Dream Count

“In this suspended life, I one day found a gray hair on my head. It appeared overnight, near my temple, tightly coiled, and in the bathroom mirror I first thought it was a piece of lint. A single gray hair with a slight sheen to it. I unfurled it to its full length, let it go, and then unfurled it again. I didn’t pull it out. I thought: I’m growing old. I’m growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known.”

The gray hair that Chia finds on her head during the lockdown is a symbol of time passing and of aging. Chia finds the hair when she is closed in her house by herself with no opportunities to connect with others. Therefore, the “tightly coiled” gray hair underscores her solitude and augments her longing to find love and happiness before it is too late.

“Darnell’s possessiveness, playful as it was, gave me a rush of happiness. My woman. I loved hearing it and he said it so rarely. Sometimes he was so detached from me in public, I feared he was only waiting for the evening’s end to tell me it was over.”

Chia’s reflections on her time with Darnell illustrate the Impact of Love and Relationships on Personal Development. Although Darnell is possessive and detached, Chia is desperate for him to show her affection. She values any glimpse of attention he gives her because she is defining her self-worth according to their relationship. She has no security in their relationship—perpetually expecting Darnell to break up with her without good reason—and thus little security in herself.

“I thought often of Kadiatou’s words: The spirit cannot break, even if your heart breaks. It had irritated me, but my irritation might have been the reflexive refusal of an unwanted truth. She was comforting me and maybe warning me. Don’t let your spirit be destroyed, even if he breaks your heart. Your heart can break while your spirit remains whole. But what of when a spirit breaks?”

Chia’s close connection with Kadiatou offers her guidance through her relationship struggles and insight into her own disappointed love affairs. Kadi is indeed “comforting” and “warning” Chia about Darnell—contradictory words that challenge Chia’s understanding of the impact of love and relationships on personal development. She doesn’t want to believe that her romantic entanglements might crush her spirit, but Kadi’s words are a warning that Chia’s relationship with Darnell’s will hinder Chia’s self-actualization.

“It was done. Telling Omelogor made it real, and I heard in my head the sound of breaking spells. I had held on for so long, and now, letting go, it surprised me how quickly mystery dissolves to dust. There was no wavering will, no fear. We are in love and then we are not in love. Where does love go when we stop loving?”

The end of Chia’s relationship with Darnell compels her into a contemplative state of mind. This passage has a reflective, melancholy tone because Chia is still trying to reckon with her breakup and subsequent heartbreak. Her questions about where love goes after one stops loving contribute to the novel’s explorations of love and The Pursuit of Lasting Happiness. Chia has defined happiness according to her romantic relationships and thus feels herself dissolving “to dust” after parting with Darnell.

“I saw the attentive, patient father Chuka would be, bent over guarding our toddler on a tricycle, or on the floor with her, building a Lego house. So attractive, this vision, like photography in flattering light. But I felt only a gathering dread, a turmoil in my stomach, to face a truth I wished were not true: I did not want what I wanted to want.”

Chia’s relationship with Chuka exemplifies the Intersection of Personal Desire and Social Expectations. Chuka is the embodiment of what Chia’s family and culture expect of her. He is “attentive,” “patient,” and “attractive” and would make an ideal husband and father—just as everyone wants for Chia. However, Chia has a physiological response to imagining this idealized future with Chuka. She experiences “dread” and a “turmoil in her stomach”—emotions which show that her personal desires are at odds with others’ desires for her. She therefore lets Chuka go because she understands that she cannot make herself want to marry him just because she feels obligated to do so.

“Now here she was, disgracing her mother by not facing labor like a wordless stoic. Part of her mother’s philosophy was to endure pain with pride, especially the kind of pain that belonged to women alone. When she had cramps as a teenager, her mother would say, ‘Bear it, that is what it means to be a woman,’ and it was years before she knew that other girls took Buscopan for period pain.”

Zikora’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth is at odds with her mother’s expectations of her. While her mom believes that women are meant “to endure pain with pride,” Zikora has no interest in silencing her physical and emotional discomfort just to please her mother. This passage thus exemplifies the intersection of personal desire and social expectations in a new context. Zikora inhabits her body during labor the way she wants to instead of the way her mother wants her to.

“But the blithe heavens seemed oblivious. She watched the years glide past, and relationships come and go, always thinking: It has to be the next man, it can’t not be the next man. Why did it not happen? She had never doubted that marriage would happen, as naturally as day becomes night.”

Zikora uses figurative language to convey her desperation and sorrow over her disappointed dreams. She personifies the heavens as “blithe” and “oblivious”—suggesting a sense of alienation from a world that does not care what happens to her. In the past she believed that marriage was as natural “as day becoming night” but in this passage she’s realizing that things don’t happen just because she wants them to.

“Their conversation felt like a poor rehearsal and not the real conversation they were supposed to have. She wanted to reverse their day, just by a few hours, and have them walk into her apartment again, laughing, her saying let’s make margaritas and him saying should we order burgers, because I don’t know what that tiny Chilean sea bass thing at dinner was about.”

