Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Conversations with the World 114: Literary FB Connections

5/4/2024

A major part of Facebook’s enduring popularity is the platform’s ability to accommodate group discussions and functions. My own capacity for participating in such groups is limited because my offline creative endeavors. Despite those limitations, I do sometimes, through different groups, weigh in on issues impacting our shared human condition and inspired aspirations. Aside from on my own FB profile, the American Literature Group, Contemporary World Literature, and Notes on the State of Southern Poetry are a few of the places on FB where I’ve been able to expand on core subjects to incorporate different contemporary issues.

In the sections below are two recent examples in which I focus on works by two American authors to address matters concerning black women in the publishing industry, antisemitism, college campus protests concerning the Israel-Gaza conflict, and nonviolent conflict resolution.

MARGARET WALKER

(Photo courtesy of Jackson State Univ Margaret Walker Center)

“…Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be
written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue
forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty
full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in
our spirits and our blood.” (Margaret Walker, from For My People, title poem)

When reading the above quote, it helps to remember that it comes from a book written in the early 1940s. The author, Margaret Abigail Walker (July 7, 1915 – Nov 30, 198) was addressing the need to end the “Jim Crow” racism commonly practiced in the United States at the time. Her words should not, as some FB commenters seem to have done, be interpreted as necessarily applicable to various modern-day conflicts in different countries. At the same time, there are certainly those in need of self-determination who may find them inspiring.

The success of authors like Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Terry McMillan did a lot to make the doors to America’s publishing industry open a little wider for African-American women during the 1980s and 1990s. But before of these literary superstars came along, there was author-poet Margaret Walker. She first gained fame for her poetry collection For My People (1942), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

Walker’s reputation as an accomplished author was confirmed with the publication of the celebrated novel Jubilee (1966). She was also lauded for several more volumes of poetry, for her controversial study–– Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius : A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work (1988), and for her work as an educator at Jackson State University in Mississippi.

HAROLD BRODKEY

(1988 public release photo of Harold Brodkey by Jerry Bauer. Tint edit by Aberjhani 2024))

“I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquility, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven. ... I admire the authority of being on one's knees in front of the event.” ––Harold Brodkey (AR, American Review 20: The Magazine of New Writing, 1974, U.S. Bantam Books. Quote frequently attributed to composition titled MANIPULATIONS.)

Somewhere in a box of books I stashed away to protect them from hurricane scares is a 596-page 1st-edition copy of Jewish-American author Harold Brodkey’s highly-acclaimed book, STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE (1988). I bought it when several copies landed on a bargain table in a bookstore I managed.

It didn’t seem possible that Brodkey (1930-1996) would live up to all the reviewer hype comparing him to the likes of Marcel Proust and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Not only was I proven wrong, but joined the ranks of those who eagerly awaited his long-rumored masterful novel, THE RUNAWAY SOUL (1991), and who were astonished to read his memoir of dying from AIDS titled THIS WILD DARKNESS (1996).

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how Brodkey dealt with the complexities of self-awareness, sociopolitical identity, and intimate relationships in his work and life. His style prompts readers’ to embrace complexity in order to reach practical inclusive understanding. Recent reports on antisemitism, Islamophobia, and disruptive war protests unfolding on college campuses across the globe have made me want to dig through the boxes of books climate change forced me to put away, and to revisit his work.

The idea of someone attempting to reduce the significance his Jewish-American bisexual first-gen American literary being, by squeezing their understanding or misunderstanding of it into a disposable demographic box, makes no sense to me. Yet that biased tendency, much more than informed awareness, seems to be driving the actions of so many at this time.

By Aberjhani
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
and Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Conversations with the World 113: Return to Harris Neck, Georgia
Conversations with the World 111: Speaking Truth to Power and Ourselves 2
Conversations with the World III: Speaking Truth to Power and Ourselves Part 1
Conversations with the World 110: Some 2022 Thoughts on Love and War
Conversations with the World 109 Reading Myself All Year Long
Conversations with the World 108 Ben Okri's Existential Call to Creative Arms
Conversations 107 20th Anniversary of September 11
Conversations 106 Reconciling Race and Justice in America
Conversations 105 Moving Forward with Hope and Determination
Conversations 104 More Thoughts Unspoken on Flannery O’Connor
Conversations 103 A Global Passion for Rainbows
Conversations 102 Encouraging Conscious Co-existence
Conversations 101 Democracy, Personal Whims, and Accountability

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Text & Meaning in These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

5/6/2023

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("Silence of the City" Skylark Art by Aberjhani c2023)

An important difference between the introduction to These Black and Blue Red Zone Days (ISBN 979-8-218-17561-0) and the planned art book edition, currently titled Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone, is the absence of a definitive discussion on the meaning of the term Red Zone. Some prefer the intrigue it evokes without a precise definition. For those more drawn to the opposite, presented here is condensed version taken from the intro to the art book edition and which can be referenced as a supplemental text to These Black and Blue Red Zone Days. (Check out the paperback edition on Amazon)

Rainbows and COVID

The colors of a rainbow arcing across the sky after a nerve-rattling storm often inspire people with a sense of hopefulness and gratitude. They indicate, we like to think, better days are on the way. The red, orange, yellow, green and blue generally associated with the natural wonder prompted very different responses when they began appearing in charts posted on the internet, published in hard print, and presented in neighborhood meetings to inform communities of how likely their citizens were to contract the COVID-19 coronavirus and, possibly, lose their lives to it.

