Literary Persuasions: Book Reviews by Aberjhani

African Americans Far from Home (part 2): Intimacy, Ethics, and Take-Aways

2/17/2022

Relationship building, arguably, comprises the heart of Gartrell’s institutional success and the soul of his memoir’s emotional intelligence.

(If you missed part 1of this article you can click here to check it out.)

Connecting with the right people to help establish and staff his Wisdom21 schools presents a challenge repeatedly met in innovative ways. Often crucial in this regard are women. His relationships with the same––notably, per the text, repeatedly initiated by them––at times blur what would be considered in the U.S. as lines of professional propriety. You might even say they were completely erased in certain cases. Gartrell is not insensitive to the point and wrestles with its implications and potential consequences.

Loneliness and Rules of Engagement

In a chapter titled “Land of Ladies,” he theorizes that during his time in the country, Japanese women were “especially lonely and in desperate need of love.” This, despite having a reputation for making “the best marriage partners on earth” (p. 108). A variety of factors are cited as possible reasons for their loneliness and desperation but the dangerous end result was an apparent (at least to the author) acute vulnerability which made them easy prey for unscrupulous foreign tourists. As for the author:

“…Back in the U.S., I led a fairly typical life and tended to shy away from romances not suitably cultivated, wholesome, or clean. In Japan, however, the rules of engagement were radically different. In many respects, there were no rules at all... As an aspiring businessman, community leader, and person of conscience, I felt it my duty to address…concerns as appropriately as I could…” (p. 110).

Given the radicalized and revolutionized factions of gender equality activists around the world in 2022, much more could be written about the author’s observations of and experiences with Japanese women. This writer would encourage exactly that for one important reason. A key component to surviving the transitions from homogenous cultural models which many have experienced in the past to more diverse communities currently forming is this: a willingness to understand how members of different cultures experience that of “others.” Powerful examples are presented throughout the subject text.

A definitive example of the possible pitfalls and drawbacks of mixing private intimacies with business ambitions may be seen in what the author describes as a “paper marriage” convenient for legal purposes. In addition to proving herself an extremely competent business partner, his native-born wife Kazumi calmly overlooks her husband’s involvement with two mistresses (a practice widely documented as acceptable in Japan). However, just as the expanding Wisdom21 enterprise begins to spiral downward, her expertise and devotion both disappear.

Black Community in an Asian World

Something many will likely be surprised to learn about when reading 21 Years of Wisdom is the extensiveness of the Black presence in Japan. The discovery makes for a completely different scenario from the solitary status reported by James Baldwin in “Stranger in the Village”––or for that matter by explorer Matthew A. Henson as he planted a flag with Robert E. Peary at the North Pole in 1909––and thereby increases its value as a recent addition to the literature of Black expatriates.

The nonprofit Japan African American Friendship Association had been established in the country some years before Gartrell’s arrival. His rapid rise in prominence, however, made him a suitable choice to lead it following the 1995 passing of the previous president, Harry Stevenson. He would hold that position for a decade.

Interaction with one particular African-American from Atlanta proved exceptionally useful when the school founder clashed with the Yakuza (mob) over a dispute concerning a former employee’s dismissal. Before things could turn violent, his fellow expatriate handled the matter without the boss’s consent and informed him afterwards. Moreover, interestingly enough, it to a city with a more than 50 percent Black population that Gartrell returns at the conclusion of his Japanese odyssey.

5 Teachable Take-Aways

In the Author’s Note for 21 Years of Wisdom, readers are cautioned that people who identify with certain demographics may find some passages in his memoir offensive. He’s probably right. But many of those same individuals are likely to sidestep any sense of personal slight out of appreciation for the larger philosophical, geographical, and historical contexts in which the central story is embedded. They might also find Shannon Roxborough’s insightful foreword useful towards that end.

