![]() The opening story-“The Finkelstein 5”-follows Emmanuel Gyan, a black man, as he tries to negotiate his Blackness with an actual scale that enables him to as it were, dial up or down how black he will be in various situations. The author’s imagination in this book is like a country where it rains knife-shaped ice, it chills the bones unexpectedly, yet it feels shockingly familiar. ( Friday Black just won the 2019 Jean Stein Book Award from Pen America). Nana Kwame Agyei-Brenyah’s debut collection of short stories, Friday Black, wields the sharpest tools of the dystopian genre-wild metaphors, stark imagery, and boundary-pushing hyperbole-to grasp at the contours of blackness through the prisms of racism, capitalism, morality, and family with the incisiveness of a tailor informed yet untainted by what is in vogue. We are somehow never enough just the way we are. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() When my Nigerian-American friends and I talk about what it means to be black in America, we talk about the ways in which we must ensure our blackness is the right size, the right cut-a digestible version of our identity. Our nappy or dreadlocked hair might be considered unprofessional in one instance, and a fashion trend when somebody else does it our English (Pidgin, Ebonics, Creole) deemed sub-standard. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |