Chris Wiegand
There is a fantastic scene in Martin Scorsese’s 1973 masterpiece Mean Streets. In a film packed with memorable moments, one sums up the dilemma faced by the central character perfectly. The scene is brief: Charlie and his girlfriend Teresa ‘escape’ the city (at her request) to take time out and spend the afternoon by the sea. A small-time mob member, born and raised in New York’s Little Italy, Charlie is a fish out of water at the beach. He can’t relax away from the streets, where he may well suffer from religious guilt and familial responsibility – and feel tense, threatened and confused – but where he also feels at home. Unable to wind down, the afternoon jaunt is cut short so he can return home.
With his hugely atmospheric debut novel Dark, published in the UK by reliable crime house No Exit Press, Kenji Jasper has taken a scenario similar to Scorsese’s and run with it. His novel shows what would happen to a character like Charlie if he were ever forced to leave his streets for an extended period.
Jasper’s protagonist – and Dark’s narrator – is Thai Williams, a 19-year-old African American born and raised in DC’s violent Shaw district. Shaw is a place where the "threat of bullets and beat-downs" continually hangs in the air "like the smell of burning tar". For Thai, security against its fits of street violence comes in the form of his three main ‘brothers’: E, Ray Ray and Snowflake, all of whom he has grown up with, and whom he knows will be there for him if he needs them.
Like Chino, the Spanish Harlem-bound narrator of Ernesto Quinonez’s recent novel Bodega Dreams, and like Tre, who is stuck in the streets of South Central LA in John Singleton’s movie Boyz N The Hood, Thai is the self-acknowledged "smart one" in his group. Like Tre and Chino, he finds himself drawn into a world in which he does not belong. Due partly to the company he keeps, he winds up playing the role of the gangsta after walking in on his girlfriend having sex with another man. When the same man appears at a neighbourhood party shortly after, he is handed a pistol by one of his friends and murders his opponent in a violent rage.
The act forces Thai into self-banishment, as he leaves town to wait for the heat to clear and relocates to the small town of Charlotte, North Carolina, where E’s mother – a prosperous estate agent – sets him up with a flat for the week, as he tries to figure things out. Re-adjustment to the pace of life in Charlotte takes time and to Thai the city seems "artificial, like it had been grown in a lab". It is the first time he has left DC in his life.
As Thai writes in a letter to his father that serves as the book’s prologue, "I’ve spent my whole life living on our block thinking that there wasn’t anywhere else to go." That he writes "on our block" as opposed to "in our city" is an important part of Jasper’s message. Thai not only feels lost outside DC, he feels lost outside his own neighbourhood. In this respect, Dark pays homage to the 1940 novel Native Son, written by Richard Wright, whom Jasper name checks, alongside Ralph Ellison, as a major early influence. A similar urban drama, Native Son sees the poor black protagonist Bigger Thomas accidentally murder a white girl. A product of Chicago’s dilapidated South Side, Bigger is unfamiliar with the white world outside the black belt and Wright plays on the difference between the white man’s Chicago and the black man’s throughout his book. Dark does the very same thing. As E tells Thai, "DC ain’t really even a big city and you ain’t even been through half of it".
As an urban African-American novel, Wright’s impact on Dark cannot be overestimated. With its day-by-day structure and interspersed accounts of its protagonist’s troubled dreams, Jasper’s novel also recalls Chester Himes’ powerful opus If He Hollers Let Him Go. The racial lessons learnt by Thai also recall the work of Wright, Ellison and Himes. Different places offer different types of people, and shortly after moving into the Charlotte apartment block, Thai finds himself having dinner with a white girl. The event haunts him on and off for the rest of his stay. He remarks after the event, "I’d never had dinner with anyone white before. To me all white people were like her, ghosts that lit candles in their apartments and felt uncomfortable in my neighborhood". The fish-out-of-water scenario, often used by authors as a predominantly comic ploy, is used by Jasper to convey deeper social and racial comparisons. At a white party, Thai comments that all those present are "wearing something that would have gotten them robbed where I was from".
Thai’s displacement from DC helps re-enforce key coming-of-age issues explored by Jasper in the novel. Many of the emotions voiced by Thai are typically those of late male adolescence, and several of the supporting characters are wrestling with the first pangs of existential angst. That the author, himself only 25 years of age, occasionally slips into melodrama is either the mark of an occasionally uneven first novel, or a real understanding of the voice of a 19-year-old boy on the break of manhood.
