Book Review: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Friday Black provokes, and it pierces. Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah uses his words like a surgeon with a knife - it punctures with its precise strokes, and sometimes, tears you to pieces. Even though it was released in 2018, it might as well have been released in 2021. It’s a fresh observation on our world - his stories breathe life into genre fiction, so much life that it elevates the entire term of ‘genre fiction’. He takes us on journeys that leave you breathless and angry, with violent episodes that are never tasteless, but constantly inciting.

Inciting is the exact word I want to use. By the time Friday Black is finished, you either want to start a riot, or feel like you have been burned to the ground yourself.

I love magical realism. Books that expand what we know to be true by using themes and plots that make our imaginations stretch. Adjei-Brenvah does this here. When he had set out writing the stories that became Friday Black, he wished to use the medium of magical realism as a way to engage and deconstruct issues such as race, the ‘depravities of consumer culture and our collective habituation to violence’. When talking to The Wall Street Journal, he said, “I like to work in that space where, "Is it hyperbole? I don't know." When you kill someone with a gun or a chainsaw, they're just as dead either way. When I say 'chainsaw,' you have to pay attention.”

And pay attention is what he forces you to do. In his story ‘The Finkelstein 5’, Adjei-Brenyah’s main character speaks to his life in a world where he can dial his ‘blackness’ up and down, depending on the situation and who he is surrounded by. He can set it down comfortably at 4.0 with the aid of a necktie and wing-tipped shoes while being interviewed by a prospective employer, and up to 10 it skyrockets when his sense of vengeance bursts forth over the killing of five black children by a chainsaw-wielding white man.

I had never heard the term ‘code-switching’ before, and if I had, I hadn’t really put a lot of thought into it as a white man. It just wasn’t my experience. This story, this book, speaks to the black experience in a way that makes you listen and understand things that seemed to be on the periphery. Adjei-Brenyah forces you to look at it, and your relationship to it.

A good writer forces you to look.

Other stories, such as ‘Zimmer Land’, are mixtures of ‘Black Mirror’ and your worst nightmare, about a black protagonist who works for a digital theme park that allows its patrons to play the role of judge, jury, and executioner in the suburbs. It’s chilling, and engrossing, and frustrating. It’s Twlight Zone as a powder keg, waiting to be ignited (if not exploding as we speak).

Friday Black takes you to the dark places of America, by taking us to an America that never was and has always been.

About this book:

Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah ($14.99, Published October 2018)

If You Enjoyed This Book, We Recommend:

Her Body And Other Parties by Carmen-Maria Machado

My Mother’s House by Francesa Momplaisir

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Best Enjoyed When:

You’re in the place where rage and hope coexist.