Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Racism, Consumerism, Alienation, and Fantasy Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black (2018) is a collection of 12 short stories about race, consumerism, and alienation. Most of the stories are told by first-person narrators, most of whom are male. The cleanly written stories range in genre from magical realism (or urban fantasy) to sf dystopia and in mood from horror to humor and from outrage to acceptance. Here follows a brief, annotated list of the stories. “The Finkelstein 5” is an excoriating satire of the racism directed at African Americans, especially in the arena of “justice.” Here a white man has been acquitted after chainsaw massacring five African American kids because his lawyer successfully argued that he was acting in all-American self-defense. In that context, the protagonist Emmanuel defiantly raises his “blackness index” (monitoring how black you are on a scale of 1 to 10) by donning baggy pants and a backwards cap. Will he join a violent resistance? “Things My Mother Said” is a vignette about the protagonist and his supportive and hard-working and wise mother. “The Era” takes place in a future in which devastating wars have led to a backlash against “dishonest” emotions and empathy and in which people pay to have their kids genetically “optimized,” although sometimes mistakes cause “shoelookers.” The narrator, Ben, who is ostracized because he wasn’t optimized, speaks a great line without any irony of his own (though we sure sense the author’s behind him): “I do bad at school because sometimes I think when I should be learning.” “Lark Street” is a moving and funny nightmare in which the narrator is visited in the middle of the night by his girlfriend’s aborted twin fetuses. Adjei-Brenyah writes vivid descriptions of the twins’ webbed fingers and toes, transparent skin, tiny bodies coated with blood, and lively personalities. At one point the male twin tells the narrator, “I think I have more balls than you, and I’m still a trimester away from genitalia.” “The Hospital Where” is an allegory of the struggle to become a successful writer, including the morality involved in mining people for story material. The narrator takes his father to the hospital, where he recounts his bargain made with the Twelve Tongued God to enable him to become a successful “winner” of a writer and decides to inform all the patients that they’re healthy and should go home. “Zimmer Land” satirizes contemporary American culture via a theme park for adults (for now) where they can pay to (supposedly) explore problem solving and justice. Patrons pay to enter modules like Terrorist on the Train or, the most popular one, Cassidy Lane, which involves cul-de-sac home defense with extreme prejudice against a loitering black man. The title story satirizes American consumerism by turning Black Friday hysteria into a zombie-mall scenario worthy of George Romero. The ace salesman narrator works in a store besieged by biting, clawing, moaning, hissing, and growling people ravenous for their desired purchases. After having been bitten by a customer, the narrator became able to speak Black Friday and so to understand that, for instance, a howl means, “I won’t be alone with this. They’ll like me now.” “The Lion & the Spider” concerns the high school senior narrator and his relationship with his apparently ne’er-do-well father who told the guy and his sisters great stories about Anansi the African spider trickster god when they were little, but who has seemingly abandoned his family, forcing the narrator to start working in a Home Improvement center unloading delivery trucks. “Light Spitter” is a fantasy exploring the psychology of outcasts. After the narrator is murdered in her university library by an alienated student, the rest of the story depicts the interactions of the odd couple, the victim on her way to becoming an angel and her killer on his way to becoming something else. “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” features the salesman from “Friday Black,” here explaining (in a less exaggerated satire) his successful salesman techniques as he recounts trying to sell some coats to a white family. The story reveals why he’s only the 10th ranked salesman for the chain in the country, while his female co-worker is the 7th. It’s a funny story but goes on a bit too long. “In Retail” is another satire set in the same mall as “Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Coat,” but this time it’s the narration of IceKing’s rival salesperson telling us how, “Even in nothing jobs like this, you need to think of ways you might really be helping somebody. Or you could end up a Lucy,” a worker who recently jumped to her death. “Through the Flash” depicts a neighborhood caught in an apparently eternal time loop after the Flash, a big bomb, annihilated everyone, making them eternally recycle through time, constantly being killed and “reset” by the bomb. As they repeatedly go through the Flash, they gain abilities, like the 14-year-old girl narrator’s super strength and speed and her brother’s super brain capacity. When the story begins, she has decided to become a New Me who wants to make everyone to feel “supreme and infinite” after she has been “the Knife Queen” into torturing everyone in her community in ever more creative ways. The story is matter-of-fact in its depiction of the cruelty of children, but ends with an odd transcendence. The two audiobook readers, Corey Allen (reading the male narrators) and Carra Patterson (reading the female ones) have appealing voices and read the stories with intelligence, empathy, and clarity. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories are full of satire, humor, horror, and love. I’d like fewer first-person narrators and less present tense narration and more narrative variety. But it is an impressive first collection (though I don’t think I’ll be re-reading it soon). View all my reviews
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