Friday Black

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2018

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Themes

The Normalization of Violence

Many of the stories collected in Friday Black highlight the ways contemporary society has normalized aggression, distrust, and cruelty. They stress the need to recognize the world’s continued desensitization to brutality and violence and address it through rehabilitation, social support, empathy, and justice.

The first story in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s collection, “The Finkelstein 5,” alternates between two narratives, one of which recounts the trial of George Wilson Dunn. Although Dunn is a clear aggressor, having murdered five Black children with a chainsaw, his defense attorney twists the narrative of his experience to make it seem like Dunn was asserting his right to defend his family. This argument becomes an emotional anchor for the judge and jury to take his side, even as the prosecutor notes the inconsistencies in Dunn’s story. In their eyes, Dunn’s liberty is more important than justice for the brutal murder of five Black children. A similar twist in perspective is utilized in “Zimmer Land” when Isaiah’s concern about “equating killing and justice for [their] patrons” is dismissed by the park’s operators (98). The events in “Zimmer Land” hinge on a shift in park policy that enables children to participate in its interactive justice modules. By the end of the story, Isaiah sees how he is complicit in encouraging the park’s adult patrons to internalize their aggression as a defensive act while also normalizing violence in the eyes of children. Critically, “The Finkelstein 5” and “Zimmer Land” show how this violence is disproportionately leveled by white Americans against Black Americans. In “The Finkelstein 5,” Dunn’s testimony reduces his victims to racist stereotypes. Likewise, the park modules in “Zimmer Land” are built around xenophobic narratives, teaching its patrons to see Black and Asian people as outsider groups with sinister agendas.

“The Era” and “Friday Black” show how violence is normalized through everyday cruelties. “Friday Black” crafts a hyperbolic version of the mindless consumer, envisioning a world where the zombie-like behavior of infected customers is just another part of the job. Its unnamed narrator was injured by a customer during a past Black Friday sale, yet there is no indication that the mall he works for has compensated him for the injury or found ways to improve employee safety, let alone cancel the sale altogether. The story ends with the narrator giving up a parka to save a coworker’s life. Although he meant to give the parka to his mother as a sign of his love, he comes to realize the flaw in thinking that material goods can express his feelings better than he can. Retail workers, the story says, are left to fend for themselves while hitting the sales goals that only benefit the corporation. Meanwhile, in “The Era,” people are valued for quantifiable attributes, which they owe to the process of pre-birth gene optimization. Despite this, the process isn’t always successful, and people like Samantha, who underwent unsuccessful optimization procedures, are unfairly maligned. The story’s main character, Ben, seeks approval from his optimized peers, including his family, but their rejection drives him to turn on coping mechanisms like his reliance on Good. Overall, this society is characterized by banal cruelty as people insult and assault each other under the guise of honesty. Only by connecting with Leslie and her family, who treat him and each other with compassion and respect, does Ben find a glimmer of hope and a path out of addiction.

Moreover, violence is presented as an unhealthy coping mechanism in “Light Spitter” and “Through the Flash.” In “Light Spitter,” Fuckton and Porter see themselves as people who deserve more from the world, which leads them to inflict violence on others so they can understand how bad people like them feel. “Through the Flash” explains that when Ama was first trapped in the Loop, she was still dealing with the emotional impact of her mother’s suicide. Remembering how Carl had insulted her mother’s memory before the Flash, Ama uses him as a scapegoat for her grief. The trauma she subjects him to shapes him into a war god, similar to how Fuckton recognizes his impact on Porter when Porter recites a line from his suicide note. Both stories are resolved by the characters recognizing that violence brings no relief to their suffering and that they must stop others from inflicting further violence. As such, Adjei-Brenyah frames the normalization of violence as a systemic issue that is resolved not by total obedience to the standards of authoritative forces like the government, business organizations, or public opinion, but by empathizing with those who suffer the most from their impact.

The Plight of Retail Workers

Four of the stories in Friday Black revolve around retail workers who live through both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. As a former retail worker himself, Adjei-Brenyah draws from his experience to speak about the difficulty of fulfilling roles in this industry. In retail, workers face demanding, repetitive workloads with little guarantee that the goals they are working toward can ever be satisfied. This traps them in a place in which they work toward various illusions of satisfaction.

