Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Moving forward with global release of: Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

9/14/2020

“Of Peacocks & Skylarks” art by Aberjhani used in title graphic for "Moving forward with global release of: Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind" C2020.

Sometimes in the middle of a pandemic a writer has to make difficult publishing decisions. That sounds a little odd, I know, but this is one of those times for me as I move forward with the global release of Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind, now on its way to online and offline book distributors.

The final stages of releasing Greeting Flannery to the public have not gone as smoothly as preferred but then few things have for most of us since COVID-19 arrived and refused to go away. With that being the case, I had to choose between either continuing to delay release of the book because of stubborn cosmetic problems concerning several pages incorporated to address the impact of coronavirus, or finally give readers access to the literary content I’ve been promising. I opted for the latter choice because the book as it stands, I believe, is a worthy contribution to current dialogues driving strategies to confront serious ongoing issues.

Consider that in addition to coronavirus, we are dealing more aggressively than ever before with: social injustices, correcting cultural biases, ending racial inequality, education versus misinformation, and adapting to a rapidly-changing world.

Quote from Greeting Flannery with art dedicated by Aberjhani to the U.S. West Coast: “With each passing day, I allowed myself to become a little more intoxicated by limitless possibilities which seemed sometimes to roll in with the fog, murmur suggestions that would have made me run yelling from them had I been anywhere [other than San Francisco], then leave me to cope with that special brand of terror bestowed by sweet and sour tastes of freedom.”

Lastly, when weighing the decision whether to publish or further delay release of the book, I was forced to acknowledge the old saying (paraphrasing Proverbs 27:1) that “Tomorrow is not promised us.” Truth of those words has never appeared more self-evident than during this #pandemic. Hopefully, however, the newly-released Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind (ISBN 1-716-68481-1) is only the first in a succession of editions which will improve more and more relevant with each publication . But because this is a first edition and features original art by the author on the front and back covers, plus some rare photographs in its “Antique Photo Album” section, it is a genuine collector’s item. Please remember as well that a collection of corresponding artworks has already been set up with several images on Fine Art America and more will be added throughout the month of September.

I welcome any and all feedback on the book for future editions and hope everyone investing in this one enjoys the read and finds the shared insights useful.

Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

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Invitation to a Bob Marley Rock-Steady (Excerpt from Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back of My Mind)

9/13/2020

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"Invitation to a Bob Marley Rock-Steady" title art graphic by Aberjhani)

How public celebrations of influential voices impact individual lives is one of the major themes in the book Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind. If you‘ve been checking out previous synopses of the book and excerpts from it, you know already its primary points of focus are on the legacies of three authors: James Alan McPherson, John Berendt, and O’Connor.

There are, however, quite a few more compelling figures within its pages, including Reggae master musician Bob Marley. The following except from Greeting Flannery O’Connor is about a remarkable concert Marley gave in Oakland, California, despite the illness from which he was suffering at the time, and which a young aspiring author excitedly attended. Following the excerpt is YouTube video footage of the concert itself:

Rocking Steady in Oakland

“As engaging as his songs were in and of themselves, there emanated from Marley’s raw corporeal soul-on-fire spiritual presence an infectious loving urgency which had nothing to do with being a stunningly innovative rock star. (What if the same could be said of O'Connor's non-threatening physicality for those who had found their way to Andalusia while she lived and coaxed from her enigmatic being something more than the thrill of greeting a celebrated writer?)

“None of those screaming and bouncing wildly up and down as he launched into the songs “Positive Vibration,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” “Lively up Yourself,” or “Is This Love/Jammin’” could have imagined a mere eighteen months later cancer would end his physical existence. The battle to save it had already started and yet there he was, up on stage, singing and dancing the dramatic pantomimes of a holy griot-prophet: laboring to convince humankind to reconsider its preferences for oppressive actions and paradoxically self-serving self-destructive values.”
––(from Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind now available for ordering)

Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

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Speaking of Women's History

3/7/2020

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“…turnin’ nouns into verbs braids into crowns
and always fetchin’ dreams from a horizon
strewn with bones and flesh of those of us
who didn’t make it…”
Ntozake Shange (from poem “people of watts”)