…A dull shade of blue close to what some in the southern United States call “haint blue” (meant to discourage unwanted spirits from invading a home) was used for small and large dots on maps to identify locations where COVID-19 cases had been discovered. Dull red circles like splotches of fading blood stains were used to indicate where deaths had occurred. None of this, at first, meant anything to me or most people I knew.

…So far as the epidemic-turned-pandemic went, there was nothing to worry about unless someone started posting case maps of the United States showing the entire Peach State of Georgia smeared crimson. At any moment, someone was going to announce a vaccine or cure had been developed and we would all laugh about having dodged a germ-infested bullet. It would no longer matter, by that time, whether the virus had come from a fish market in Wuhan, China, or been intentionally created to function as a biological weapon. I would have felt differently if, in February [2020], I had been able to peep a few months into the future and read these words:

“…How we live and interact with each other, how we work and communicate, how we move around and travel. Every aspect of our lives has been affected. Although the world is in lockdown, governments, epidemiologists, school principals, entrepreneurs and families around the world are already planning the next steps: how to safely reopen schools and businesses, how to commute and travel without transmitting or contracting infection, how to support those most affected by the crisis…”
––(from How COVID-19 is Changing the World: A Statistical Perspective published by the international Committee for the Coordination of Statistical Activities under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 IGO license)

Red: A Tipping Point of Camusian Proportions

My lack of precognitive precision did not stop me from noting the increased levels of uncertainty which crept into local, national, and international government officials’ voices when talking about the growing “crisis.” States and media outlets began publishing graphs indicating levels of risk represented by four to six colors. Green usually meant there was less than 1 case for every 100,000 people in a given region and the threat was minimal. Yellow meant there were 1–9 cases per 100,000 people and the unseen killer was moving through your neighborhood. Orange indicated cases had accelerated with 10–24 cases and people were advised to do something which freedom-loving Americans, from Gen-Z’s to older Traditionals, found unthinkable: stay at home whether they wanted to or not.

The dreaded Red Zone signaled a community, or a nation, had reached a “tipping point” of Camusian proportions and people should not be advised, but ordered, to stay home unless engaging in “essential” activities requiring them to leave home.

Tapestry Weavers

Unexpected problems were and are (writing now in this winter of 2021/2022 as the Delta and Omicron variants extend the ravages of the pandemic) to be expected living in a coronavirus Red Zone. What few anticipated was the role it would play by highlighting centuries-long issues of inequity and oppression in America’s Black, Brown, and Yellow Zones. As in people of color, whom it turned out, were disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 all over the world. Red, in too many cases, long before the historic heart-break of George W. Floyd’s death from a policeman’s knee on his neck, had come to symbolize blood spilled in the struggle to preserve Black lives succumbing to violent indifference.

As much as the pandemic itself and the “racial awakening” of 2020, the January 6 attacks on Capitol Hill now represent a definitive turning point in our country’s history.

This volume is a tribute to the millions worldwide who have lost their lives to the different variants of COVID-19 to date. It is a tribute also to those whom Dr. Patricia M. Stewart, in her foreword to Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone, refers to as tapestry weavers. In the tinted and written pages are testimonies from centers of truth incapable of being anything other than genuine.

They are not offered for purposes of condemnation or exoneration. They preserve a crystalized portrait of history when we human beings found ourselves wandering en masse through a maze of darkly-stained shadows as we fought to overcome the worst within our natures in order to reclaim and preserve the shining very best.

Aberjhani ©2023
(adapted from Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone)

EXPLORE MORE OF FROM THE TEXT & MEANINGS SERIES BY ABERJHANI

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Encouraging Conscious Coexistence: Conversations with the World 102

9/10/2020

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Postered Chromatic Poetics title art graphic by Aberjhani.

Many of my blogs on the Charter for Compassion website address an international audience on why the practice of conscious global coexistence is crucial to humanity’s survival and how we can work towards achieving it. It is something diplomats from different countries have been trying to help nations accomplish for centuries, so the concept is not new. But we continue to get blindsided in the 21st century by biases and phobias which do more to perpetuate divisions than strengthen unity.

Among the quotations from my work employed the most to help transform international antagonism into global cooperation is the following:

“Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.” (from Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays)

These words were first published as part of the essay “For Love of Paris and a More Compassionate World” following terrorist attacks on the city November 13, 2015. The quotation has since been adopted by groups ranging from students’ civic clubs and online study groups to social service nonprofits and political organizations. It has proven particularly popular in different countries on the continent of Africa. Here are two examples:

Individual Cultures quotation social graphic posted in South Africa

Sign featuring quote on Individual Cultures by Aberjhani created by Facebook user in Kenya.

