Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: “The first time someone died trying to get a Tickle-Me-Elmo should have been a big deal.”
One of the most exciting fiction debuts of the year is Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black, a darkly satirical short story collection that plays on our ideas about race, capitalism, and dystopia. By turns funny, tragic, and unsettling, Adjei-Brenyah’s stories work their way under your skin and stay there, leaping out at you when you least expect it.
This Black Friday, I’ll be thinking about the title story, “Friday Black,” which reimagines Black Friday as a kind of zombie plague, and has forever changed the way I think about the waves of shoppers who spend the day after Thanksgiving descending on stores across the country. I spoke to Adjei-Brenyah over the phone about how “Friday Black” came together, and what it is about our culture that makes people want to express their love and thankfulness for each other through shopping.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Constance Grady
For people who haven’t read the story, could you give us a quick summary?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
It takes place in the Prominent Mall. We’re following the top salesperson in this clothing store. It’s Black Friday, which is the day he shines, because he understands the shoppers, who are essentially sort of zombies. They can’t speak, they’re running, they’re trampling, they’re clawing, they’re completely visceral and violent in their pursuit of winter jackets.
Constance Grady
Does this come from your own experience working Black Friday?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Yeah, I worked several Black Fridays in Palisades Mall. It also just comes from listening to the news, with people just stampeding, literally trampling to death other people all over the country. When I worked at Palisades, I would see people camping out in front of Best Buy, Circuit City when that was a thing, and even our clothing store Against All Odds, running in to get to the North Faces.
Constance Grady
The violence in this story is pretty brutal. Does it feel to you more like an exaggeration of what Black Friday is like, or more of a translation from one less obvious mode of violence to another?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I think it’s an exaggeration. It’s surreal because even someone who’s trampling someone’s head in real life can still speak, usually, hopefully. I turned up the volume because it’s interesting to think about how bad the violence has to be for us to care. I got to make more acute points about how readily we allow love to become conflated with things in the stores, things that are purchasable; how often we allow love to be externalized, turned into something we can buy back from whatever company. Exaggeration helps with that. It can get really specific quickly.
Constance Grady
So the main character in Friday Black has this superpower, because in a previous year he was bitten by one of the Black Friday shoppers. That gives him the ability to understand the shoppers, which is what makes him such a great salesperson, but it ends up feeling incredibly sad and pointless. What to you is appealing about using a superhero trope for this kind of story?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I like the idea of what makes you different, other, and how often your superpower might be very closely tied to your weakness. He understands [the shoppers], but as the story reaches his resolution, we see that he’s even more similar to them than we realize originally. Often, with people’s powers, there’s a tension between them being themselves, being the person who does the heroic thing, and their ability to do that thing and be a person at all. I like that.
Constance Grady
It’s a pretty dark story. What to you is saddest and most upsetting about Black Friday as an institution?
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
I think it’s really sad how, right on the heels — and we do this with all our major holidays — but we have this day about being thankful, and then right against that is the buy-things-a-thon. Or even the same day! By the time I was done working at the mall, Black Friday started at 10 pm on Thanksgiving. That explicit, “here’s the things that are for being thankful for,” trying to get us to believe that it’s mostly things you can see and touch and buy.
And connected to that is how people are willing to literally kill other human beings to get to stuff, and how common that might be and how it seems to not be a big thing. To me, the first time someone died trying to get a Tickle-Me-Elmo should have been a big deal. Like, “This otherwise normal person was driven to hysteria! What’s going on?”
It’s myriad things, but it’s mostly just how easily and casually otherwise kind, normal people are pushed to this crazy harshness and violence. And because of their kindness, because of how they love this person they are trying to get a gift for, they maybe forget to love this other person they’re trampling.
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Breaking News: The author of Friday Black explains why he reimagined Black Friday as a zombie plague - News Paper
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