After a ten-year literary silence, award-winning Nigerian author and essayist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes a powerful return to fiction. In a candid and soul-searching interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday, April 3, Adichie digs into the decade-long pause between novels, the emotional and political pulse of Dream Count, and the radical act of imaginative freedom as a Black woman writer.
She admits to a 12-year gap in fiction writing, calling the period “frightening” and marked by an almost spiritual drought:
“Fiction is the love of my life… when I couldn’t write for all those years, it was a really frightening, just terrible place to be.”
Creativity, for her, is deeply intuitive — not linear or controlled. She says she finds her characters rather than creates them:
“There’s a wonderful quote I love from Elizabeth Bowen, who says that writers do not create characters, they find them… it feels true to me.”
The novel follows four women — Chiamaka, Zikora, Omologo, and Kadiatu — whose stories interweave across culture, class, and continents, exploring layered realities of womanhood, agency, and voice.
Chiamaka: Publishing While Black
Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer, reflects on the limitations imposed on Black women creatives.
“It suddenly felt delusional to think anybody would publish a light and quirky travel book by a black Nigerian woman… She was instead told to write about the horror stories…”
Adichie, though fortunate in her publishing journey, insists this story reflects broader gatekeeping in the industry:
“We don’t always have to be interpreters of struggles.”
Omologo: The Quiet Power of Self-Chosen Solitude
Omologo resists motherhood and romantic convention, a nod to women who deviate from the expected script:
“To be alone is not always to be lonely… Sometimes I revel in long spells of satisfying sexlessness unburdened by the body’s needs.”
Adichie uses Omologo to challenge societal norms:
“She is considered kind of strange… but I think she really does like her life.”
Zikora: The Painful Wait for Marriage and Motherhood
Zikora embodies the tension between traditional aspirations and modern frustrations.
“She imagines that somehow the husband will follow, but he doesn’t… she wants the relationships to progress to marriage, but somehow they don’t.”
Adichie questions the imbalance of romantic power:
“Marriage is such an important part of one’s life… to think that one doesn’t really have full control… is interesting to me.”
Kadiatu: Powerlessness and the Demand for Perfection
Inspired by a real-life Guinean maid’s sexual assault case, Kadiatu’s story reflects the invisibility and moral scrutiny often placed on marginalised women:
“Her case was dropped… not because she lied about the assault, but because she lied on her asylum application… I remember just feeling almost wounded by this.”
Through fiction, Adichie reclaims dignity:
“I was trying to give this woman back her dignity. I was trying to create a human being.”
Adichie also reflects on living in America, despair, creative defiance in a time of erasure — of women, of diversity, of language itself:
“You can ban words, but you cannot ban… people are thinking them.”
She resists despair through a belief in the human spirit and the imagination:
“The things we believe in… the way that the human spirit thrives — it’s difficult to kill that.”
