'Blackass' a Thoughtful Look at Race

Furo Wariboko, still living in his parents’ home at 33 years of age, wakes up on the morning of yet another hopeless job interview to find that he has become a white man. And thus, in a wry, bold play on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Nigerian author A. Igoni Barrett launches his readers into the story of one lost man’s journey through the roiling streets and turbulent politics of Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, while embarking on an investigation of both the transformation of an identity as well as the social implications of race. Barrett stakes out a daring plot of ground for “Blackass” to cover—and though the novel is neither narratively perfect nor a mind-blowing opus of revolutionary social commentary, it delivers a thoughtful and insightful snapshot of Lagos, race, and people that is ultimately satisfying to read.

Race is obviously inescapable given the novel’s premise, and there is always the implicit potential for race-related commentary to go awry when the author is of one race (Barrett is a black Nigerian) and the subject at hand another (Furo, though originally a black Nigerian, spends the novel as a white man). However, Barrett successfully executes nuanced thinking about race. Though Furo is in a place of power as a white person, Barrett also shows us the underbelly of his psychology, which most readers might not expect, or think to demand: his alienation and his sense of otherness. Furo continuously reaps the benefits one might expect a white man in Africa to receive—unsolicited help, job offerings, material gifts, respect. When Furo contemplates whether or not to tell his parents about his transformation, Barrett writes, “(Question: Would Furo’s family have accepted him for what he’d become? Answer: No white man has ever been lynched in Lagos.)” He is, ostensibly, superhuman. On the other hand, however, Furo spends much of the novel being ogled on the street, called oyibo (white person), patronizingly praised for his flawless Nigerian accent, brashly approached and solicited by strangers and prostitutes, exploited by businessmen, and feeling deeply insecure about being in public.

Barrett’s social scrutiny also moves beyond the novel’s overt premise of black-and-white race relations, adeptly unpacking the more universal, flawed, and hilarious state of being a human being. Much of this analysis is woven throughout the book in choice moments of action and eagle-eyed single observations. Furo’s sister visits the mortuary with her parents to look for Furo’s corpse, tweets about the appalling condition of the mortuary, and makes the hashtag “mortuary” trend in Lagos. “Thanks ALL!!! My phone battery’s about to die have to go now. #mortuary,” she tweets triumphantly, wonderfully exemplifying the ruthlessly click-absorbed mentality of social media. A stranger on the street asks Furo if he’s from Poland; Furo says he isn’t, and the man goes ahead and waxes on about his personal dream of moving to Poland. Furo’s skin color serves not only as a source of racial insight, but brings out the idiosyncratic and the laughable in human behavior.

Barrett is in part able to achieve this balancing act between social commentary and engaging storyline—critique and playfulness—through the versatility and quickness of his language. The pacing feels pleasantly casual and syncopated upon first read; Barrett’s voice often sounds like that of a friend telling stories over Saturday night’s round of drinks, though upon close scrutiny the diction is precise and original. He jests of an apartment: “Everything spoke of new money and no eye for colour coordination”; just one page later, he describes the dimples on its owner’s back as “a creator’s finger marks.” In many sequences of physical action and descriptions of setting, however, this voice becomes straightforward and cinematic, panning across rooms and zooming into people as they speak in a manner reminiscent of movie camerawork. The pace slows markedly some of these sections, which feels a bit at odds with the tightness and poetry of Barrett’s language elsewhere. Overall, however, the effect is engaging, endearing, and effective, rhythmically rolling the reader along from page to page, scene to scene.

Barrett’s rendering of Lagos stands out amidst all these laudable aspects of “Blackass.” Synthesizing his observational and linguistic skills, Barrett shows his readers the city in all its physicality, language, and social nuances. He delivers dialogue in unapologetic pidgin, written with absolutely no auxiliary explanation of what’s being said. He includes a chapter narrated in long strings of tweets. At times, he takes the liberty of pausing the forward momentum of the plot to expound upon a particular situation—Lagos’ youth joblessness problem and floundering education system, the dearth of Nigerian literature, the appalling and unregulated traffic, the dirtiness—or to create a vivid sensual sketch. In one instance, a paragraph’s single sustaining plot point is Furo arriving at a bus stop, after which Barrett writes: “In this roadside market stood food sellers with huge pots of steaming food, fish sellers with open basins of live catfish and dead crayfish, hawkers with wooden trays of factory-line snacks, iceboxes of mineral sodas and armloads of pirated music CDs… Then there was the noise, the raw sound of money, of haggling and wheedling and haranguing, the rise and rise of voices against the roar of traffic.” This description is not particularly, immediately pertinent to Furo’s situation at the moment, nor does Barrett ever really return him to such a market setting where this previous description might resurface in a reader’s memory. But by the time the novel concludes, all of Barrett’s investment in writing Lagos pay off, leaving a grand, compelling sensory and social impression.

In terms of social parable, “Blackass” builds well upon the foundation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” placing its meditations on identity and society in a vibrant, contemporary setting and reconfiguring it into terms of the omnipresent and ever-pressing questions of race. Barrett’s unique, well-controlled voice offers easy access to the teeming interior life of his protagonist and the bustling streets of his city—and his genuine sympathy for and appreciation of both hold the reader there to the end.