Aborted by her the day before, they climb on to his pillow to talk to him. In Lark Street, a man encounters the apparently alive and definitely articulate twin foetuses of his girlfriend. We’re not sure exactly how Emmanuel is going to seek retribution, but we sense his blackness will be dialled up in the pursuit of it.
The author cleverly expresses the pressures of assimilation and survival when you are from a vilified minority.Įmmanuel is disturbed at the murder of a group of innocent African American schoolchildren by a white man who cuts off their heads with a chainsaw and tries to justify his actions in court. However, if he goes out in “a black hoodie, baseball cap and trainers”, his blackness rises to 7.6. 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”. 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. A young man called Emmanuel talks about dialling his blackness up or down according to the situation. The opening story, The Finkelstein 5, is one of the most topical and devastating. 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. 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. N ana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black made the New York Times bestseller list recently, an astonishing feat for a debut collection of short stories.
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