A Brief Book Review of Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I enjoy reading most when I have a pencil in my hand and can scribble thoughts in the margins of a page. And in the margins of this book, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection of short stories titled Friday Black, I kept writing “WOW.” It is rare that a book both feels as though it were a sample of the best of what came before it and starkly new. The reader opens “Friday Black” to a quote from Kendrick Lamar and that introductory connection to rap makes sense. Like the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” keeping the beat on Jay-Z’s “H to the Izzo” or The Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” lighting candles on Biggie Smalls’ “Big Poppa”, this book, like the best of hip hop, smoothly samples the past while revealing it in a new light. In the story “The Finkelstein 5” we hear a sample of Guitar and the Seven Days from Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon”. In the stories “Zimmer Land” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing”, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is chopped and screwed. Topics such as freedom, racism, consumerism, White fragility, safe spaces, Black identity, gene-editing, abortion, nuclear weaponry, and school shootings are explored in profound, highly imaginative, absurdist narratives. This book can be dark and violent, so squeamish readers (me among them) should be mindful. But this book is also at times funny and often hopeful, as a skillful young writer shares stories about America’s past, present, and future I’m not sure I would’ve wanted him to tell in any other way.