More than a few commenters have noted the stylish novel-like quality of Gartrell’s narrative. With that in mind: how interesting would it be to see a director such as Spike Lee, Steven McQueen, Regina King, or Quentin Tarantino produce a film adaptation of the book? Time will tell. For now, the following are 5 of what I consider to be important teachable take-aways from 21 Years of Wisdom:

Harmonious interaction between members of converging cultures is as dependent upon those entering a host country as it is upon indigenous communities accommodating them.
The literature of the African-American expatriate experience is one deserving of greater study within the contexts of both American academia and world literary forums.
The potential for mutually life-enriching experiences shared by immigrants and native residents on various shores is an extensively documented one, the study of which could serve America well as the country continues to evolve from one of a majority-White rule to one of a minority-majority population.
Alongside any strategies for raking in maximum profits, effective organizational leadership requires ethical practices which safeguard the integrity of an organization’s products, its image, and it personnel.
The mindful practice of cultural literacy provides an effective deterrent to mind-less violence between people of different nationalities, religious background, and other social distinctions.

By Aberjhani
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
and Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Original Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

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‘Talks Between My Pen and Muse’ an Inspired Literary Debut from Poet Aurie Cole

4/10/2021

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The title of Aurie Cole’s debut collection of poetry, Talks Between My Pen and Muse, caught my attention and held it from the moment I first saw it. That a contemporary young poet acknowledged such a thing as a “Muse” was captivating in itself because it meant the poet was willing to let something other than ego-driven rage, lust, envy, or self-righteousness control completely the contents of her lines. It also meant she was attempting a partnership between classic notions of how poetry functions in the world and her own modern vision of it. My curiosity was stirred enough to place the title on my list of poetry books to read during National Poetry Month 2021 and I am glad I did.

This is a slim volume of 75 pages divided into 8 parts. Obviously, the sections themselves would have to be brief but the emotional intensity and aesthetic intentions come through with impressive power and precision. Unless there should be any confusion, the title of each section includes its definition. For the purposes of this review, I will leave readers to discover for themselves Cole’s preferred definitions but these are the headings (caps per original text): 1) MUSE; 2) RELATIONSHIP; 3) PITY PARTY; 4) SABOTAGE; 5) MISCONSTRUE; 6) FORGIVE/FORGIVENESS; 7) REBOOT; and SELF LOVE.

“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

What I thought I might encounter with the first poem was either a dialogue between the poet’s pen and her muse and or a monologue from one pouring out grievances to the universe. Instead, the very first poem is titled “Stolen Muse.” There is no doubting the seriousness of this theft as Cole screams at the beginning:

Somebody call the cops!
My muse has been stolen
I repeat my muse has been stolen…

The pain of this crime is felt in each stanza as she dramatically describes the sleep deprivation and loss of creativity it has caused. Yet there is also gentle self-deprecating humor while observing:

I feel too normal
I need my abnormality back…

The depth of her need is amplified with the following simultaneously pleading and demanding lines:

I want it back the way it was taken
Opinionated, LOUD, wild, confused
Loving, happy, untamed, passionate
Smart enough, encouraging, kinda shy
Uncorrupted by the norms of society
Unpierced by the actions of my peers
AND ALL MINE

In the poems which flow immediately afterwards, titled “Nicking,” “Lost Scared Afraid,” and “My Muse,” the poet’s attachment to what most inspires her can be understood at different times in different ways. In one moment, it is an addiction of a healthy variety rather than a destructive one. In the next, it reads and feels a lot like a love affair brutally interrupted by the kind of heinous disregard which too often in our current over-technologized world leads to tragic consequences.

In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

The poems in the RELATIONSHIP section are as introspective and soulfully analytical as a reader might expect. But they also demonstrate Cole’s passion for language with titles like “Imbroglio” and “The Rage of Words.” The latter is particularly powerful for its depiction of language as a weapon in a battle between intimates. The quality of intimacy, in fact, is one of the stronger aspects of poetry throughout Talks Between My Pen and Muse. In poem after poem, it weaves back and forth between elements of trust and distrust, strength and fragility, condemnation and forgiveness, and love and risk.

The poems “Caged Bird” and “Caged Bird Freed” reinforce the perception of Cole as a writer with classic leanings. The titles’ obvious references to Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “Sympathy,” which provided Angelou with the title of her famous autobiography, place Cole within the tradition of soul-baring African-American literature without restricting her to it.

