one person in America might be called Black but in Brazil or South Africa be called a different race. When I asked, “So how do sickle cell and cystic fibrosis know who to afflict?” I added, “It’s not enough. Don’t just say that and be smug. Race is a construct but—and there’s always a but—race is also the language of health care with real consequences. Black women have more aggressive breast cancers and Black women have bigger fibroids and Black women die more often in childbirth.”