Gaurav's Reviews > Friday Black

You are supreme and infinite.

Humanity has been quite strange, right from the outbreak of civilization. It is so full of darkness that if time takes reverse turn and our forefathers look at us, they would be taken aback by its sheer degeneracy; humanity has become so inhumane in itself that they would evolve back into ‘lower beings’ from horror so that earth or rather universe might be saved. The most civilized beings, who are ironically us, who think that we are supreme and infinite, who are so mad after power which may come through religion, oppression, suppression that we have become blind to see that it would ruin us- the humanity- eventually. Human beings have devised so many ways and means to control the organic flow of life that there had been numerous scars which had stained humanity over the age of evolution; we would be ashamed and abashed to face our future generations, if there would be any. Some of these scars the book deals with may be said to be as racial injustice, class struggles, violence, profiling, war, misogyny, genocide.



We have created issues which seem illogical right from the word go, however our entire existence keeps on struggling to cope up with these issues. Racism, in all of its forms, remains a massive cause of discrimination, indignity, and lack of equality for millions of people in the world today. Addressing racism in the world today requires understanding how human rights are violated by racial ideologies in addition to discriminatory acts. It is so ingrained in us that sometimes we don’t even realize it that we are racist. And racism is not restricted to western civilization, as some believe; the colonial culture has propagated into those too who had been oppressed. Every time such incidents, in which a race is declared superior to others, leave a bad taste in your mouth, in fact there are some ‘enlightened’ people who’ve written about gene supremacy. We also need to understand that racism is not just limited to social discrimination or apartheid, with this comes the economic, judicial, existential prejudice too. In fact, the entire life of some people becomes just an existential struggle due to it and oftener than not, end up in crisis. The violence which comes as an underlined impact of racism shows its gravity and the extent to which it may affect those who are at receiving ends. The unique feature of racist violence is that it has a ripple effect: not only does the individual have to deal with the hurt and isolation but everyone who shares that person’s identity becomes a potential target. This community then has a shared fear that they are vulnerable to harassment and violence because of their identity. We have seen off late that people don’t get much concerned on hearing news or incidents of heinous crimes based upon racism, since we have become so immune to adversaries of life that no injustice boils our soul any more, and it’s dangerous trend as we are becoming accomplice to such grave crimes, though unknowingly but certainly unacted.

I generally do not read new authors, for I’m quite selective reader as perhaps I’m afraid of bad experience a book might leave you with. I got inspired from the review of my Goodreads’s friend -S.penkivich’s superb review, I immediately decided to buy the book and take a dig at it. Friday Black brings forth a new but a sharp, witty and pleasantly surprising voice to the world literature, the voice which is sharp like razor and can cut deep into your consciousness. Friday Black is as intellectually hefty as fiction can get. In these twelve stories, Adjei-Brenyah turns over ideas about racism, about classism and capitalism, about the apocalypse, and, most of all, about the corrosive power of belief. His work is fiercely, spikily funny. And no matter how supernatural his stories get, how speculative his fiction is, each one of them talks about the world as we know it. The excitement it brings with itself wrapped underneath it, the furious, witty, captivatingly dark but quintessential study of humanity in a dystopian world where violence is used as resort to make way through the vagaries of life. The stories come as a dark revelation to the reader, as they are immensely charming but edgy and insightful but brutally honest narrated through believable but frightening narrators. These striking stories set in twisted prosaic settings, explore themes surrounding black identity as it relates to a range of contemporary social issues.



As you pick up the book, you are thrown into muck of savagery which is swathed in the fabric of racism which takes you through the hell- the Inferno, in which brutal violence shudder your notions of a civilized society and you are forced to contemplate about yourself- the humanity. Men of particular race or color are killed in the name or rather joke of self-defense and the murderer has been acquitted. You are filled with utter disgust which traverse through the painful track to your stomach, the repulsion it creates inside you, is not something you may digest, for how can assimilate something which is part of you. The abhorrence you feel cut deep in your heart and a vomit of unendurable aversion wants to spew out from your mouth, but you want to hold it back due to your utter shame. Tears come to the very brim of your eyes, you want to cry but you are not strong enough to stand your own humiliation, such clump of darkness you have become! You are taken through dystopic muck and more before landing you in a transcendent spiritual place.
Some of the stories such as The Era are bittersweet satire on the impact of racism. An instinctive and unlearned person may that these are petty issues but the book does not talk to such man. The story is set in a dystopian futuristic world wherein you are robbed off your emotions, your natural feelings, in which your knowledge and intelligence have to be relearned. Being emotional isn’t prideful, and being truthful, prideful, and intelligent are the best things. The State now decides you should feel and what you should feel. The useless things like literature, music which are used for self- amusement in old world have no place in the new world, for the new world is progressive wherein they have created things which may keep you amused and happy. And those, who still follow the norms of old world, are supposed to inferior ad they are better named as shoelookers, for what good they have done to look upright. A few of the stories—“Friday Black,” “In Retail” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing”—confront consumerism with razor-sharp satire. In Adjei-Brenyah’s world the workers of the Prominent Mall routinely mop up pools of blood following store-aisle riots: “It isn’t always like this,” says the narrator of “Friday Black.” “This is the Black Weekend. Other times, if somebody dies, at least a clean-up crew comes with a tarp.”




”Joke-tellers, humor-makers,” says Father McStowe. “Back in the old world, it was a life profession to make laughter. One of many interesting old-world lives.”


