Susie Anderson
Staff Writer
From behind the podium Thursday in the Hall of Philosophy, looking out to an audience of attentive and literary Chautauquans, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah opened his lecture saying, “I feel like a Black Socrates right now.”
Adjei-Brenyah is the author of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection for a week themed “The Global Rise of Authoritarianism.”
“I wonder what made the organizers think of that (theme)? Like is there something going on?” he joked.
While Americans typically look beyond their country to find examples of wars against humanity, Adjei-Brenyah implored audiences to consider the land upon which they sit.
“Its first stewards suffered a genocide, so this land of the free can grow a robust economy on the backs of slaves,” Adjei-Brenyah said.
Citing a recent video posted to the White House Instagram employing the viral trend of ASMR to present human beings carted off in chains to deportation, Adjei-Brenyah emphasized the insanity of the modern documentation.
“Since its inception, the nation we now call America has moonlighted as a multifaceted death machine. My latest book is about just one of those avenues of destruction — the carceral system, the prison industrial complex,” Adjei-Brenyah said.
When he was 11 or 12, Adjei-Brenyah asked his father, a criminal defense attorney, if his client was guilty.
“I remember my father saying, ‘Yes, Nana, he did kill someone. But it’s not that simple,’ ” he said.
While he wanted to ask more, the moment planted a seed for Adjei-Brenyah.
“Years later, the novel Chain-Gang All-Stars is out in the world, and my father is not alive to see it, but I think he would’ve liked it,” he said.
After writing the book, visiting prisoners and seeing firsthand the impact of the U.S. carceral system, Adjei-Brenyah said he believes “vehemently in abolition and (that) the end of prison as we know it is essential to the arrival at our better collective destiny.”
Adjei-Brenyah then read from the prologue of Chain-Gang All-Stars, engaging the audiences as participants with a call and response of the name of character Melancholia Bishop. Once he finished reading, he explained that he thinks his father was “offering an invitation to nuance.” Nuance is a gateway to compassion, Adjei-Brenyah said.
“Prison destroys our ability to respond compassionately to the mental health crisis that is never truly attended to because we have the structural capacity to remove those in need rather than help them and look at their suffering, which we would rather understand as an inconvenience to us,” he said.
Adjei-Brenyah said one way to look at being American is to gently ignore the smell of blood by endorsing systems that strip humans of their rights.
“Aspiring autocrats always use our fear as a means to consolidate their violent power,” Adjei-Brenyah said. “They always create an imagined ‘other’ that must be caged or killed.”
Using his fist as a metronome, Adjei-Brenyah conducted a chorus of Chautauquans in humming as he read a scene further on in the book. In the chapter, Hendrix “Scorpion Singer” Young and his chain-gang of prisoners march across a near-future American landscape, singing as they mourn a member lost to the violence of their existence in a privatized prison system.
To the tune of Chautauquan hums, Adjei-Brenyah sang, “His mama named him a king’s name, because she knew what he had with him. His only sin was to be human, so please God let him in. Please God, let him in.”