This third social graphic comes from the United States’ Kearsarge Food Hub in New Hampshire.

Many additional artsy social graphics employing the same words indicate a hunger for something other than the tensions which exist between members of different demographics on different continents in different communities. More importantly, educators, conference speakers, various thought leaders, and men and women from diverse backgrounds are not just quoting the words. They are living the truth behind them and demonstrating the greater unifying possibilities which come with embracing our shared humanity. Few realizations could be considered more important during a COVID-19 pandemic which apparently does not play favorites.

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 2 of 3)

12/19/2019

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From the time when her first short stories and novel were published, O’Connor was identified as a writer with a rare kind of gift. Her specific brand of genius allowed her to adapt powerful religious principles, aesthetic technique, and social observances to create highly original and often shocking literary art which leaned heavily toward the Gothic and grotesque.

She painted with words in the same manner she painted with colors. Stroke by carefully-rendered stroke, she created broken-soul characters who were oddly warped by the jarring impulses of their own scarred personalities, a condition which could make them as misplaced within the confines of their own skin as it could within society.

The Church of Hazel Motes’ Truth

One archetypal example is Hazel Motes, the anti-hero main character in Wise Blood described by Gooch as “a slightly demented saint in the making.” Motes could also be described as a prototype for any number of O’Connor’s characters driven by pain and confusion to rage against their perception of divine, or human, authority over their lives. Hazel Motes is bold enough to propose starting “the Church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified.” His own ambitiousness and the ambiguities of human mortality inherent in anyone’s life defeat his intentions and ultimately lead to his destruction.

It is not only the daring with which O’Connor wrote such tales as Wise Blood that made her an exceptional writer but an ear for true-to-life dialect and a command of language that enabled her to bend narrative prose into lyrical poetry like this:

“The smokestacks and square tops of buildings made a black uneven wall against the lighter sky and here and there a steeple cut a sharp wedge out of a cloud.” Or the following: “The outline of a skull was plain under his skin and the deep burned eye sockets seemed to lead into the dark tunnel where he had disappeared.”

Such statements, beaded as they were with strong philosophical nuances, would make any writer in any language an exceptional one.

The N-Word Factor

For many African Americans, O’Connor is not an easy read because her fiction is very true to the Southern rural language of her times. That means the word “nigger” tends to flow like breath out of many of her characters’ mouths with such a total disregard for its social, political, or spiritual implications that their use of the word might prompt many a hardcore rapper to reconsider his or her fondness for it.

The degree to which O’Connor herself may have been racist is an issue biographer Brad Gooch does periodically address: “She had returned to settle in a society predicated on segregation and had taken on its charged voices and manners as the setting of her fiction.”

In short, from O’Connor’s perspective as a literary artist, to avoid racially derisive language, and in some cases customs, would have meant dodging an ugly truth rather than confronting it head-on. Moreover, readers should note she was far from being alone in this regard among white and black American writers in the previous century.

NEXT: Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (final part 3)

If you missed part 1 of Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor and would like to read it Please Click Here.

Author

Aberjhani is a multi-genre author of history, memoirs, poetry, fiction, and journalism. His most recent book is Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah.

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Conversations with the World 114: Literary FB Connections

MARGARET WALKER

HAROLD BRODKEY

This form may be used to contact author-artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Lit Prods. To comment on this article, please go to the next section .

Text & Meaning in These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

Rainbows and COVID

Red: A Tipping Point of Camusian Proportions

Tapestry Weavers

Aberjhani ©2023
(adapted from Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone)

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Encouraging Conscious Coexistence: Conversations with the World 102

Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Contact the Author

Speaking of Women's History

Balancing Scales of Recognition

Contact the Author

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2 of 3)

The Church of Hazel Motes’ Truth

The N-Word Factor

Author

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Conversations with the World 114: Literary FB Connections

MARGARET WALKER

HAROLD BRODKEY

This form may be used to contact author-artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Lit Prods. To comment on this article, please go to the next section .

Text & Meaning in These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

Rainbows and COVID

Red: A Tipping Point of Camusian Proportions

Tapestry Weavers

Aberjhani ©2023(adapted from Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone)

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Encouraging Conscious Coexistence: Conversations with the World 102

AberjhaniAuthor, Poet, ArtistHarlem Renaissance Centennial 2020

Contact the Author

Speaking of Women's History

Balancing Scales of Recognition

Contact the Author

Exploring the Wonder and Enigma of Flannery O'Connor (part 2 of 3)

The Church of Hazel Motes’ Truth

The N-Word Factor

Author

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Aberjhani ©2023
(adapted from Black and Blue Letters from the Red Zone)

Aberjhani
Author, Poet, Artist
Harlem Renaissance Centennial 2020