Zikora’s fraught relationship with the past informs the narrative structure of this section, as she is perpetually reviewing and rearranging her memories, effectively pulling the narrative back and forth between past and present—in desperate search of some semblance of happiness and balance.

“In an unfinished dying, you feel you must mourn yet you can’t begin, because you haven’t reached an end that you understand. Kwame was an unfinished dying. She could not accept that it was over; so much lay loose and incomplete. She sifted through her memories for reasons, as though through debris left by a fire to find uncharred fragments.”

Zikora likens Kwame’s abandonment to a death; this metaphor conveys the depth of her loss, sorrow, and disappointment in the present. She also uses a simile to compare the aftermath of his departure from her life to the “debris left by a fire,” likening her memories of their life together to burnt fragments. She is obsessively mining her memories for “uncharred fragments” because she desperately wants Kwame to return, or, metaphorically, to come back to life.

“She almost believed her earlier empty fighting words, that she was causing her son unnecessary pain. Her son. Those words: her son. He was her son. He was hers. She had given birth to him and she was responsible for him and already he knew her, moving his face blindly at her breasts. Rooting, it was called.”

Zikora’s use of repetition and fragmentation enacts her attempts to orient to motherhood. She repeatedly says “her son” because has yet to adjust to giving birth and becoming a mom. Indeed, she’s been so consumed by her frustration with and memories of Kwame that she hasn’t been able to focus on the present with Chidera. In this passage, she is trying to draw herself out of the past and into the present.

“The urge she had felt in the past few days to apologize to her mother was only growing. But she did not have the words and did not yet know what she was apologizing for, or perhaps it was that mere apology felt inadequate, a gesture so small and so late that it might be better left undone. She looked at her mother, who was rubbing the sides of her nose where her glasses had left small dents in her skin. ‘Mummy, I don’t know what I’ll do when you leave.’”

Zikora’s renewed dynamic with her mother nuances the novel’s explorations of the impact of love and relationships on personal development. While Kwame broke Zikora’s heart, her mother has stayed by her side—teaching Zikora that she has been loved and cherished all along. This revelation inspires her remorse and desire to apologize in this passage, an impulse that captures her newfound ability to see and cherish her maternal relationship.

“She had actually climbed a tree, she was on top of a tree, she was aloft above the earth. How exhilarating, to discover that she could overcome the boundaries she had set for herself. Later, as she made her way down, she was pleased to have climbed but knew she would never do so again.”

The image of Kadi climbing the tree provides insight into her character. Kadi faces her fear and feels the exhilaration of being “aloft above the earth,” but the passage uses anticlimax to puncture the exaltation of this moment by pointing out that Kadi knows she won’t repeat this adventure. Kadi is a reserved individual; she might branch out of her comfort zone from time to time, but she isn’t rebellious by nature. The passage foreshadows how she’ll live the rest of her life, and how life might force her into unexpected situations she wouldn’t otherwise have sought out.

“In the blaze of his attention, Kadiatou melted, and she never stopped being astonished that he had chosen her. They stood hand in hand behind Mariama’s Kitchen and looked in the distance at the valley, dreamy with mist. He kissed her, her life’s first kiss, his tongue like a warm slippery fish in her mouth. It was not pleasant but also not unpleasant, because nothing with Amadou could be unpleasant.”

The third-person limited narrator uses descriptive and figurative language to enact Kadi’s transformative experience with Amadou. Through metaphor, she describes Amadou’s attention as a “blaze” and Kadi’s response to him as “melting.” The images of the “dreamy” valley and mist and the “slippery fish” convey notions of magic and surrealism—both of which Kadi feels with Amadou. For Kadi, her first romantic relationship contributes to her personal development.

“It shattered the shock-strangled air. In that moment Kadiatou understood that her sister was dead. She felt an implosion in her heart, the beginning of a deathless sorrow, the moment that love forever turned to loss. For years to come, she would bolt awake from a dream about Binta, so achingly clear that she always looked around, searching the room as if Binta might be there.”

The detailed way the narrator describes Binta’s death conveys Kadi’s grief. Losing Binta is shocking, and the metaphor of an implosion in her heart, coupled with language that both semantically and sonically evokes the violence of an implosion (for instance in the alliterative first sentence), seeks to convey the emotional intensity of this sudden loss. The passage also conveys the impact of love and relationships on personal development, because Binta is the person Kadi has loved best; losing her feels like losing love itself.

“Would he harm her again? He wanted her to cover her body and cover his crime, to look as she had before he walked into the store. As if nothing had happened. Shame, shame like hot water scalded through her. And shock. Shame and shock.”

When Kadi is raped by her boss, she directs her rage and pain at herself. The repetition of the words “shame” and “shock” throughout this passage enacts Kadi’s simultaneous confusion and self-loathing. The narrator also likens Kadi’s emotional response to scalding water, a metaphor that conjures notions of heat and pain. At the same time, this passage foreshadows Kadi’s second sexual assault in the United States years later—specifically with the opening line.

