Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has released his debut novel, "Chain-Gang All-Stars," and it is truly a tour de force.
You may remember Adjei-Brenyah. He joined Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA" in our first season to talk about his incredible New York Times' best-selling short story collection, "Friday Black."
"Friday Black" explored the violence, injustice and painful absurdities that Black men, women and children have to deal with every day.
Now with "Chain-Gang All-Stars," Adjei-Brenyah has taken his fiction to a whole new level. As Ron Charles wrote in his rave review for The Washington Post: "It’s a devastating indictment of our penal system and our attendant enthusiasm for violence."
The story focuses on two women gladiators who are literally fighting to the death to obtain their freedom. Adjei-Brenyah's father was a criminal defense attorney and the novel is dedicated to him.
"I think he was the seed for the novel in many ways," Adjei-Brenyah said. "He was a defense attorney and I remember at a very young age him telling me that he was defending someone who had killed someone. And as a child, I remember feeling like, 'Well, OK, I guess my dad's a villain'...kind of communicating him or just questioning, 'Why would you be doing that?'"
Adjei-Brenyah's father told him there wasn't a simple answer to that.
"I think having someone like that tell me that at such an early age certainly influenced me in ways that maybe I wasn't aware of at the time, and maybe I'm still not aware of," he said. "But just having him as a presence in my life made me understand that the law and the rule of law is something that people are shaping, and it's malleable and it's controllable and there is a right and wrong, and that should be your guiding hand. But what we do once we establish that right or wrong is very flexible."
Adjei-Brenyah said his father passed away from cancer in 2018, a few months after "Friday Black" was published.
"I think spending time with him, and towards the end of his life, also influenced the book in a lot of ways," he said.
Adjei-Brenyah originally envisioned "Chain-Gang All-Stars" as a short story for "Friday Black." He decided to turn it into a novel after learning more about the prison system and how interconnected it is with other issues.
When he started writing "Chain-Gang All-Stars," Adjei-Brenyah said he hoped that he'd believe in abolition.
"After I finished and even probably, a couple of years before I finished, I discovered I absolutely was abolitionist. And there are sufferings I think, that we institutionally administer. What I mean by that is I think our attitude towards the incarcerated signals a general unwillingness to be compassionate towards those who need help," he said.
Adjei-Brenyah has described prison as "a radicalization space": "They make bonds with people who are career criminals or whatever you want to call it. But also their ability to move through the world is more difficult because if they do get out of prison, we have this label attached to them now. And so for them to make a living, it's very often the fact that they have to resort to so-called crime to survive. And so inherently, by the status that we assign to those who have been incarcerated, prison becomes a radicalization space, but also because of the nature of the community in prison, it also can become a radicalizing space."
Adjei-Brenyah had to do an incredible amount of worldbuilding to create the "Chain-Gang All-Stars" storyworld, which includes the "Chain-Gang All-Stars" athletes, the hardcore fans, the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, the network executives at SportsViewNet and the members of the Coalition to End Neo-Slavery.
How did he go about doing this? "Painstakingly," Adjei-Brenyah said.
He read an essay called "What is the NBA?" which details the complex legality of the organization as it's several companies working together "in this amorphous kind of way," Adjei-Brenyah said. He used that as a lens for creating his fictional prison structure.
"And each of them (prisons) are representing a different corporation, but they're in this sort of league together. But then I have to think about the human component of how the different people who participate existed among each other and the sort of dynamics of the consumer sport," he said. "So there was a ton of things to consider, and it's really just about fine-tuning it over several years. It took me seven years to write the book, so I had a lot of time and it took a lot of time."
Adjei-Brenyah is uneasy about violence, which raises the question of how he handled writing the violent scenes that occur in "Chain-Gang All-Stars."
"You end up getting really mechanical about it, especially in the initial drafting spaces," he said. "I view it more like mechanical choreography than like mega, mega, bloody violence because I'm just trying to render it as clearly as possible. Of course, when I step back to the gate, I'm like, 'Oh my God, that's pretty tough.' But for me, it's more about the choreography."
Adjei-Brenyah said it was challenging for him to switch from writing short stories to novels.
"The way I describe it is you're swimming for a long time with no shore in sight," he said.
"I really enjoy the process of revision. I like to get an ending and then work on a story for a long time, but at least having the whole shape of the thing in mind," he added. "But with the novel, I was probably three or four years in — I didn't know if I was half done or a quarter done or three quarters done. And that is really challenging. So it's a trust fight and a faith practice, but a really long one."