The Soundtrack of Ache: On Chimeka Garricks’ A Broken People’s Playlist

Some books are symphonic. Others are closer to mixtapes—loose, lived-in, stitched together by effect rather than plot. Chimeka Garricks’ A Broken People’s Playlist belongs to the latter category. A collection of interlinked short stories set in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, this 2020 volume arrives with its own sonic scaffolding: each story is named after and inspired by a song, mostly soul, rock, and R&B classics—Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Labrinth, and others whose music has historically cradled sorrow and offered its own vocabulary for survival.

In Garricks’ hands, the playlist is not a gimmick. It is the architecture of the book’s emotional world. Each story is a fugue in its own key: yearning, anger, resignation, tenderness, or grief. Together, they build a map of human fragility—a city populated by people not so much broken as beautifully bruised. Garricks, a lawyer by profession and author of the acclaimed novel Tomorrow Died Yesterday, brings to this collection an understated lyricism and a deep familiarity with the inner weather of Port Harcourt life.

The book opens with “Somewhere in America (There’s a Street Named After My Dad),” a story braided with Jay-Z’s introspective track of the same name. A young woman struggles with the death of her father—a local hero who was anything but heroic within the four walls of their home. The emotional terrain here is deftly navigated. Garricks is not interested in absolutes. He writes his characters in chiaroscuro, layering bitterness with nostalgia, love with loathing. The story is less about the father’s actions and more about the daughter’s attempt to rewrite the memory of him into something she can live with.

Elsewhere, in “Do I Wanna Know?”, inspired by the Arctic Monkeys’ confessional anthem, a man tries to rekindle a lost romance—only to realize too late that some loves are best left as questions unanswered. The story is elliptical, mournful, a mood piece more than a narrative arc. And that is perhaps Garricks’ quiet genius. He is less concerned with plot than with pulse.

What distinguishes A Broken People’s Playlist is its emotional intelligence. Garricks writes about grief and estrangement with a restraint that honors the pain rather than exploiting it. “In the City,” for instance, draws on Labrinth’s slow-burning ballad to tell the story of a woman battling depression in the aftermath of divorce. Her loneliness is not romanticized; it is detailed in the way she lingers too long in the supermarket aisles, the way she pretends to be on a call when walking past people, the way her eyes search for signs of recognition in the faces of strangers.

In the story titled “Love is a Losing Game,” inspired by Amy Winehouse, Garricks reveals a man’s unraveling through a series of text messages and flashbacks. The woman he loves has moved on. His masculinity, frayed at the edges, offers him no tools for healing. Yet Garricks avoids cliché. The man’s heartbreak is not noble or pathetic—it simply is. Raw, persistent, and unresolvable.

What makes this collection feel radical in its subtlety is how it resists the tropes often associated with Nigerian fiction in the global imagination. There are no violent uprisings, no breathless commentaries on corruption, no caricatures of Lagos hustle or Nollywood excess. Instead, Garricks writes the emotional lives of Nigerians with the same nuance that writers like Raymond Carver or Jhumpa Lahiri have brought to American and diasporic characters. His Port Harcourt is not just a place; it is an atmosphere—humid with longing, punctuated by silences more resonant than speech.

There is a distinctly male emotional register that pulses through many of the stories—a kind of bruised introspection often absent in African fiction’s portrayals of men. Garricks’ male characters cry, apologize, falter, remember. But they are not reformed archetypes—they are real, unsure, inconsistent. In one of the most affecting stories, “Redemption Song,” a middle-aged man looks back on a childhood act of cowardice that haunts him decades later. Bob Marley’s iconic ballad plays as both soundtrack and spiritual provocation. Garricks is interested in how men carry regret, how they remember their own failings, how they bury their worst impulses under decades of silence.

The collection is not without unevenness. A few stories veer too close to sentimentality, and some characters blur into one another in tone and temperament. The use of song as motif occasionally risks overshadowing the narratives, especially when the emotional cues from the music are leaned on too heavily. But these are minor blemishes on an otherwise richly textured work.

One of the most powerful pieces in the book is “Everybody Hurts,” which dares to wade into the often-taboo terrain of suicide. The story unfolds gently, almost imperceptibly, until it arrives at a climax that leaves the reader winded. Garricks does not sensationalize mental illness. He shows its ordinariness, its banality. He asks: What if pain is not always loud? What if suffering wears a polite face and still goes unheard?

The musical structure of the book is more than thematic. It underscores Garricks’ belief that music is how we survive. Each story is a song—a memory, a regret, a conversation never had. And like any good playlist, the order matters. The final story, “I’d Die Without You,” closes the collection with the kind of ache that doesn’t resolve. A woman attends the funeral of a man she once loved. He had been her rhythm, her companion, her undoing. She carries the sound of him like a phantom limb. The story ends not with revelation but with residue.

In a literary landscape often crowded with maximalist storytelling, A Broken People’s Playlist is remarkable for its restraint. Garricks does not raise his voice. He does not lecture. He listens. And he invites the reader to do the same. What emerges is a book that pulses with pain, but also with quiet grace. It is, above all, a love letter to those who feel too much, too quietly, too alone.

There is a line in Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” that could serve as the epigraph for this entire book: I’m just a soul whose intentions are good / Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood. Garricks understands that line. He has written a book full of souls like that—flawed, yearning, unfinished. The broken people in this playlist are not looking for redemption. Just a place to be heard.