“Friday Black” and “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” both feature narrators who feel that they can find fulfillment from performing well in their jobs. In “Friday Black,” the narrator believes that a branded parka can functionally express his love for his mother, which motivates him to endure extreme violence from the infected shoppers. Eventually, his coworker Duo helps him realize that he can express love without participating in this system. At the same mall, the eponymous character of “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing” desires something more abstract from his employers: the validation that comes from being recognized as their best-performing salesman. He feels threatened by the new salesgirl, Florence, because of the way she effortlessly usurps his status. However, she is working hard to support her daughter, Nalia, while IceKing is working to feed his ego. This causes him to resent Florence, as he feels empty without his coworkers’ validation.

When Florence is given the spotlight in “In Retail,” she reflects on the emotional burden of her work. She is deeply affected by the suicide of another retail worker named Lucy, whose name has been reduced to a euphemism for not coping with the work. When a coworker tells her that Lucy was not the first to suffer this fate, Florence becomes conscious of her own vulnerability as a retail worker. She reflects on the way Lucy’s suicide, an attempt to free herself from the trap of never-ending retail work, became a spectacle to shoppers and workers alike. Outside of Nalia, it is difficult for Florence to imagine a life outside of retail, compelling her to hold on to happiness wherever she can find it. She faces the reverse of the problem that hounds the unnamed narrator of “The Lion & the Spider.” In the latter story, the teen narrator is set to go to college. However, his father’s sudden, inexplicable departure from home causes him to become the family breadwinner, supporting his mother, who is unable to work, and his sister. The narrator tries to downplay his circumstances in the presence of his coworkers, withholding the facts of his living situation and pretending that he will likely attend community college. This allows him to repress the frustration of being trapped in a lifelong cycle that will only lead to managing the store where he works or else working in the same position as he ages, a fate represented by his older coworkers.

Adjei-Brenyah concludes that there can be no real satisfaction in retail work and that the joy or happiness found in the role is illusory, temporary, and exploitative. Retail workers feed themselves to the machine of capitalism and come out no happier than they were when they first entered.

The Transformative Power of Magical Thinking

Adjei-Brenyah frequently uses surreal images in his work to reflect the dark nature of the contemporary world. However, some of the stories in Friday Black also explore the possibility that surreal or magical circumstances can affect people’s lives, transforming the world for the better in the process.

“Things My Mother Said” approaches this in the most grounded way, presenting a narrator who appears to experience a miracle when his mother produces a hot meal of chicken and rice despite their lack of access to gas and electricity. While it is later revealed that she cooked the meal in the yard, the gesture retains its mystical resonance, allowing the narrator to understand the depth of his mother’s love. Other stories like “Lark Street,” “Light Spitter,” and “The Hospital Where” introduce explicitly magical elements as inciting incidents, from reanimated aborted fetuses who pester the man who would have been their father to an unnamed deity that encourages an aspiring writer to use his gift during a trip to the hospital. In each of these stories, the magic is juxtaposed with the issues these characters face in the real world. The narrator of “Things My Mother Said” grows up in poverty. Fuckton and Deirdra from “Light Spitter” are implicated in a systemic cycle of violence. The narrator of “The Hospital Where” and his father are evicted, moving from house to house as his father requires more costly and intensive healthcare. Because these circumstances require magic to affect the lives of the characters, Adjei-Brenyah hints at how they might feel impossible to solve with real-world solutions.

Nevertheless, the magical lens of these stories is also a window for hope. Certain characters, like Jaclyn in “Lark Street” and the father in “The Lion & the Spider,” are inclined to accept magic as an aspect of reality. This, in turn, allows them to trust in the outcomes of uncertain things, encouraging them to carry on in the face of difficulty and strife. Jaclyn, for instance, turns to the psychic for reassurance because she finds relief in his ability to reassure her. Although she never explicitly refers to his predictions, she cites the psychic’s advice to do “what [she thought was] best for [her]” as her main takeaway (59). It is important for her that this advice comes from a psychic rather than her boyfriend, since the former presents himself as a link to a mystical universe. When her boyfriend reveals that he paid off the psychic to reassure her, her anger comes from his exploitation of her faith and yearning for hope. Likewise, “The Lion & the Spider” weaves a key Akan-Ashanti fable into its narrative, showing how the narrator’s father maintains a reverence for his native tradition. However, as the narrator notes, his father also bent the fable toward reality, at one point naming the three rabbit children after the members of his family. With this, the father was planting within his son an implicit trust in the power of stories like this one, which show how impossible circumstances can be overcome. When he reappears at the end of the story, he offers the narrator a ride home, mirroring the aid Mother Earth lends to Anansi to win the race against the Lion. Although his reasons for suddenly leaving are never made clear, Adjei-Brenyah suggests with the fable’s inclusion that the narrator’s father always meant to return. Friday Black asserts that through magic, people are able to engage with impossible circumstances.