It feels America is no longer America says Chimamanda Adichie

One could almost be forgiven for forgetting that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a novelist. Well over a decade has passed since she published the best seller Americanah, about a young Nigerian woman’s confrontation with race and identity, which quickly secured a spot in the contemporary canon. The novel elevated Adichie to rare literary stardom—onto the cover of British Vogue, into a Beyoncé song. She continued to write but stuck to nonfiction—long essays on feminism and, more recently, on grief. Yet with the exception of a few short stories, she wasn’t producing much fiction. When I asked her during an interview two years ago about the long wait for a new novel, she said the question made her “go into a panic.”
The drought—which is how she sees it—is now over. Dream Count, her new novel, is about four African women—including three who share Adichie’s Nigerian background—and their love lives. The book’s central occupation is a serious one: how men affect the existences of women, either as destructive forces, objects of longing, or distractions from women’s dreams.

Chiamaka is a travel writer holding out for someone who will make her feel “truly known”; Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who badly wants to settle down and start a family; Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, is a successful banker in Nigeria who rejects all pressure to live a conventional life; and, finally, Kadiatou, the book’s most interesting and original character, is a Guinean housekeeper who works for Chiamaka, tries to build a new life in America and finds herself the victim of a powerful and predatory man.

Adichie spoke with me in the days before the novel’s publication. I was curious to hear about the characters but also about how Adichie sees the United States right now. In her usual outspoken way, she had much to say about masculinity, Donald Trump, and the way that politics is skewing art.

Gal Beckerman: Almost all the writing you’ve published over the past decade has been nonfiction, like your essay We Should All Be Feminists. Fiction offers you, as you said in your author’s note to Dream Count, a chance to explore complexities. How does it feel to be back in that fiction mode?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: I’ve always wanted to be in that mode, so not being in it was hard. That expression, “writer’s block,” is one I don’t like, but it speaks to what it was: an inability to write fiction. I had that for a few years, and I just remember being terrified. I don’t know how to be moderate in thinking about my own creativity. And so, really, what it felt like when I couldn’t write fiction was: I felt like I was shut out of myself. Because fiction is the thing that gives meaning to me. It just gives me joy.

Beckerman: I wanted to read you a quote from a 2016 interview you gave that I think is a kind of keystone for understanding the bigger themes of Dream Count: “Put a group of women together, and the conversation will eventually be about men. Put a group of men together, and they will not talk about women at all … We women should spend about 20 percent of our time on men, because it’s fun, but otherwise, we should also be talking about our own stuff.” The four women in this book are each contending with the men in their lives, and men who are mostly doing damage to them.

Adichie: I might have to revise that number: maybe more like 15 or 18 percent. I should say that that is more about what I wish the world would be than about what the world is. And I think that fiction, if nothing else, has to be honest. It has to be unforgivingly honest. And I don’t want to write about women’s lives as I wish they were. So, for example, I know many women who, looking at their relationships from the outside, it’s very clear to me, and I think to most people, that it’s an unhealthy relationship. But I’m always interested in how women justify to themselves remaining in those relationships. Someone actually just said to me that all the men in the book are jerks.
Beckerman: I was about to say that too!

Adichie: Really? I feel like I’ve been grossly misunderstood. Good Lord, come on. There’s one that we might argue is not the most appealing of men. But even [him], I think, we could view with some empathy. But I feel like the other men are not jerks. I suppose if I’m hearing it this often, it must mean there is some truth to it.

Beckerman: It does seem that what matters more in the book is the way their actions end up affecting each of the four women.

Adichie: I would argue that heterosexual women’s lives are, in fact, shaped quite often by men. Girls are often socialized from childhood to be nice in a way that boys are not socialized to be nice. You know, it’s women in relationships who almost unconsciously make compromises and sacrifices; we’re often taught that love is self-sacrifice, and that makes us feel ashamed to think about ourselves. Men do not have the same kind of fear of consequences if they’re selfish. I don’t even know if it occurs to men.

Beckerman: I know you don’t think all the men were jerks, but while I was reading, the idea of a certain aggressive, careless, destructive masculinity was inescapable, especially at a moment when American politics and culture have been overtaken by what one writer in our pages just called an “Adolescent Style.” Do you think this novel has something to say about the particular form of what might be called immature patriarchy that we’re living under right now?

Adichie: I think that many of the women in my book do, in fact, escape masculinity—if not escape, then they have figured out ways to sort of push it to the side. Honestly, just thinking about what is happening in this country, it feels as though America is no longer America. It feels to me a disservice to my novel to try to talk about the masculinity of my beloved characters alongside this confederacy of dunces.
Beckerman: But I do feel like, reading this right now, there was something that echoed with our times.