Instead of offering strategies for navigating the painful uncertainties of her personal journey, the Savannah, Georgia-born poet simply presents her own efforts at balancing them. In this way, she self-identifies with humanity as a whole rather than with a single segment of it. Near the end of the volume, she notes the following in a letter to herself:

I know you
From your favorite color
To your deepest secrets
From your untold feelings
To your wildest dreams

I care about
Your every word
Simplest request
Smallest dreams…

There is a tremendous amount to appreciate in this first edition of Aurie Cole’s debut volume as her pen makes its free-styling way through shock and despair toward hope and self-determination. However, it has to be said as well that serious readers of poetry are likely to find a number of typographical errors distracting. These are understandable enough because talented young poets rarely receive the kind of publishing support which ensures the absence of such mistakes. (How many, after all, such as the celebrated Amanda Gorman are likely to receive an invitation to recite their poetry at a presidential inauguration and subsequently get Oprah Winfrey to write a foreword for their book, basically guaranteeing its status as a number 1 bestseller?)

Other critically-minded readers may question the absence of poems dealing with such timely issues as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, or Black Lives Matter. In a way, it may be argued that the more deeply personal writings inspired by the poet’s muse are a kind of response to these very concerns as they illustrate the power of sheltering within the integrity of one’s own sanity in a world knocked off balance by myriad forms of chaos. The important thing may be the knowledge that Talks Between My Pen and Muse is only a first important literary step for Aurie Cole and readers hopefully can look forward to many more writings from her pen and muse in the future.

Aberjhani
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

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Student Authors Amplify Muted Voices in Book ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’

3/16/2021

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Detail from "Hearing Silenced Voices" artwork graphic by Aberjhani for Bright Skylark Literary Productions.

“The most shocking moment in my life was when I was told that in two days I was leaving my country. It was a small moment in in which I felt that the world was falling on top of me.” ––English Learning High School Student (from the book Where the Rainbow Ends)

The purpose and value of Where the Rainbow Ends is spelled out clearly in the book’s preface by editors Jamie Hinds and Savanna Payne when they tell us: “Throughout the pandemic, our students have witnessed other historical events that took place in 2020. They have become witnesses to movements that are hearing silenced voices for the first time… They have become witnesses to change.”

The extraordinary significance of those words is demonstrated repeatedly in the collection of brief stories written by more than 90 anonymous English Learning Students in the Oklahoma City Public Schools system. These brave young authors range from fifth-graders to high-schoolers.

Intense debates regarding the migration of populations around the world have been ongoing for the better part of a decade but the voices of youth whose lives are most impacted by those debates are, as indicated, rarely acknowledged. Within this volume, they come through loudly and understandably enough. The word ‘understandably’ is emphasized here because the editors have very wisely left speech patterns and vocabulary as originally penned. These are, after all, individuals who are slowly adjusting to new ways of comprehending, relating, and behaving on different levels.

"Where the Rainbow Ends," a collection of voices by Oklahoma City Public Schools English Learning Students.

Those of us already proficient in the English language might wrinkle our brows when reading certain sentences with obviously faulty grammar. But we know what the authors mean and these sentences help us understand the gigantic challenge of uprooting oneself from a known cultural environment and reestablishing your life in a new unfamiliar locale. The most hard-hitting statements go beyond such considerations as syntax and brings to mind what the great Harlem Renaissance leader W.E.B. Du Bois called the worst blow which people of African descent suffered during slavery in America: the destruction of the Black Family.

Human migrations forced by desperation in our modern times have resulted in similar devastation; however, in the pages of Where the Rainbow Ends we experience painful separations as well as healing reunions. So it is that one student recalls prior to leaving El Salvador: “My sister went to the USA when I turned 4 years old but she got a VISA to get here so I have no memories of her.” The opportunity to make new memories would not come easily but it would come. Another student from Honduras demonstrated the importance of such a prospect when declaring: “And I learned to love my dad after seven years I was separated from him.”

Historical Consequences

Published by Project VOICE Industries, the 167 pages which make up this “collection of voices” represent a particularly important addition to discussions on immigration policies at a time when a new U.S. presidential administration has reversed executive decisions made by the previous one. That reversal has prompted a new wave young people, many without parental supervision, to take their chances on entering the United States under dangerous and illegal conditions.

