Dream Count

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“God is saving Nigeria; there is no other explanation,” Afam said. “There’s magic,” Bunachi said waspishly. Then he added, “Europe is just honest at recording coronavirus deaths.”

Paris wears its badge of specialness too heavily, and therefore gracelessly; Paris assumes it will charm you merely because it is charming.

How slippery moralities are, how they circle and thin and change with circumstance.

“The problem with Zikora is that she has always had a surfeit of that trait women are blessed with—the ability to tolerate nonsense from men,”

I thought Dubai all sterile kitsch, but it did not surprise me that Chuka liked Dubai, because Nigerians liked Dubai.

Upon seeing a beautiful woman, animosity erupts unprompted in some women. I knew from experience how to diagnose it.

Newly ebullient, I added, “I admire the curiosity and courage it took for people to go off to places they didn’t know.” “Isn’t it more from disenchantment with their lives than curiosity about other lives?” he asked.

But she couldn’t die here, surely, not in America, in a good hospital near Washington, D.C., paid for by her good health insurance. Chinyere had been in a good hospital—she remembered Chia saying all the rooms had huge flat-screen TVs—but no matter how good the hospital, everyone there was still breathing the mediocrity that was Nigerian air.

“Hold yourself together,” her mother said in Igbo, close to a whisper, as if anybody else could understand. Jikota onwe gi. Those words so often hissed or muttered or said with a sigh, whenever Zikora did something in a public place where she couldn’t be slapped right away. Hold yourself together. It was a warning and a lament,

“Maybe after grad school, you’ll just stay, live here, and try and survive without being a Nigerian madam,” Chia said, teasingly. “Nothing beats living in your own country if you can afford the life you want,” Omelogor said.

America is so provincial, like an enormous giant of a man from a bush village who blunders about with supreme certainty, not knowing he is bush because he is blinded by his strength. If

and then the professor said, “Let’s be civil.” Let’s be civil indeed, as if their quiet evil isn’t the real incivility. The incivility of quiet evil.