The stories such as ‘Lark Street’ deals with prominent modern world issues such as abortion in a quite straight-forward but piercing manner, the weakness of the narrator is portrayed like some free flow black muck. The Hospital Where," a story in which a young writer devotes himself to the Twelve-tongued God, who imbues his imagination with real-world power. Whatever he writes comes true. The responsibility is total, and hard to harness. His efforts to heal the sick go awry. The story takes the road if imagination on which the divinely endowed narrator chooses a path to get the people free of the vicious circle of existence. We see a tinge of absurdity of life here conveyed using supernatural themes.


The dark and wry humor associated with the stories can’t be missed, as we see in Zimmer Land, a black man works at the titular theme park where white people and their children are allowed to shoot him in a virtual simulation: “It was better for me to get fake blasted 10 or 20 million times a day than for an actual kid to get murdered out of the world forever.” The irony of the vagaries of life prevalent in the modern world is painted on a tapestry of absurdity through sardonic disposition. Zimmer Land is another story of the collection which hits you deep. The greatest illusion of the technology may be that it can offer experience without consequence. Isaiah feels loyal to his employer, but he’s also highly attuned to the social and ethical complexities and implications of Zimmer Land’s services. As the black youth in “Cassidy Lane,” Isaiah observes the zeal with which many customers (who are armed in the module) escalate the otherwise innocuous encounter as if intent less on “problem solving” than on aggressive confrontation and even murder. ‘Zimmer Land’ and ‘The Era’ are imaginative and feel like societal mirrors in an accessible way. In the violent closing story Through the Flash, Ama is a mass murderer with superhuman strength who’s trying to mend her ways by volunteering at an old folks’ home and protecting her brother from the evils of her former protégé Carl.

I dream this dream often. But this time, after I'm dead, I feel my soul peeling from my body. My soul looks down at the body, and says, 'I'm here.


We see utter violence in the final story, Through the Flash, which is an intense and harrowing Groundhog Day journey in which day got struck infinite loop of time and starts over again and again with flash. The infinite loop of reality represents here infinite possibilities of infinite time, and its potential implications for morality and redemption. The story moves and breathe and explode on the page. The narrator has to resort to extreme violence to save his brother time and again as they are struck in a loop. The loop here may represents the horrifying and heart-rending condition of those who are oppressed, who have been trying to get away from the powerful jaws of tyranny (which exists on brutality) and it is being caught again and again or the freedom is just an illusion, the jaws are too powerful to break free at all.




We see the threads of magic realism woven expertly and deftly around the themes of dystopia in which the characters are endowed with bit of divine power, which takes them through the absurdities and bigotries of life. The supreme deity may sometime expresses itself through Twelve-tongued God; sometimes through its sheer immortality; sometimes it's a preternatural gift for selling jackets. Death, murder and violence are constants throughout this book, and appear in most stories, even the ones that seem to be the most benign. It can often feel too much and so this is a collection that you might pick up and put down, rather than being able to read through. One thing can be said with conviction about these stories that these are ingenious, so daring and mind-bending that you haven’t a clue where you’re being taken to. We see that in each of the stories the narrator is trapped in situations which are not kind to him. He has to resort either to supernatural or intelligent but exploiting or violent but honest means to pull himself out of those traps.


The dystopian story collection as full of violence as it is of heart. To achieve such an honest pairing of gore with tenderness is no small feat. We see quite a few instances right through the collection wherein the violence is portrayed as poetry. Red blood drizzled the concrete. Or in Friday Black- Now I have a jagged smile on my left arm. A sickle, half circle, my lucky Friday scar. The trivialization of the heinous crimes of humanity in effect intensifies their impact in a sarcastic and humiliating way, which forces humanity to ponder upon itself, it’s history. The language crafted by the author with the precision of a surgeon so as to have an underlying theme of irony or sarcasm so the words may strike right chord with your sensibility and would not just hung in open air.

Which meant for the reasons we still don’t know, we each came to realize we were replaying the same thing over and over, and the realizing happened at different times for everyone. It was a pretty alarming thing. To see you’re trapped in infinity and know that no one can explain exactly how or why.

In Friday Black, the ethical rot and tumult coming from America's buyer culture is pounded home through the eyes of a shopping center's adored, top-selling colleague: "A lady climbed the denim divider searching for a second pair her size. She was shouting and shaking the wooden cubby divider so hard that the entire thing nearly fell on Duo and everyone in his area. Pair jabbed her off the divider with his range. She fell on her neck. Another lady grabbed the SkinnyStretches from her dead hands." A later story, How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing, takes us back to the shopping center as the top vender loses his position of authority, his curve point of view denoting the contrast among white and dark clients: "When they mean me, they state, 'the tall one', on the off chance that they're white. In the event that they're dark, they state, 'the dark person'". The accompanying story In Retail comes back to an increasingly cutting edge tone that doesn't exactly work with the horrendous topic of an associate's suicide. The attachment of early stories gets lost now and again with more tightly topical improvement and progressively bound together endings required in stories like The Lion and the Spider and Light Spitter.


In “Friday Black,” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has written a powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories meant to be read by everyone of us who care about justice, who care about humanity. The words of the author are like razor-sharp which cuts through our mind into the realm of your imagination to take you through the embarkment of horrors of humanity. As it is the case with all great dystopian works, Friday Black seems to based in a futuristic world but it’s very much about the world we live in right now.

All you feel is infinite, knowing all the falls and leaps and sweet and death that’s ever been will be trumped by the wall of nuclear flying at you. You of all people. Then, before you’re gone, you know that all that’s ever been will still be, even if there are no tomorrows. Even the apocalypse isn’t the end.