The poem from which the above quote was taken, “people of watts,” by the late playwright and poet Ntozake Shange (1948-2018) was originally published in her Wild Beauty collection and more recently in the special spring 2020 edition of African Voices Magazine dedicated to Shange and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019). The quoted lines summarize with agonizing eloquence the work Shange and Morrison have done to resurrect the lynched legacies of African American women. I hope they apply as well to my poem, “A Song of Toni Morrison My Soul Now Sings,” included in African Voices’ celebration of the authors’ amazing lives.

Cover of African Voices Magazine Spring 2020 special tribute edition dedicated to the late African-American women authors Ntozake Shange (seen here on the cover) and Toni Morrison. To order magazine on African Voices' website click the image.

Publisher Carolyn Butts, in her introductory note, spells out the importance of the women’s literary triumphs: “Part 2 of our Ntozake Shange issue honors two Black women writers whose language ignited movements around the principles of self-love, healing and interconnectivity. Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange freed us from restricting cultural mores while stretching our language and shifting our gaze. We tip our pens in gratitude…”

Balancing Scales of Recognition

Women have always occupied major positions in my nonfiction books, fictional works, essays, poems, and journalism. That may have become more evident over the past year with the inclusion of my work in the art catalogue, Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades, and announcement of my forthcoming lecture at the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia.

Morrison in particular has been a recurring subject. However, by comparison, I’ve written far too little about Shange. That realization comes as a major surprise because I recall clearly the controversies stirred over her iconic play: For Colored Girls Who have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, and the impact it had on me and others.

Described as a choreopoem by Shange in the late 1970s, the play had already become a cultural phenomenon (much like the TV production of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has today) by the time I saw it at Temple University in Philadelphia. The playwright had set astonishing witnessed truths, some of them beautiful and some of them horrifying, to linguistic music, and dressed them up in skirted dancing hues. It was as visually captivating as it was dramatically innovative and exhilarating.

Promotional art graphic for director Tyler Perry’s film adaption of Ntozake Shange’s FOR COLORED GIRLS starring: Loretta Devine, Kimberly Elise, Whoopi Goldberg, Macy Gray, Janet Jackson, Thandie Newton, Phylicia Rashad, Anika Noni Rose, and Kerry Washington.

Male friends had declined to go see it with me because they bought into the hype it was “anti Black men.” While there may have been grounds for such an argument, I had grown up with too many sisters and female cousins to fail to recognize the shocking validity of Shange’s voice. I had read the works of too many of her predecessors–like Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Petry, and Lorraine Hansberry––to fail to accept that hers was a major authentic contribution to a dialogue essential to African Americans’ expanded understanding of African Americans. As a young writer looking to develop his own voice, how I could I not be astounded by what she had done with hers?

It is not the destiny of literary sisters like Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Shange to rest in peace. Legacies such as theirs tend to lift our love for and memories of them ever higher in power. That is something for which we can always be grateful.

Aberjhani
© Women’s History Month 2020
Harlem Renaissance Centennial

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Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

12/19/2019

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Flannery O'Connor Wonder & Enigma title art graphic for Aberjhani's Postered Chromatic Poetics.

Among the biggest surprises to come my way in 2019 was an invitation to give a talk and sign copies of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah at the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home in Savannah, Georgia. Health issues prevented me from accepting the initial invitation but I am now slated to give a presentation in May 2020. The plan is to also have available for signing a forthcoming book in which I recount adventures and misadventures involving three iconic writers: O'Connor, James Alan McPherson, and John Berendt.

Any literary biographer will tell you writing a book of meaningful depth on an influential author requires a ton of research involving what other writers have already said about the subject. The following are reflections on another scribe's brilliantly-informed perspective, first published by AXS Entertainment as: "Events, Books, Highlight Flannery O’Connor’s Legacy."

