‘Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep,’ thus goes the first sentence of Blackass. Much has been said of Barrett’s novel’s parallel relationship with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, but as he has reiterated, his story divorces itself from that primal inspiration as it moves beyond the space of a room. Furo emerges into Lagos looking white but with every other quality of his being Nigerian. It is a premise that gives room for astute social observation. The southwestern city is notoriously busy and Furo walks through its madness, his veiled Nigerianness a sort of mirror which reflects the supposed difference between how Nigerians treat white people and how they treat themselves.  

In their Strange Horizons conversation, Geoff Ryman brought up a valid concern, that Blackass seemed to exaggerate the privileges that come with being white in a Black country. Being white himself, he understood the experience, but it wasn’t as dramatically charged as Barrett painted it out to be. In response, the author pointed out the lack of a unified experience for Nigerians, how growing up in the North was so different from living in the East or West, Lagos particularly, which was the most liberal of the cities and had a flagrant mix of every ethnicity. Furo’s situation in Egbeda, as Barrett makes the point, revealed a lifestyle few people on the upscale Island area of Lagos knew. ‘Seeing a white person strolling down the street in Egbeda is like seeing a snake in the city,’ he said. ‘It is such a surprise’.  

I disagree. There is sometimes wonder, yes, but that doesn’t manifest purely out of the rarity of the view. Rather it is the circumstances in which the white person manifests themselves—a character like Furo would have elicited mixed reactions: disregard because he was too familiar to the ways of Nigerians or great regard, exactly for the same reason. Unfortunately, Barrett leans too heavily on the latter, down to Furo’s access with Syreeta, whose ‘Lagos big girl’ status is flashily evoked. There is economic heft in the narrative; the ambitions clash against each other, the means of reaching those ambitions as well. But besides this flawed representation of Wariboko’s whiteness, the Lagos in Blackass is wonderfully realized, with recognizable characters like the truck pusher and the immigration officer who works out his new passport.  

The failure of Blackass is its inability to stay focused. Barrett has spoken about his ambition for the novel. ‘I didn’t want to write the sort of novel usually expected from a first-time novelist: a coming-of-age story or a story of war,’ he said. ‘I felt bored by those topics, and I wanted to write something new.’ It is that newness, the techno-speculative element Barrett infuses into the story, that sends it spiralling. Even though he brilliantly handles the language of physical and sexual transformation, especially including the fizzy range of social media conversations, at some point that weighs on his focus. As a result, Blackass has one of the most unremarkable endings of a novel with high artistic vision. This arises from Barrett’s insistence to stay true to the histories of identity in his own life—his light-skinned Jamaican father being called an oyibo despite living in Nigeria for decades and marrying a Nigerian; him having effeminate qualities growing up. Angling for narrative reprieve through his characters, Barrett undercuts the narrative’s power. His authorial hand is visible, and this doesn’t bode well for a novel, especially one weaned from the peculiarities of such a vibrant, popular city.  

However, writing a story like Blackass was important for Nigerian literature at the time. No matter how Barrett evades generational placement—and though his belonging to any one is quite debatable—in 2015, the scene needed a novel to attempt something as spectacular as this. The degree of its success or failure is open to anyone to analyse, but I consider Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities to be an offshoot of Barrett’s ambition in his debut novel. Obioma is more faithful to the voice of his novel and that leads him to create a transcendent novel, though with editorial flaws without which it might have been elevated into the contemporary canon, alongside Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Habila’s Measuring Time. Other novels in this discussion are Ayobami Adebayo’s stark realism on Stay With Me and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim’s When We Were Fireflies, with its fantastic tale eliciting widespread critical praise. What these writers share is a faithful appreciation for the hallmarks of world literature, and it has been to their individual merit how these ideals enter their work. Otherwise, the majority of contemporary Nigerian literature has not stood tall on the shoulders of global influences, not with the intensity Barrett reflects. His reiteration of art for art’s sake reflects a passion for the writer’s craft that is missing today. It is a passion that imbibed his stories—if not the novel—with an exuberant Nigerianness, able to reflect the country’s sensations without falling into the pitfalls of sensationalism.  

With his forthcoming novel, Whyteface, which evolves from the universe of Furo Wariboko, it remains to be seen if Barrett would be able to extend the pristine vibrance of his stories into the novel’s framework, better than he did in his first. Hopefully he is more empathetic to the heavy lifting of Blackass, and would now be more delicate in the responsibility given to the new work, in order that it might reflect more originally the private realities of his characters. Because it is all there in the work—the swagger and sway of language, the tonal range of urban characterization and an awareness to Nigeria’s sensibilities of class. It is all there. For exuberant-minded writers such as Barrett, it has always been more a matter of what is left out than what is written in; the consideration being application and not merely talent⎈