Transition and Trauma: The Changing Worlds of Chimamanda Adichie’s Dream Count

This paper explores transition and trauma in Chimamanda Adichie’s Dream Count and discusses how trauma impacts the inner and existential lives of four women. It considers a taxonomy of suffering that includes existential loneliness (Chiamaka), relational betrayal (Zikora), systemic hardship (Nafissatou), and ideological disillusionment (Omelogor). Through the lens of Cathy Caruth’s attempts to theorize trauma and its ramifications, these readings support the arguments that trauma is both layered and an experience which disrupts and transforms someone on a deeply personal level but that trauma also has the capacity to create resilience. The fragmented, non-chronological narrative of the novel itself has also been taken to be a willful literary imitation of this jagged processing of memory and trauma. The collective trauma that serves as the backdrop for personal crisis and agonized overthinking about self-worth and connection is the COVID-19 pandemic. Restructuring intimacy, identity and knowledge through trauma so that female solidarity and forcibly reclaiming one’s all Purpose becomes a pathway to resilience is yet another complexity and depth added to humanity in postcolonial and modern scholarship.