Hopefully, additional volumes or ones similar to Where the Rainbow Ends will present readers with the flip side of the immigration coin by sharing the voices of different Americans’ experiences of adapting to immigrants. That is something I attempted to do in the story “A Brazilian Thanksgiving in Savannah” published in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah. For the time being, it’s good enough to know my quote at the beginning of Where the Rainbow Ends has played some small role in helping the student authors amplify their voices and educate the world about the realities of one of the most consequential concerns of our volatile historical times.

Aberjhani
author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

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

12/18/2019

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Postered Chomatic Poetics "Wonder & Enigma of Flannery O'connor" title art graphic by Aberjhani.

Impaired as she was by lupus, O’Connor may not have been able to barrel ahead with the same level of prolific productivity as some of her contemporaries—such as James Baldwin for example-- but neither did she let it bring her career to a screeching halt between the time of her diagnosis and her death on August 3, 1964.

She followed the novel Wise Blood with a collection of short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find, in 1955; the novel The Violent Bear it Away in 1960; and the short story collection Everything That Rises Must Converge ––a book on which she worked virtually right up until her death–– published posthumously in 1965. In between the writing and the publishing, she marshaled her strength to travel (aided by crutches) and lecture, write articles for popular magazines (for which she was generally well paid), and write numerous letters to friends, supporters, and critics.

(To read part 1 of this story please click here. For part 2 click this link.)

The O’Connor readers and scholars now know would not have been possible without a tightly woven network of friends and family members who supported her work through belief in, and out of love for, her. After illness derailed her plans to live the life of a postmodern New York author, she famously surrounded herself with peacocks at Andalusia, her family’s farm, and allowed the world to come to her just as much as she continued to embrace it on the page and through speaking engagements. Fellow authors, theologians, aspiring writers, general admirers, and would-be lovers in the form of men as well as women often made their way to her front door.

Flannery O'Connor quotation art graphic by AZ Quotes.

Her editor, Robert Giroux, believed enough in the corpus of her work that in 1971 he published The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. A compilation of all her short fiction, The Complete Stories went on to win the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972, and in 2009—shortly after Brad Gooch’s biography was published–– was voted “The Best of the National Book Awards Fiction.”

Mother and Daughter Together

Of all those who shared their life’s energies to help endow Flannery O’Connor’s with enduring meaning possibly none were more crucial than her mother, Regina Cline O’Connor. The relationship between mother and daughter could alternate between a sensitive symbiosis and a barely-restrained combativeness. But: the fact is that despite her great intellectual prowess Flannery O’Connor was made an invalid by her disease and it could not have been any easier for her mother to watch her daughter’s slow agonizing physical decline any more than it had been to watch her husband’s. She nevertheless bore the “cross” of the affliction which defined so much of her own life’s story.

As such, she did the kinds of things caregivers tend to do when committed to ensuring as high a quality of life as they can for someone they love: setting aside a thermos of hot coffee at night to share with Flannery in the morning, running a farm to secure an income, tolerating the droppings and cries of beautiful but annoying peacocks, traveling abroad with her daughter even when she herself was ill, and standing guard at her hospital room door to ensure a chance at rest and possible recovery.

Regina Cline is very much present in the pages of Flannery but a section or two presented within the context of her struggles to assist her daughter might have made this powerful biography even more compelling. She outlived the writer by almost thirty-one years, dying on May 8, 1995, at the age of ninety-nine.

In Praise of Those Who Wait

In the acknowledgments section of his biography on the author, Brad Gooch informs readers that he “first stepped into the world of Flannery O’Connor in the late 1970s.” Thoroughly smitten by what he found in that world, he respectfully wrote her close friend Sally Fitzgerald, editor of The Habit of Being, Letters of Flannery O’Connor, to obtain her blessings for his hope to write a biography. Fitzgerald advised him in 1980 against such an undertaking because she was already in the process of writing a literary biography of her friend. Consequently, Gooch held off and waited, even beyond Fitzgerald’s death in 2000, for a book that never appeared.