Regarding a Gifted Child

One of the words most frequently used to describe Flannery O’Connor is “paradoxical.” Exactly why that word is such an appropriate one is demonstrated with informed passion and masterful skill in Brad Gooch’s finely layered biography: Flannery, A Life of Flannery O’Connor.

The fact that the mystery of O’Connor’s life and work continues to draw increasing attention in the twenty-first century is amazing when considering how steeped it is in the language of her times—the very racially-charged South of the mid-1900s–– and when noting her early death from lupus at the age of thirty-nine.
Gooch begins his story by revisiting a moment which would remain a reference point of both humor and symbolism throughout O’Connor’s remarkable life. He takes us to the author’s childhood home in Savannah, just off Lafayette Square, where in 1930 she was visited by a news cameraman “to record her buff Cochin bantam, the chicken she reputedly taught to walk backward.” While a chicken may have been the first bird to enhance her public profile, in her personal essay about the incident, The King of the Birds, O’Connor noted “My quest, whatever it was actually for, ended with peacocks.”

Her childhood penchant for reversing the accepted order of things might be read as nothing more than weird if attributed to another five-year-old. Because it is O’Connor, it may instead be viewed as one early hint of a creative sensibility which in time would create and coax characters into acting out challenging dilemmas of the human condition as she observed it. Biographer Gooch’s narrative is particularly astute when it comes to his evocation of how that sensibility recognized its own value and instinctively preserved itself within “a regulated and meticulously organized world within a world.”

Flannery O'Connor quotation art graphic by BrainyQuote.

Her tactics included the creation of poems, cartoons, and booklets in which she presented portraits of Edward O’Connor, her adored businessman father, and the resilient Regina Cline O’Connor, her mother. They also included somewhat restrained rebellions against the authority of the nuns, at St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls, whose job it was to help shape her character into one reflecting modern Catholic grace and values.

Like nearly all Americans who grew up during the 1930s, Flannery O’Connor’s childhood was marked by the economic ravages of the Great Depression. Her father lost first his real estate business, then a succession of jobs until he was forced to accept a position in Atlanta in 1938 and moved his family to Milledgeville, where in time his daughter would become one of its most famous citizens. Even more notable than the family’s financial up and downs was Edward O’Connor’s death from lupus at the age of forty-five in 1941. His daughter was then fifteen.

Each turn of fate in Flannery O’Connor’s life as recounted by Gooch seems to have reinforced her personality with powerful measures of theological insight, focused creativity, and humor. A couple of years following her father’s death, she noted: “A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder.” Most people stop at the “grief” part and allow themselves to simply wallow in it until ready to move on. The mystery of the “wonder” continuously pushed O’Connor forward.

Loss and Suffering

Flannery O'Connor: Acts of Redemption from Elizabeth Coffman on Vimeo.

At the age of twenty-five, in December 1950, she was told she was suffering from a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis, but two years later learned her true condition had been hidden from her. Sally Fitzgerald, one of her closest friends, told her she was suffering from the same disease which had killed her father. By the time she learned her actual condition, she had already distinguished herself as an aspiring writer at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop and as one from whom great things were expected at the renowned Yaddo Artists’ Colony. Her status as a professional author rested mostly on a number of short stories published in prestigious literary journals and on her now classic 1952 novel, Wise Blood, published just a month before learning about her medical fate.

Such “devastating knowledge” might have reduced another sensitive soul to a simmering puddle of depression from which they might never have recovered. As Gooch points out:

“She did not know whether she would be allotted the same three years of borrowed time as her father, following his diagnosis, or if indeed ‘the Scientist’ possessed a miracle cure. She had her doubts.

She also had her faith and intellectual passion, both of which helped her to confront the enemy known as lupus. (Gooch’s report on how doctors treated individuals with the disease in the 1950s is particularly interesting in light of the Food and Drug Administration’s 2011 approval of a drug called Benlysta as a treatment option; the authorization marked the first time in fifty-four years a new drug received such an endorsement.)

NEXT: The N-Word Factor: Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2)

Author

Aberjhani is the author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance. He is also an accomplished artist & photographer.

