Dream Count

Omelogor’s Robyn Hood fund is symbolic of guilt. When Omelogor begins to realize that the work she’s doing with her financial company is actively disenfranchising the very women she has hoped to help, she begins siphoning company money into a private account; she then uses this self-proclaimed Robyn Hood fund to offer grants to economically disadvantaged women who want to open small businesses. While Omelogor uses the fund to do good, its inception also reveals the regret she feels over her other decisions. She is trying to use Robyn Hood to atone for her sins and to support women whom the system economically marginalizes.

For characters including Kadiatou and Omelogor, America is symbolic of hope and possibility. When Kadi and Amadou first fall in love, for example, Kadi is thrilled by the idea of leaving their village and making a new life together in the United States. However, this dream begins to fade as soon as Amadou goes overseas without her and fails to send word to her. Suddenly the proverbial promised land is “too removed from the spherical shape of her imagination; she [can no longer] see herself living there” because if she thinks “at all of America, she [thinks] only of films” (166). This allusion to Hollywood underscores the dreamlike fantasies associated with America. While America promises happiness and wealth, it is also a myth to someone like Kadi, who doesn’t know how to get there without Amadou. Years later, she does eventually secure asylum in the United States and is grateful (despite all the hardship she faces) that she can offer Binta an American childhood and future. Once there, Kadi believes that America can provide her daughter everything she couldn’t have had in Nigeria.

For Omelogor, America also offers the opportunity for discovery, newness, and independence. Disillusioned with her job in finance, Omelogor gives up her vocational ambitions to pursue a graduate degree in pornography in the United States. However, almost immediately upon arrival, Omelogor realizes that “America makes more sense” from the outside (349). When she had visited the United States in the past, the country seemed gilded with opportunity and possibility. When she moves there, she finds the place disappointing and hostile. She knows that America doesn’t “owe [her] restoration and yet [she feels] that it [does], as if it had reneged on a promise that was never really made” (348). Therefore, America still represents promise to Omelogor, but she discovers that this promise is false. The novel reiterates this notion via Kadi’s case. Initially, Omelogor is convinced that Kadi’s attacker won’t get off because the incident happened in America; she quickly discovers that the American judicial system has no real interest in protecting women like Kadi and that its promise of equality and justice is another illusion.