“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. Her period just ended, but what if she had been in her period today? What if this wild-animal guest desecrated her body while in her period? What if she had to spread herself like this while also bleeding?”

The shame Kadi feels while the nurse is examining her after the hotel guest rapes her conveys the extreme emotional toll this act of violence has taken on Kadi. Instead of telling the nurse about her physical pain, she silently berates herself. She feels as if her body has been desecrated, a metaphor that implies a prior state of purity and sacredness. Her rhetorical questions about her period further reveal the weight she puts on purity. Because her body has been violated, Kadi feels her self-worth has been tainted.

“Kadiatou shrank away from their words, her stomach churning […] This image of the court bulked forbiddingly in her mind. They would hack at her with a machete and invite vultures while she lay, still alive, her open wounds exposed.”

The narrator’s language in this passage enacts Kadi’s anxiety over the court case. She uses an extended metaphor to describe the process of testifying against the man who raped her as a further violation. The images of the machete and the vultures evoke notions of violence, which is what Kadi fears in this unfamiliar legal system.

“Sometimes I withdraw for weeks merely to be with myself, and I sink into reading, my life’s great pleasure, and I think, and I enjoy the silence of my own musing. Sometimes I revel in long spells of satisfying sexlessness, unburdened by the body’s needs. Sometimes my house lights blaze brightly with dinner parties and game nights, and I bring together my different friend groups who otherwise might never meet.”

Omelogor’s use of anaphora effects an insistent, urgent tone. Omelogor is talking both to herself and to her aunt in this passage. She is trying to validate her life to herself (and to Aunty Jane) after her aunt deems her life unhappy. The repetition of “Sometimes I” and “Sometimes my” evokes Omelogor’s desperation to convince herself that her life has meaning. The passage thus contributes to the novel’s theme of the pursuit of lasting happiness.

“I should send her a link to read For Men Only, but even if she gets it, and she won’t, how does that show I like my life? You can write popular posts on a website, you can have a surfeit of things, and still have an empty life, so there really is no way to prove to someone else the fullness of your own life.”

Omelogor’s thoughts about For Men Only and her aunt capture her desire to find lasting happiness. She wants to prove to her aunt that she does indeed have a satisfying life, but simultaneously knows that trying to prove this is a waste of time. Her reflections on the “fullness of her own life” also provide insight into Chia’s, Zikora’s, and Kadi’s surrounding stories, as they are all in pursuit of lasting happiness, too.

“I paused and could not think of what to say in response. The blithe open simplicity of her positions was refreshing, the way she was instinctive, almost impulsive, the lightness she brought. She wasn’t interested in my time in America, like my old friends were, and it freed me to put my wounded self away.”

Omelogor’s dynamic with Hauwa shows the impact of love and relationships on personal development. Omelogor gravitates toward Hauwa when she returns to Nigeria from the United States because Hauwa lets her compartmentalize her past. Omelogor is convinced she can escape her mistakes and heartbreak by attaching herself to Hauwa. She is thus stunting her own personal development via this relationship, in hopes of avoiding her pain.

“My melancholy heaves. I wished I had not agreed to this doleful downer of a call. After the father of her son abandoned her, a part of Zikora decayed into a bitterness which she imagines is wisdom. Imagine asking Kadiatou to stop discussing the destruction of her life with Amadou. What if Amadou is Kadiatou’s only real solace? What if he is the one person to understand her silences?”

Omelogor’s reflections on Kadi and Amadou’s relationship show how impactful intimate connections can be to the individual’s development. Omelogor empathizes with Kadi because she believes that love and relationships can offer “real solace” amid hardship. Her perspective on Kadi’s situation in turn suggests that Omelogor longs for a similar form of connection in her own life.

“I had come to America hoping to find a part of me that was more noble and good; I came in search of repair. Because I wanted so desperately to look up higher and be reminded of things I could believe in again, my disenchantment stung. Disappointed disenchantment, or disenchanted disappointment, a feeling with flint at its core, as if a much-loved aunt I ran to for succor had turned to land on my face a series of surprising slaps.”

The descriptive language Omelogor uses to describe her time in America conveys her intense emotional state. Omelogor feels let down by America—which she’s seen as a symbol of hope and possibility for many years—and therefore experiences “disappointment” and “disenchantment” when she leaves. She uses a metaphor to convey the significance of her disappointment, comparing America’s hostility to violence from a beloved aunt. The metaphor harkens back to Omelogor’s conflict with Aunty Jane, and reiterates how her desires often conflict with her expectations.

“I like even more the cornrows. What confidence tonic a man’s words could be. We’re told to find it within ourselves, and some people can, like Omelogor, but I viewed myself with more esteem because Luuk liked the way I looked. I like even more the cornrows.”

Chia’s meditations on her relationship with Luuk reiterate the impact of love and relationships on personal development. Instead of finding confidence within herself, Chia admits that she derived her sense of empowerment and value from the way Luuk saw her. Her behavior in this relationship shows how much significance Chia has given the men in her life; she has indeed allowed her partners to define what beauty, happiness, and goodness mean to her.