Dream Count and Problematic Faves

In which I discuss Adichie's new novel and how I've navigated reading works by people who've done bad things...

Hi, y’all! Glad you’re here—

Last week, I started the novel Dream Count, by the talented, polarizing, possibly transphobic writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I read Adichie’s previous novel Americanah back in 2015 and found the experience of reading it to be illuminating, inspiring, and thought provoking. Americanah was both a love story and a consideration of race in both the US and UK, with the novel’s framework holding this expansive narrative in flashbacks while the protagonist, Ifemelu, gets her hair braided at a salon. While most of that novel focused on race, Adichie also explored many themes relating to the experience of Black women, and is often sited as a feminist writer. The way she’s been positioned as a feminist icon—either by herself or by her readers—means that when she speaks about feminism, it’s met with a more serious consideration of what she has to say. This is why, when she spoke about trans women back in 2017, it immediately became a topic of conversation.

During a March 10th interview with Channel 4 news, Adichie allegedly refused to state that trans women were real women, and said, during an interview:

“I think the whole problem of gender in the world is about our experiences. It’s not about how we wear our hair or whether we have a vagina or a penis. It’s about the way the world treats us, and I think if you’ve lived in the world as a man with the privileges that the world accords to men and then sort of change gender, it’s difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are.”

Two days later, after receiving quite a bit of backlash, Adichie clarified her stance with a Facebook post. To summarize, she claimed that her intention wasn’t to say that trans women aren’t women—that she was already speaking from that as a given and starting point—but that the experiences of trans women were different from cis women, for various reasons, and that pretending otherwise was insincere.

Adichie’s language throughout most of this conversation has been clumsy at times, at others admittedly offensive (she refused to apologize for any offense and mostly doubled down in an essay back in 2021), but I also think there is more here to consider. Back in 2018, when discussing this with fellow bookstagrammer Bernie Lombardi, he made the point that Adichie is approaching much of this conversation through a lens outside of the US, and that it could potentially be just as problematic to center this discussion through an American lens as it is of her to center cis women in conversations around feminism. He further mentioned that if we consider her work, even as she approaches it as a feminist writer, it still operates within the confines of a patriarchal society, that she still identifies womanhood and measures it against manhood. There’s a lot there to unpack, more than I really know how to right now, but evaluating her work with that in mind was really interesting.

Adichie’s defense was that we were getting caught up in “language orthodoxy”, and that if she’d just said the right words, even if what she meant was still the same, she wouldn’t have received so much backlash. I’m mixed on this. I do agree that if she had just explained that, like with all intersectional feminism, every woman’s experience will be different than the woman beside her—a cis woman is going to have a different experience than a trans woman, just like a white woman is going to have a different experience from a Black woman. Adichie’s perspective centers cisgender identity as the starting point—she even said that she doesn’t really consider ‘cis’ as a term—and because of that, she is going to automatically ‘other’ trans women. I think this is part of where it gets messy, when we see someone as a foremost authority or expert on something, and always expect them to have the right answer, when in reality, we’re all limited by our own identities in some way.

Even so, I do think that all of this plays into how we’ll receive her work moving forward—for those who choose to still read her work. I don’t know where Adichie stands on the trans issue at this point in time. I would hope that she supports trans people and knows how necessary that support is. But while this part of her politics is currently a mystery, the way she discusses the experiences of ciswomen, how she measures womanhood alongside men, all of it plays a part into how she approaches her work, especially as a woman who wants to write about the experiences of women.

There’s this idea that people with questionable politics can’t approach these subjects with nuance in their fiction, but I actually think that these are sometimes the people whose work ends up being the most interesting. Or, at least, the most illuminating.

When we look at a writer like Flannery O’Connor, whose personal letters revealed a truly racist person underneath, it adds a new layer to her work as a woman choosing to write about race. There’s something interesting about her work, because at times, it feels so in opposition with who she portrayed herself to be in some of these letters. And I think part of the reason why is because she might have been trying to understand what she actually thought by exploring these ideas in her work.

She wasn’t the only person whose work felt a little more complicated than their outward persona—many southern writers have shown their own ignorance’s and biases either in interviews or private exchanges, only to have their work really thinking deeply about the ways race played a part in everyone’s day to day lives. Many people have praised the works of O’Connor and Faulkner for how they explored racism more than someone as ‘likable’ as Harper Lee. While Lee never got discovered as a bigot, many people today have an issue with her book being a white savior narrative. Sometimes good people write ‘good’ books that aren’t as honest about the realities of the world, and sometimes ‘bad’ people write books that reveal the questioning they themselves might have, that we might all have, even when we’re too afraid to admit it.

I think we do this thing sometimes, where, when we discover that someone is problematic in some way or just a plain bad person, we look for clues in their work to see what might not have revealed itself before. When Andrea Skinner published an essay about her stepfathers sexual abuse and how her mother, Alice Munro, chose to ignore it, many people’s responses talked about how they’d never be able to read her work again, or that they never would have expected that she’d by that kind of person based on her stories. The reality is, Munro’s work was always considering the ways women navigated the world in which men held the power. Even when women broke free of men, they often still had to sacrifice so much, maybe even too much at times. What Munro did to her daughter was unforgivable, but I didn’t find it all that surprising. I grew up in a house where women believed that the key to survival was to ignore whatever traumas caused their worlds to crumble. I can see how Munro might have felt the same.

The discussion around what to do with problematic artists has already been had many times—I loved Monsters by Claire Dederer, which interrogates her own love for bad people who create great work, and what there is to do about it. What her book explores mostly has to do with bad men—I even think Junot Diaz could fit into this conversation we’re having right now, seeing as his work often questioned the misogyny of his characters, while he was being taken to task for that in real life. This post isn’t about what to do with these people. I’m sharing because I’m reading a book right now about someone who I have complicated feelings about, and I know that my complicated feelings are shaping how I read her work. If I’m being honest, there’s a lot that I've loved about Dream Count so far. Adichie is a gifted writer. But at the same time, some of the feminist ideas explored here feel a bit rudimentary, the women’s stories revolve more heavily around men than most of her previous work—it actually reminds me a lot of how Joyce Carol Oates often writes women, as if women are often just obsessed with men and abused by them. I can’t tell if Adichie’s defensiveness has caused her to retreat back into an earlier wave of feminism or if this was simply the story she wanted to tell. I also keep thinking about the things she’s said that have caused harm to another community. There are hundreds of artists who I love who, as far as I know, are innocent—but it doesn’t mean I actually know the reality of their lives. Someone like Neil Gaiman seemed universally loved, until these terrible accusations came to light, and then he wasn’t. I’m always figuring out what the line is for me, when it comes to engaging in a person’s art. I wanted to take a moment to share what’s going on in my head, and also some of the observations I’ve made over the last bit of time. i think many of us are wrestling with these things. Part of knowing is figuring out what to do with the information. I’m still learning. But I guess that’s part of the process.

If you all have more thoughts on this, I would love to discuss.

Until then,

XOXO

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