As much as I love his young adult fiction, I hope this is not Tochi Onyebuchi’s only excursion into adult fiction. It’s a clever trick that manages to give this novella a novel-like breadth. This allows Onyebuchi to tell two vast stories with the same concise theme. The narrative moves from South Central to Harlem to Rikers to Watts and jumps between Ella and Kev as they grow up. With an eviscerating and eloquent style, Tochi Onyebuchi tells a profound story about resistance. Maybe not so much if you like being in power.
Onyebuchi could have ended the story on a note of desperation and cynicism instead he opts for hope. For those of us dealing with it every moment of every day, Riot Baby isn’t so much of a warning about what might happen if we aren’t more vigilant and more of a thinkpiece about where we’re already headed. Onyebuchi shows a world that is frightening only if you’ve been exempt from mass oppression. And that’s what makes Riot Baby so impressive. For BIPOC in a white supremacist society, the dystopia is past, present, and future. To call Riot Baby 'dystopian' is to undersell it. The only drawback to this novella is that I wanted more! I could have easily inhaled a book twice as long, as I found myself wanting to know much more about the brave characters he created and the multiple worlds they inhabit. The narrative builds and builds, digging its claws in ever sharper, drawing the reader to the edge of their seat. In relatively few words, he creates such realistic images in the mind of the reader, immersing them in each scene.
Onyebuchi is a truly skilled world-builder and his juxtaposition of the real and the fantastic, the present and the possible future, is impressive. This technique works quite well to emphasise and sharpen his commentary, while also allowing a glimpse into a not-so-distant dystopian future. By weaving together history and fantasy, he adroitly demonstrates how racism has been, and continues to be, embedded in the culture of the United States. Riot Baby directly confronts decades of police violence by building upon real life events like the well-known beating of Rodney King, as well as nodding to perhaps lesser known, but no less important, events such as the Watts Riots of1960s Los Angeles and the shooting of Sean Bell in 2006. Onyebuchi packs a lot into this little book.
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