Aberjhani
African-American historian, poet, journalist, essayist, and fiction writer.
It is true that poems and stories generally have only a single name attached to them where authorship is concerned but in many ways they are born of much more than any single individual. They evolve out of meetings of minds, the collective heartbeats of communities, and the shared journeys of similar souls.
While the enslavement of African Americans was an unavoidable historical fact, so was the historical record of their courage in the face of mortal danger, their strength before seemingly insurmountable odds, their faith when confronted with conditions that had driven others to faithless despair, and their evocation of beauty and genius under oppressive circumstances that did not encourage either.
You are the man newly arriving
at history’s worm-ravaged door,
the woman whose shadows are salves
upon the bleeding breasts of the earth,
the infant whose heartbeat
floods every harp in Paradise.
As goes love so goes life.
In the face of a world where economic hardships often ground the best of the human spirit into the worst, love provided a pathway into hidden chambers of the spirit where nobility and compassion might be salvaged, resurrected, and made stronger.
He W.E.B. Du Bois was at once a scientist in his skillful use of history as a tool for comprehending the present, and a prophet in the application of his gift for analyzing the present as an indicator of the future. Because he lived both firmly entrenched within his time and decades ahead of it, the light of his wisdom, like that of his great love for humanity, is one that never diminishes.
Certainly with the enslavement of their parents and grandparents less than seventy years behind them, the odds of successfully utilizing black culture to better refine the application of democracy in America was against them. Yet the planners and participants in this would-be renaissance moved forward with all the faith and visionary certainty of Betsy Ross stitching the American flag or General William T. Sherman blazing a trail of victory through the Civil War South.
Peace is not so much a political mandate as it is a shared state of consciousness that remains elevated and intact only to the degree that those who value it volunteer their existence as living examples of the same. It does not end when jetliners are used as bombs to decimate skyscrapers, nor does it end when a father shoots to death his adolescent son and daughter. Peace ends with the unraveling of individual hope and the emergence of the will to worship violence as a healer of private and social dis-ease. It is, after all, not only nations and communities that need peace so desperately but individuals divided against other individuals and within themselves.
Writing provided me as a teenager, first with a tool to navigate my way through a constantly humming nighttime swamp of inner traumas, and second with a means to comprehend and address the material world of race, poverty, and social backwardness that characterized my hometown at that time. Words, like music, gave themselves to me as companions and have always endowed my existence with a strength and resilience that otherwise I would not have.
And now we step to the rhythm of miracles.
Time to be the sun and send forth flesh to heal the bones of time.
I wanted the kind of power of insight and self-command that I experienced in the works of a Jean Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, or Margaret Walker. I wanted to make that kind of music that I heard in the poetry of a Langston Hughes or the stories of James Joyce. That combination of power and beauty more than anything else is probably what made me most want to become a writer. It wasn't until I became a journalist with the U.S. Air Force that I became more objective in my literary outlook and accepted that writing professionally included responsibilities to something other than my personal desires or needs.
Course you been hurt. You was born to hurt. What make you wanna forget somethin that important? Power that’s worth somethin --real power!--live an’ grow from the hurt you feed it.
Some of the smartest people in the world never talk cause they got more sense than everybody else.
Beauty will snatch us by the heart
and love us until we are raw with understanding.
Life possesses an amazing array of profoundly sad faces.
Summer is the season when the sun reaches its zenith, its peak, when it burns the hottest and shines most golden for the longest days of the year… It embraces everything with its light, spreads a blanket of reassuring warmth, induces fertility and growth and regeneration, and even causes rainstorms to balance its own overwhelming power. Michael Jackson was very much like that with an abundance of creative spiritual energies that enriched, inspired, and empowered the lives of more human beings than anyone can accurately count.
Because his living presence became such an uncommonly global one, that ministry [Jackson’s individual spiritual concerns] reflected universal ecumenical principles dressed up in ultra-modern dance grooves, love songs to nature, lyrical eulogies in the form of musical elegies, and sermons sung with passionate intensity and suffering eloquence.
A strategic use of black culture could help generate a more efficient use of American democracy,and democracy more effectively practiced could then produce a genuinely spiritual nation of people.
In the end, it was strength he was reaching for once again to begin his journey anew and do the one thing he did better than anybody else.”