Then, approached by an editor in 2003 about a biography on O’Connor, it clearly was not an offer he could refuse. A dream which had been deferred for more than two decades finally saw the light of day in 2009 and by most accounts it was very much worth the wait.

Author

Aberjhani is co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance as well as author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah and Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind.

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Floating along: A Review Essay on Duncan McNaughton’s Somewhere in the Stream (part 2 of 2)

11/26/2019

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(Postered Chromatic Poetics title art graphic by Aberjhani)

If you missed part 1 of this post and want to check it out please click here. Part 2 begins now:

McNaughton's nods to the late "Imaginary Man of Las Cruces," poet Nicanor Parra, in the poems "¿ENTONCES QUÉ?" and "(COLIN CHRISTOPHER" (open parentheses per original) should not surprise anyone. Given the company his pen has kept over the decades, it would be too much of a stretch to say he and Parra share the same antipoetic approach to their craft. There nevertheless are similarities which reveal a kinship between their aesthetic instincts. The humor employed by both poets at times oscillates between comic hilarity and nightmare darkness. It can assume the form of thinly-disguised self-deprecation or more overtly-poised social and political satire.

If Parra's is a poetry of anguished laughter and mournful tears as some have suggested, then it may be McNaughton's is an equally intense but more restrained verse of amused hopeful smiles and astonished frowns. Both employ a minimum of embellishments to achieve maximum provocation. Both balance ironic incongruities with subtle personal resolve in a manner similar to the way jazz musicians utilize highly-charged counter-rhythms to produce captivating performances. Both, as Parra put it, incorporate "the hideousness and the beauty of the world" (Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier, Interviews with Latin American Writers, 1989). Therefore, naked pain and uncertain joy play crucial roles in rendering disturbing truths aimed at disrupting, or reclaiming, different kinds of power.

The narrator of "CHILDHOOD + YOUTH" laments, via "figures of speech," wars of different kinds which have never ended, and, numerous bridges burned while waging them. He finds his understanding of these interior and exterior traumas challenged by doubt, but then reaffirmed by an authoritative witness who knows what it means to survive unnerving cycles of destruction and rebirth. Taking a trip "to David Highsmith's furniture store," he buys a copy of Hector France's Musk, Hashish and Blood:

"...Then I went to my place
to read the story and smoke hashish and
drink whisky and set another bridge ablaze.
Standing on it I met Virgil. You know, I said
I thought all those figures of speech you used
were real figures of speech. They are, he said.
Pay no attention to fools. Here, come with me.
I have a bridge to see to, and I wouldn't
mind some company. Bring your strike anywheres."

Such healing, empowering, and time-bending solidarity can only come with dedicated practices of remembrance and recognition, among the hallmarks of McNaughton's extensive oeuvre. As the late writer Benjamin Hollander put it in "The Pants of Time," his definitive review of TINY WINDOWS, "McNaughton’s work achieves a testament of personal observation embedded in a trans-historical tendance of the imagination." Moreover: "He discovers history for himself anew..." (Boston Review, June 5, 2015).

He also increases its capacity for simultaneously preserving autobiographical identity and expanding notions of community to accommodate kindred spirits occupying physical and non-physical forms. Thus the poem "AS EFFECT AN ECHO" is less an elegy in which McNaughton bids farewell to Hollander than it is the written continuation of a relationship:

"The back door hammer clubbed my friend, the Jew,
Ben Hollander. I can't part from Ben. They
say one must part who don't understand the heart
of the friend, it knows something else, something
about containment, about the stars at night,
about the heart that contains them..."

The stars in the heart comprise the sweet substance of enduring friendships, or alliances, and even less-binding associations, which take on a kind of sacredness for the way they inform and sustain each other’s' personalities. They reject the insanity proposed by stars as symbols of genocide sewn onto the clothes of Hollander's ancestors in Nazi concentration camps as they do all restrictions placed on basic human freedoms and civility.

Duncan McNaughton - Poetry Center from Documentary Film Institute on Vimeo.

