The thirty Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a new star in African American letters. With his first book, Friday Black, a short story that has just been published in French, this author who was born to parents of Ghanaian origin establishes himself as a powerful and innovative voice. The twelve short stories in this collection combine dystopia, satire and magical realism and show a clear and disturbing portrait of American society, a society plagued by violence, racism and outrageous materialism. Friday Black was unanimously awarded when it was released in the United States, and the author earned several awards and his nomination by the National Book Foundation to his list of the five most promising American authors in 35 years.
“Everything we imagine we have.” These lyrics are from rapper Kendrick Lamar, better known by his nickname “King of American Hip-Hop”. It is a tribute to King Kendrick that Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah highlighted this quote at the beginning of Friday Black, her very first fiction book that has just been published in French translation. The quote also repeats the author’s philosophy of life, at the beginning of his writing, which he explained to us:
“Very early on, I discovered that I could lose the material things I owned overnight, when I wrote was something no one could take away from me. I just needed my dad’s notepad and a pen to write. Even though the electricity was cut off in the house, I was able to continue writing. I also realized that I did not have to go anywhere to find stories. I could invent them myself. My stories are my true companions, because I created them from scratch. ”
Themes of possession and removal are at the heart of Friday Black, a collection of twelve short stories that revisit contemporary American society in the grip of racism, consumer greed and cyclical violence committed from generation to generation. The tone is set from the title, which is the reverse version of the consecrated formula “Black Friday”, which in American fantasy is associated with the shopping rose unit linked to the discounts that shoppers traditionally offer after the Thanksgiving holiday.
This book was published two years ago in the United States and has been criticized for its inventive approach to the moral and social issues facing Americans. Described as “dark”, “captivating” and “essential”, the news of Friday Black continues the emergence of a new talent on the African-American literary scene. They have been compared to the short stories of Ralph Ellison, Isaac Babel and Anton Tchekov. Excuse the little thing!
The pursuit of style and style
Adjei Brenyah, son of Ghanaian immigrants who have been in the United States for four decades, was born in Queens, New York, in 1991. He grew up in the suburb of the Big Apple and had a rather bookish teenager, divided between reading classics introduced by school and science fiction and Japanese manga. These readings helped shape the author’s taste for magical realism and the dystopian universe that characterizes his short stories.
The author of Friday Black has long sought his voice. Coming from his teens, realizing his desire to write and wondering if he would ever get published, he was convinced he had to write in a realistic style if he wanted to be serious. This is exactly what he did in 2012, devastated by the death of the unarmed African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin, killed by a security guard. During the first year of university, the student stood in front of his screen and wrote a brochure during the night condemning the systemic racism that remains in his country. Before going to bed, he printed his text in several hundred copies and distributed them randomly across campus.
This militant pamphlet went unnoticed. But this failure proved to be healthy for the stuttering writer and reinforced his determination to find a style that was both inventive and entertaining, while remaining close to his social and moral concerns.
The dissolution of her stylistic tensions between the fantastic and the realism, Nana owes her year of master’s degree in creative writing at Syracuse University in New York State. His path crosses a certain George Saunders, professor of Syracuse and a big name in contemporary American news. Close to the absurd comic tradition, Saunders was a decisive influence in the pursuit of voice and style of this student as promising as he was confused.
“He gave me two tips. I had in a way internalized the separation that I now consider excessive, between magical realism and realism itself. For a long time, I struggled to choose between these two writing styles. So I went to ask George Saunders, my master’s director, for advice. George told me that even a ghost story could be told realistically. Her response freed me from the feeling that I absolutely had to make a choice when I just needed to be myself. That was the first piece of advice. His second piece of advice to me: be simple, precise and as clear as possible. ”
Dystopia, massacre and dehumanization
Divided between social realism and fantasy, even aggravated futurism, the twelve short stories about Friday Black illustrate this heterogeneous sensitivity that today is the hallmark of Adjei-Brenyah’s prose. On these pages, we are dealing with a modern imagination that has its stories in everyday environments, such as shopping malls, theme parks, hospitals, suburban areas or even campus. But as we progress in reading, these everyday places turn before our eyes into theaters of dystopia, massacres and dehumanization.
These transformations resonate with evil and corruption in contemporary American society, as in a number of short stories in the collection (Friday Black, How to Sell a Jacket According to the Recommendations of the King of Winter, In the Sale) whose plot takes place in malls, these temples of consumerism . The author knows them from the inside and has worked there for several years, together with his studies.
Adjei-Brenyah revisits his old clothing store, stormed during the sales days by armies of consumers who came to rob the shelves, “everyone claws out”, “shoots the clothes and bodies”. Under this author’s pen with the superfluous imagination, the scene of banal consumerism is transformed into a ritual of zombified shopping, punctured by riots and macabre battles. Driven by the desire to own fashionable clothes at all costs, customers go over corpses to access the shelves.
We go from the macabre and exaggerated of everyday life to misleading futurism in two short stories in the collection (L’Ère, Lark Street) where the reader is urged to navigate through the atrocities of the post-apocalyptic society. Here class struggle is the norm and eugenics has been trivialized. On Lark Street, one encounters desperation and guilt from parents who are haunted by the interrupted fetuses of their unwanted children. “At least you’re to blame,” one of them tells his father.
We leave the private sphere of political and social criticism with the powerful news that opens the volume. The theme for Finkelstein’s five is racism in its bloodiest, dirtiest manifestation. A white father is accused of killing five black children playing outside a municipal library in cold blood, with a chainsaw. The man is appealing for self-defense, as the killer of Trayvor Martin and others before and after him had done. Finkelstein’s killers are acquitted by a jury that is more sensitive to the defendant’s arguments than to the outrage caused across the country by these murders. These murders of barbaric cruelty and hyperbolic proportions certainly never took place in real life, but Adjei-Brenyah deepens the logic of racist power relations in contemporary American society. committed regularly in front of their eyes against their black citizens.
Hyperbole, caricatures, average economy, these are the tools that the author of Friday Black uses with ingenuity and brio to touch and strike the minds of his readers. The strength of the ten stories in this collection lies in its writing and more precisely in the refined form of the short story where, as the author emphasizes, “every word has its raison d’être”.
“I, I like that my writing is powerful, concise and intense, which I think benefits the format of the short story. I think every word is a necessity. You can not spread in a novelty, which is like the tip of an iceberg. That’s all you need to evoke the world hidden under the iceberg. ”
Since the publication of Friday Black 2018, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has been involved in the writing of her first novel, a normal development, because is not the new anti-chamber in the novel? But according to the author, neither Kendrick Lamar’s words nor his reconciliations to the God of the Twelve Tongues, this mysterious tutler god of writers that readers have encountered on the pages of his short stories, are of much help to him in his novel writing business. A company like no other!
Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Translated from English by Stéphane Roques. Editions Albin Michel, Terres d’Amérique-samlingen, 261 pages, 21.90 euros.
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