Adichie: I would actually say that the actions of the Trump administration feel more like those of toddlers, not men. How they are acting doesn’t feel manly. I think I want to make a distinction between manly and masculinity. So there is a kind of ugly, masculine energy, but it’s not a manly energy. I think to be manly is to show maturity, responsibility—and there’s none of that. But what I’ve been thinking about more in this novel, as in all my work, is love. I’m a hopeless romantic who hides it behind sarcasm. I remember a few weeks ago thinking that what we’re witnessing from Trump is actually from a lack of love. So you cannot love a country and treat it with such careless recklessness; you just cannot.

Beckerman: When you say that America doesn’t feel like America anymore, how does that affect how you think about your role as a writer?

Adichie: I’m still a little bit dizzy. It’s been a month, and just so much has happened. But in general, I like to make a distinction between myself the writer and myself the citizen. Yes, of course, political issues do inform my fiction, but I hope that I never let it either propel or become a hindrance to my writing. I think of my writing as something that’s quite separate from my political self, if that makes sense. Which is not to say they aren’t intertwined, because most of my fiction is political. As a citizen, things have changed for me. I mean, you have to remember that I come from Nigeria, where, growing up, America was the place where everything went the way it was supposed to go. And the reality is that Nigeria and the U.S. are the same now. Someone said to me, “Are you thinking about moving back to Nigeria?” Well, no, because it’s the same.
Beckerman: Nigeria moved to you.

Adichie: The only difference is that I don’t have to use my generator as much here in the U.S. In Nigeria today, we have a president who, in my opinion, was not elected. And Nigerian politics has always been a politics of patronage: the Big Man, and you give your friends jobs, that kind of thing. But I think that Nigerian leaders, even if they just pay lip service to ideas like competence, they are not likely to be so brazen about creating sort of long, lasting actions from personal vengeance. It’s the brazenness of it [in the U.S.] that just feels to me stranger, stranger than Nigeria.

Beckerman: I wanted to ask you to talk about the Kadiatou character in the book, whom you based on the story of Nafissatou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant who was allegedly assaulted in a New York City hotel suite in 2011 by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. You write about her in your author’s note, and the idea that fiction can become a kind of justice, that your depiction of her was “a gesture of returned dignity.” Did it worry you at all as a fiction writer, interested in complexity, about approaching the creation of a character with that motive in mind?

Adichie: Actually, I feel as though the motive came afterwards. And honestly, I did not want to write an author’s note. The legal department of my publishers felt I should. And it made me go back and read my own work. I also don’t think of my fiction in terms of themes. I only find out the themes afterward. And I realized I was fascinated by her, but also I loved her.

Beckerman: Did that make it hard to write about her in complex ways? The way you would if you were inventing someone?

Adichie: Well, she’s the character who I spent the most time on, but that’s also because I did a lot of research. Guinea is a country that’s not familiar to me. I talked to people. I watched endless videos of Guinean women cooking. She’s the character who took the most work. I hear you about the complexity, because I had unconscious “noble ideas” for her. To write honestly about people is to start off with the premise that people are flawed. I think what I worried about most was just having her be a believable human being. And to do that, I decided at some point just to completely put aside everything I knew about the real person.

Beckerman: The book is full of women taking account of the men in their lives, but it is also very much about mothers and daughters. You write in the author’s note that this was a book about your own mother, who recently died.

Adichie: I started writing it after my mother died, but I did not set out to write about my mother in any way. And actually, again, it was when I went back to reread this book that I just thought, My goodness. At the risk of sounding a bit strange, I just felt my mother’s spirit, and it was actually very emotional for me. I remember just weeping and weeping after I had read it. I became a bit dramatic. I feel as though she opened the door for me to get back into my fiction and my creative self. But just seeing how much of it was about mothers and daughters, I thought, Is this all this novel is about? And I did not think this in a hopeful way. I was thinking, I hope it’s also about other things.

Beckerman: Well, it’s also about jerks. But we won’t relitigate that. More than a lot of other writers, I feel like you really have insisted in your public comments on that need for complexity. And you say some version of this, again, in the author’s note. You talk about contemporary ideology—I think you’re thinking about the left here, though it’s obviously also true of the right—that sort of stamps out that possibility of contradiction. You talk about “reaching answers before questions are asked, if the questions are asked at all.” I wonder if you worry at all about art being shaped by that ideology.

Adichie: I do worry, and I am seeing that. Even the idea of an author’s note, which you could read through an ungracious lens as being defensive, as explaining too much. I think we live in a time of this kind of ideological capture, and you’re right that it exists on both sides. It’s almost as though the intellectual right doesn’t exist anymore. But of course, I’m more interested in the left, because it’s my tribe. And if there was some magical way, I would want to protect fiction writers and artists from what is a kind of tyranny, this ideological conformity. And also, I think that there are young people who are really brilliant, who are original, but who see the climate that we live in and who then, in some ways, dim their lights. And we suffer for it.