In reference to the killer of teenager Trayvon Martin, he creates Zimmer Land: a theme park for white people to act out brutal fantasies against people of colour. He imagines a dystopia in which corpses are swept from the floors of Black Friday sales where aborted twin foetuses, grey and dry, fight each other and compete for affection. I thought they could push the conversation in a direction that mattered.”Īdjei-Brenyah’s work is often called “timely” and Friday Black opens with “The Finkelstein 5”, a visceral account of murdered black children, decapitated by an attacker with a chainsaw. At his most confident, he is driven by the idea that “maybe they could help someone feel seen. Those stories that did make the final cut have been precisely edited to work together like a concept album in rhythm and style and beat, Adjei-Brenyah delivers a wildly creative collection that isn’t so much dealing with race, capitalism, violence, poverty, abortion and injustice as it is telling it from the inside out with blood and guts. I thought they could push the conversation in a direction that mattered Usually, I have somebody’s voice in my mind for the stories that actually take.” Maybe my stories could help someone feel seen. No, really, they were never going to be anything more than terrible … An idea is not enough, you could have a thousand good ideas every day. The dozen stories have been written over the course of eight or nine years, mercilessly revised and chosen by him from a bank of about 80. Adjei-Brenyah sets us in a bleak near future, “a world a little bit worse than ours”, he explains, “so maybe, collectively we could imagine a world that was much better”. Adjei-Brenyah is jet lagged, which he blames for being “at least 25% less funny”. “This is weird … Like I’m supposed to come into this room and think this is normal?” It is a small meeting room at his London publisher the walls are lined with dozens of copies of his book. It’s really absurd to think that people – and this is the cool part – living so far from where I’m from, have read my book and have felt anything about it, you know?” If he weren’t so genuinely excited, this might seem excessively self-effacing. “Before this book stuff happened, I’d been on a plane like three times in my life … Now I’m on a plane pretty much every day and it’s wild.
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