'The World's Suppositions of Poetry'

Nowhere in the pages of SOMEWHERE IN THE STREAM is the consecrated nature of authentic friendships, especially as forged by shared dedications to poetry, more intensely realized than in "(COLIN CHRISTOPHER [Stuart]" and "OLD SOCKS." Within the former he describes the synthesization of a poet's work and person as "twins.' McNaughton then offers this observation: "...Whatever The World's suppositions of/ poetry and of what a poet ought to be, whenever those/ 'twins' descend and ascend, below and above, to the/ disturbance of truth on behalf of trust, then we are in the/ dimension of 'The Imaginary Man,'..."

In "OLD SOCKS" our narrator confronts the reality of mortality and what it has meant within the context of life lived up to this point. While wrestling with "my very own tangle/ of being," the poet reflects on successions of wars which have threatened the innate integrity of that being. In contrast, friendship has helped guard against the threat by reinforcing the front lines of self:

"...So I have Bill's
back-up for my opinion of Hobbyhook,
Bill's authority, his knowing smile, his
eye twinkle. Queer, how this poem has turned
into Bill's hats. Bill's ears. Tells you something
about how little truth matters when it
comes to trust. Oceans come, oceans go, they
used to say, fishing for flounder, floundering
they called it, they still do, obviously..."

Whether writing autobiographically or assuming the voice of another seems less important than the invitation to celebrate shared histories, friendships, lives, knowledge, acts of compassion, or acts of remembrance. These endow life with a quality of being which--despite media glamorizations of artificial presences in a world where such creations too often diminish capacities for actual thinking or organic human interaction--seem to lose more value by the day. Likewise, different literary strategies may have their irrefutable uses and powers, but in the end they too are floating along with everything else Somewhere in the Stream of discoveries and encounters as we navigate shifting currents, or dodge the increasing fury of hurricanes, and hold on for the sake of poetry and each other.

Aberjhani
author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
November 2019

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Literary & Cultural arts Persuasions:
Reviews & Remembrances by Aberjhani

African Americans Far from Home (part 2): Intimacy, Ethics, and Take-Aways

Loneliness and Rules of Engagement

Black Community in an Asian World

5 Teachable Take-Aways

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

‘Talks Between My Pen and Muse’ an Inspired Literary Debut from Poet Aurie Cole

“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

Aberjhani
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Student Authors Amplify Muted Voices in Book ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’

Historical Consequences

Aberjhani
author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact the Author

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

Mother and Daughter Together

In Praise of Those Who Wait

Author

Floating along: A Review Essay on Duncan McNaughton’s Somewhere in the Stream (part 2 of 2)

'The World's Suppositions of Poetry'

Aberjhani
author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
November 2019

Contact the Author

Archives

Categories

Literary & Cultural arts Persuasions: Reviews & Remembrances by Aberjhani

African Americans Far from Home (part 2): Intimacy, Ethics, and Take-Aways

​Loneliness and Rules of Engagement

Black Community in an Asian World

5 Teachable Take-Aways

Contact Author-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

‘Talks Between My Pen and Muse’ an Inspired Literary Debut from Poet Aurie Cole

​“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

​In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

AberjhaniAuthor of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My MindCreator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Student Authors Amplify Muted Voices in Book ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’

​Historical Consequences

Aberjhaniauthor of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mindco-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Contact the Author

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

​Mother and Daughter Together

​In Praise of Those Who Wait

Author

Floating along: A Review Essay on Duncan McNaughton’s Somewhere in the Stream (part 2 of 2)

​'The World's Suppositions of Poetry'

Aberjhani author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance November 2019

Contact the Author

Archives

Categories

Literary & Cultural arts Persuasions:
Reviews & Remembrances by Aberjhani

Loneliness and Rules of Engagement

“Loving, Happy, Untamed, Passionate"

In the Tradition of Baring One’s Soul

Aberjhani
Author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
Creator of Authentic Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Historical Consequences

Aberjhani
author of Greeting Flannery O'Connor at the Back Door of My Mind
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Mother and Daughter Together

In Praise of Those Who Wait

'The World's Suppositions of Poetry'

Aberjhani
author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
November 2019