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Springing Forward with Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

3/23/2019

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"Simply by allowing its darker-hued brothers and sisters to openly discuss ideas without having to constantly justify, defend, or survive the color of their skin, whether in classrooms of the great Sorbonne or while walking un-hunted down a boulevard, Paris [France] made a crucial contribution to what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance and to the legacy of African-American intellectual traditions in general." from Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah quote, art graphic, & new 2019 book by Aberjhani. Click image to pre-order.

The basic image in this quotation art graphic was derived from visual studies prepared for the works of art which have become known as Harlem Renaissance Deja Vu Numbers 1 and 2 canvases. The work seen above was modeled after a famous photo (photographer unknown at this point) of a young James Baldwin holding a copy of his essay collection, No Name in the Street. In the poster graphic viewed here, this author is seen holding a copy of the forthcoming title, Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah (ISBN 978-9388125956) currently slated for release May 1, 2019. It is also now the focus of a new blog-site you can check out by clicking either the art graphic or this link: Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

With actress Regina King having won Golden Globe and Academy Awards for her portrayal of Sharon Rivers in the film adaptation of Baldwin's classic novel, If Beale Street Could Talk, plus the critical acclaim garnered by the 2016 biopic, I Am Not Your Negro, the iconic Baldwin is possibly more famous now than ever before. And No Name In Street, of course, has gone on to become an American literary classic.

The personal essay style utilized in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah may or may not reflect some of Baldwin's influence. He is referenced in the stories "Cities of Lights and Shadows and Dreams," and "Trees Down Everywhere" but any stylistic similarity is not intentional. Contemporary authors who grew up reading Baldwin, as I did, are more likely than not to have been influenced by him to one degree or another on one level or another.

Connecting and Disconnecting

The observation noted in the above quote about the city of Paris's connection to the cultural arts revolution known as the Harlem Renaissance might seem out of place in a book titled Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah. In fact it is not. One reason is because the book is being published during the 100th anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance.

Another is because Savannah, like Paris, also has strong ties to the event which is generally recognized as having lasted throughout the 1920s going into the 1930s, but which endured to a lesser degree well into the 1940s. That such an unlikely connection can be identified between the Harlem Renaissance, Paris (France), and Savannah (Georgia, USA) is one more example of how the phenomenal movement transcended geographical boundaries and strengthened the case for harmonious interactions between multicultural communities.

I first explored that three-way connection in an essay titled The Harlem Renaissance Way Down South, and now revisit it in the aforementioned story, "Cities of Lights and Shadows and Dreams." The narrative stands as a good metaphor for one of the primary concerns highlighted in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah: how we connect and why we sometimes disconnect during disruptive, or stagnant, moments in our personal lives and shared public histories. Measuring, determining, and applying the value of such awareness holds possible advantages for many more than the denizens of just one city or region.

Aberjhani
100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance

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Moving forward with global release of: Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Contact the Author-Artist

Invitation to a Bob Marley Rock-Steady (Excerpt from Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back of My Mind)

Rocking Steady in Oakland

Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Contact the Author-Artist

Speaking of Women's History

Balancing Scales of Recognition

Contact the Author

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

Regarding a Gifted Child

Loss and Suffering

Author

Contact the Author

Springing Forward with Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

Connecting and Disconnecting

Aberjhani
100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact the Author

Aberjhani

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Moving forward with global release of: Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind

AberjhaniAuthor, Poet, ArtistHarlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Contact the Author-Artist

Invitation to a Bob Marley Rock-Steady (Excerpt from Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back of My Mind)

Rocking Steady in Oakland

AberjhaniAuthor, Poet, Artist​Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Contact the Author-Artist

Speaking of Women's History

Balancing Scales of Recognition

Contact the Author

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 1 of 3)

​Regarding a Gifted Child

Loss and Suffering

Author

Contact the Author

Springing Forward with Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

Connecting and Disconnecting

Aberjhani 100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact the Author

Aberjhani

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Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Regarding a Gifted Child

Aberjhani
100th Anniversary of the Harlem Renaissance