There’s a palpable tension throughout the story between these learnt survival techniques and the anger he feels, the growing sense of obligation. Emmanuel started learning the basics of his Blackness before he knew how to do long division: smiling when angry, whispering when he wanted to yell.” “‘You gotta know how to move,’ his father had said to him at a very young age. Throughout the story, Emmanuel is pulled back and forth between bringing his Blackness down below 5 for his own safety and ratcheting it up towards 10 in solidarity with the Finkelstein Five and the movement inspired by their murder and the acquittal of their killer.Īs his Blackness creeps up past 7.0, he remembers the advice of his father:

I was hooked from the opening of the very first story, where we meet the main character, Emmanuel, consciously dialling his Blackness up and down on a 10-point scale as he tries to navigate life as a black man in America while being haunted by visions of a headless girl (one of the victims of the scared white man with the chainsaw) “waiting for him to do something, anything.” I got to make more acute points about how readily we allow love to become conflated with things in the stores, things that are purchasable how often we allow love to be externalized, turned into something we can buy back from whatever company. “I turned up the volume because it’s interesting to think about how bad the violence has to be for us to care. That’s what the best political fiction does, and that’s what the stories in Friday Black deliver. Yet the impressive achievement of Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is to make them believable, to make sharp political points without coming over as didactic. The realities of race and capitalism in America are extreme, so the satirist has to up his game to stay a step ahead.

If the setups sound extreme, that’s because they are.

In this debut collection of short stories, we meet zombie-like shoppers fighting over cut-price jackets, a theme park where visitors can experience the thrill of shooting a black intruder, a white homeowner who decapitates five black children with a chainsaw because he felt threatened. Yet Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah startled me by the freshness, directness and urgency with which it dealt with these issues. And the list of things you can’t do while black without having the police called or a gun pulled on you seems to expand by the day, from working out to moving into an apartment to buying Mentos. This year’s Black Friday shopping frenzy brought the usual bout of stabbings and shootings to add to the overall death count, not to mention the looming environmental collapse that such consumerism feeds. Race and capitalism in America should be fertile ground for literary fiction.

Black friday nana kwame