“‘Chain-Gang All-Stars’ Is a Searing Indictment of the Prison Industrial Complex” - shondaland
Published: May 9, 2023Author Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah discusses how he arrived at the interesting premise of his first novel.
When Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah was writing his first book, a well-received short story collection called Friday Black, he saw the image of a woman “in the eye of the Colosseum” who was rejecting the fame she’d earned through killing. “She was dispassionately telling everyone, ‘I am not your savior or celebrity or whatever you want me to be,’” he says. When he sat down to write the scene, Adjei-Brenyah thought it would be a short story, but it just kept evolving. Over the next seven years, as Adjei-Brenyah was featured in publications like LitHub, The New York Times Book Review, and Guernica — even having the honor of being selected by Colson Whitehead for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” honor — that woman kept stirring in his mind and eventually became Loretta Thurwar, a convicted murderer who dominated a dark new form of entertainment, and that short story became Chain-Gang All-Stars, Adjei-Brenyah’s first novel.
In this grim vision of the future, prisons offer inmates the option to participate in the Criminal Action Penal Entertainment program, where they compete to the death against other incarcerated people. It’s a huge industry with an intense fan base. The main voices in the story are Thurwar and her team member/lover Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker. But Adjei-Brenyah gets in the heads of everyone involved, from the “Links” who fight on the field to the announcers, funders, audience members, and even a few protesters who want the matches to stop. It would be hard to say too much more about the storyline without spoiling some of the gut punch, but you can expect a visceral, heart-wrenching read that treats systemic issues with delightfully speculative skepticism and broken people with compassion and dignity.
Shondaland caught up with Adjei-Brenyah to talk about his move to novel writing and prison abolition.
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