Friday Black

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2018

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Background

Authorial Context: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is an American author who has written two books, the 2018 short story collection Friday Black and the 2023 novel Chain-Gang All-Stars. His father was a defense attorney whose special interest was in prison abolition. His mother is a former kindergarten teacher who lost her job when Adjei-Brenyah was in middle school, prompting their family to move several times while he was growing up. In high school, Adjei-Brenyah found work as an apparel salesman and discovered his love for literature on his lunch breaks when he frequented the nearby Barnes & Noble. This interest led him to participate in the production of his high school literature magazine in Spring Valley, New York. He then pursued his love for writing at SUNY Albany, where he studied under novelist Lynne Tillman. Tillman was responsible for introducing Adjei-Brenyah to the work of fictionist George Saunders, who became a massive influence on his work. Adjei-Brenyah later went on to pursue his graduate degree in creative writing at Syracuse University, where Saunders taught (Rao, Mallika. “Now That He Has Your Attention… Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Dystopic First Book Was a Surprise Hit. He’s Using His Second to Ask Harder Questions.” Vulture, 25 Apr. 2023).

Many of the stories in Adjei-Brenyah’s debut collection draw from his relationship with his Ghanaian-American parents, his childhood experiences, and his interest in popular culture. His early exposure to the prison abolition movement allowed him to think deeply about the ways contemporary American culture reinforces the racism of the criminal justice system, giving rise to stories like “The Finkelstein 5” and “Zimmer Land.” At the same time, his experience in retail inspired a sequence of stories in this collection, which include “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing,” “In Retail,” and the titular “Friday Black.” Adjei-Brenyah is also an avid gamer and gravitates toward comic books, anime, and manga, which inform his preference for speculative storytelling.

Literary Context: Dystopian Fiction and Surrealism

Several stories in Adjei-Brenyah’s collection can be classified as dystopian fiction. As a subgenre of speculative fiction, dystopian fiction typically imagines societies characterized by severe injustice, unhappiness, and a pervading sense of fear. While dystopian stories are often set in the future, they are used to discuss sociopolitical issues in the present day, examining how these issues, if left unaddressed, could lead to terrifying outcomes. A popular example of contemporary dystopian fiction is The Hunger Games, in which American author Suzanne Collins considers the intersection between violence and entertainment by transposing the Roman gladiatorial games into a futuristic setting. Similarly, Adjei-Brenyah uses “The Era” to explore how the popular push against kindness and empathy in favor of cold, objective truth can result in a society that reduces people to quantifiable values like beauty and intelligence. “Zimmer Land,” meanwhile, imagines a theme park in which racial violence is not only commercialized but incentivized, raising questions about the ways contemporary forms of entertainment encourage violence against minorities. Through many of the stories in Friday Black, Adjei-Brenyah draws on and contributes to a robust canon of dystopian literature that critiques racist oppression. Authors in this genre include N. K. Jemison, Rivers Solomon, Nalo Hopkinson, and Octavia Butler.

Adjei-Brenyah also employs elements of surrealism to establish his characters’ personal connections to social issues. Led by French poet André Breton, surrealism emerged in the 1920s. Its proponents blur the nature of reality by blending realistic elements with absurd, dreamlike images. Dream logic, they argue, can arrive at ideas that pure realism cannot reach. Famous examples of surrealism include Salvador Dalí’s paintings and Federico García Lorca’s poems. In Friday Black’s first story, “The Finkelstein 5,” Adjei-Brenyah opens with the shocking image of a headless girl walking toward Emmanuel, the story’s protagonist, in a dream. The final story, “Through the Flash,” ends with three of its characters playfully discussing which poses they will strike as they are obliterated by a weapon of mass destruction. While ostensibly bleak, this surreal discussion highlights the value of being with loved ones in the present moment rather than despairing over a dreary future.