This is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me. My responsibility to forms can’t be gracefully fulfilled. Nonetheless, I offer the following in the hope it does not strike you as dishevelled or depressing.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s brand of realism has always depended on dreamy characters dreaming of, say, exuberant sexual pleasures or the protections of extended family relations or the new freedoms arising from political revolution. Adichie’s new novel, “Dream Count,” is about the dream lives of four West African women living in Maryland, Washington DC, and Abuja, Nigeria: Chiamaka; her hair-braider and housekeeper, Kadiatou; her best friend, Zikora; and her cousin Omelogor. The novel unfurls across four overlapping novellas — each one named after a character in the above order — and one closing coda that cycles back to “Chia.”
Under a Pink Sky could justifiably have been a furious tirade of a book, but instead it is articulate, thoughtful, full of self-reflection and forgiveness – and, yes, it is brave. I have never met Ghey, but I get the impression that this is all so very like her.