Chain Gang All-Stars

A beautiful novel about the impossibility of Black Freedom in America

There is a time in the writing process for me when I cannot actually write words because I am still in the midst of thinking and talking about the many words I already wrote. That’s where I am now, a month after the publication of Women of the Post, which has gotten beautiful reviews in the Boston Globe & on Shelf Awareness, among other places. While I’m here talking about launch month, I’m also proud of writing about my process for Writer’s Digest, and what it took for me to swing at historical fiction as a genre, and to actually make the time to write in the midst of a world that feels determined to keep us from the concentration we need to do so.

When I am not talking about my beloved novel, or thinking about the will I want and need to gather to work on the next book, I read. This summer, I have been savoring a few books at a time, which is why it took a minute for me to finish Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. The book was high on my list, since an editor friend raved about it, and I was a big fan of his debut collection of short stories, Friday Black.

Chain Gang All-Stars focuses on a near-future reality-TV show type universe, where the neo-slavery of the prison industrial complex is both more evident and openly cruel. Prisoners are Influenced, thrown into solitary until their loneliness drives them mad, (Rest in Peace, Kalief Browder) and a false hope for relief is offered to some of the strongest, most ruthless inmates in the form of signing up to be High Freed through CAPE, or a prison entertainment program. The main characters are Loretta Thurwar and Thee Hurricane Staxx, known in her freed days as Hamara Stacker.

Throughout the novel, there’s a lot of great wit, deep insight about the relationship between capitalism and capital punishment; the thin line between our aspirations to punish those who have broken societal rules and ethical codes in alignment with justice, and our individual moving goal posts when it comes to determining how, or if, we too should be punished for our sins. Some of us, particularly Black folks, are familiar with the consequences of over incarceration and hyper surveillance, but the statistics that Adjei-Brenyah incorporates into the harrowing narrative are still stark and outrageous.

But the reason I felt compelled to write about the book here is because the relationship between Thurwar and Staxx feels ultimately like a question about whether Black freedom is actually attainable in a world that has built so many barriers against it. Chain Gang All-Stars reminded me that Black love may be the only place where Black people can really be free. And Black love can be in the form of a relationship with another, or it can be in the form of a relationship with self.

I came away from finishing the book feeling that Black self-love is hard to cultivate in an imagined world such as this one, which is really just a metaphor for the real world we all navigate. But I also felt that as tough as love is to feel, as hard as it is to believe and sit with, love is love; and it lives in the pages of Chain Gang All-Stars nonetheless.