Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black made the New York Times bestseller list recently, an astonishing feat for a debut collection of short stories. It’s not surprising because his dark and strange tales are so inventive and stirring that they read as the male counterpart to Leone Ross’s recent first collection, Come Let Us Sing Anyway, with its amazing realist and magic realist concoctions around black women’s lives. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories are equally ingenious, but through a male lens and, like Ross, they’re so daring and mind-bending that you haven’t a clue where he’s going to take you.
The opening story, The Finkelstein 5, is one of the most topical and devastating. A young man called Emmanuel talks about dialling his blackness up or down according to the situation. Speaking to a possible future employer on the phone, he code-switches his voice to “1.5 on a 10-point scale” of blackness, which won’t be possible when seen face to face. He knows that if he wears “a tie, wing-tipped shoes, smiled constantly… and kept his hands strapped and calm at his sides, he could get his blackness as low as a 4.0”. However, if he goes out in “a black hoodie, baseball cap and trainers”, his blackness rises to 7.6. The author cleverly expresses the pressures of assimilation and survival when you are from a vilified minority.
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