Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah pushes satire as far as it can go with his debut short-story collection, "Friday Black." He explores the violence, injustice and painful absurdities that African-American men, women and children have to deal with every day.
"Friday Black" has been described as "Black Mirror" meets Black Lives Matter. But Adjei-Brenyah told WPR’s "BETA" that he’s come up with his own elevator pitch for the book.
"If you imagine three people sitting on a couch, and the first is like, you know, 'I really like this. It’s really soft, you know, pretty good butt-feel, it’s like feels pretty great.' And the second’s like, 'Yeah, I also think this couch is like pretty awesome. You know, I feel like the lumbar’s good but it’s just, you know, it feels really great for me just, you know, to relax into it.' And the third is like, 'Yes, I also agree that the couch is nice but I think we’re overlooking the fact that it’s made out of corpses.'"
In his review of "Friday Black," Entertainment Weekly Associate Editor David Canfield writes Adjei-Brenyah's book is part of a new pop culture trend called "new black surrealism."
Canfield said this new trend also includes movies such as Jordan Peele's "Get Out," Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You" and Donald Glover projects like "Atlanta" and "This Is America." According to Canfield, all of these works "derive political power from a kind of absurdist framing."
"I do think that there is sort of an absurdist framing and that framing comes from the absurdity that is racism itself," Adjei-Brenyah said. "The absurdity that is the way oppressions just force humans to do the opposite of what you would hope and expect them to do with each other. And the comparison I think makes sense. I wrote this book before 'Get Out' came out, you know several years before ‘Get Out’ came out actually, but I remember going to the theater and being like, 'Good, you know, this is allowed now almost.' If they’re going to call it a trend, I don’t know if I would agree with that word per se. But part of that is just the powers that be in the media being more open to allowing black creators to tell their stories in different ways."
The opening story in "Friday Black" is called "The Finkelstein 5" and it features the horrifying image of a white man feeling so threatened by the presence of five black children outside a library that he uses a chainsaw to decapitate them all. This image is so violent that it seems like such an exaggeration. And yet upon further reflection, it doesn't seem like it's such an exaggeration after all.
"I think a lot of my stories operate right in that space between familiar and hyperbole," Adjei-Brenyah said. "But also, I think part of the reason for the chainsaw is that you can’t ignore it the way unfortunately, it’s almost become something to ignore young black people being murdered by a gun, for example. You know, for me, whether you kill someone with a chainsaw, a pickax or a gun, they’re just as dead either way. And I think this story sort of pushes on that idea that this killing is happening gruesomely all the time actually. Maybe not by chainsaw but how bad does it have to be for us to really take notice?"
Adjei-Brenyah also introduces the idea of "code-switching" in this story — the idea that people change the kind of language they use when they're communicating with people from different cultural backgrounds.
In "The Finkelstein 5," the main character, Emmanuel, adjusts the blackness in his voice to various points on a 10-point scale, depending on who he is talking to.
He said he often creates the strong elements of surrealism in his fiction by "literalizing and concretizing" something that he thinks of as an abstract or mental experience.
"Depending on where you are, things that might typically be associated with your being black can be used against you, can be used to deny you things, and also can be used to make you a threat. And so, in this story, the main character Emmanuel adjusts his voice, not only his voice but also his appearance. And I used a 10-point scale because ... it sort of becomes also again a little bit absurd because I think blackness is not quantifiable. Blackness is so many different things. But the stereotype of blackness, the fear that people feel regarding blackness, is silly and reducible and based on things that aren’t real. And so the scale allows me to play with the idea of adjusting yourself to appease someone else’s gaze based on a paradigm that is inherently false in the first place."
Adjei-Brenyah continued, "And it’s not just black people. I think so many different people in so many different spaces and identities have to sort of shave away parts of themselves to present as whatever it might be to be successful, upwardly mobile, or even just safe in any particular space. For me, I’m sure I do (code-switch) and what’s fortunate is I think as I get further into something like success or something like maturity, I’m allowed to do it way less. Fortunately, I get to be myself 100 percent a lot more than I used to, and eventually, I think I’ll get to be myself all the time."
Listen to Adjei-Brenyah reading an excerpt from the title story of "Friday Black."