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Aberjhani at Soulwriters

Author-Poet Aberjhani Male
Savannah, United States

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Location
Savannah, GA
About Me:
I'm an historian, poet, journalist, songwriter, novelist, author of creative nonfiction, essayist, and evolving spiritual being.
Website:
http://www.authorsden.com/Aberjhani

Author-Poet Aberjhani's Blog

A Rich Harvest of Empowering Inspiration

(photo of Susan L. Taylor by Marc Brasz) When the NAACP in 2006 presented author and social activist Susan L. Taylor with its President’s Award, the organization publicly acknowledged what readers of Essence® Magazine had been experiencing for nearly four decades. Namel… Continue

Posted on March 16th, 2008 at 4:38pm — No Comments (Add)

The Great Debaters and the Harlem Renaissance

When reading about what may be described as the lesser celebrated heroic figures of the Harlem Renaissance, we rarely get a definitive look at just how complicated and sometimes dangerous their everyday lives were.…

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Posted on January 5th, 2008 at 5:22pm — No Comments (Add)

The Art of Getting a Good Book Published

CTI News Room, Dec 26, 2007––Connect Savannah, the weekly news and entertainment magazine famous for its balanced coverage of cultural activities and events in Savannah, Georgia, published an in-depth update on ELEMENTAL, the somewhat legendary book project featuring the metaphysical art of Luther E. Vann and poetry by Aberjhani at http://www.connectsavannah.com/g…

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Posted on December 27th, 2007 at 2:41pm — No Comments (Add)

Once Upon a Christmas Tree Miracle

(Christmas tree art courtesy of Mega Screen Savers)

From “Thorns of Sorrow and Blossoms of Grace”

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Posted on December 23rd, 2007 at 4:19pm — No Comments (Add)

The Bridge of Silver Wings


CTI News Room--Within weeks of the release of his first novel, the controversial “Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World,” American author Aberjhani made a surprise move with the early-December release of a powerf…

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Posted on December 5th, 2007 at 1:13pm — No Comments (Add)

Latest Activity

Author-Poet Aberjhani's profile changed Jul 22
jawar left a comment for Author-Poet Aberjhani May 15
Author-Poet Aberjhani added 3 new blog posts. View Author-Poet Aberjhani's blog posts Dec. 27, 2007
Author-Poet Aberjhani left a comment for Chase von Dec. 23, 2007
Author-Poet Aberjhani added the blog post 'Once Upon a Christmas Tree Miracle' Dec. 23, 2007
Author-Poet Aberjhani added a photo: The Bridge of Silver Wings (ISBN 0966235606)
The Bridge of Silver Wings (ISBN 0966235606)
Dec. 5, 2007
 

Through the Eyes of An Author-Poet at Large

G.R.I.T.S. Reading Club Adds ELEMENTAL to Featured Titles

Currently on a ten percent off sale for the summer at a variety of locations, ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love, recently joined the line-up of books featured on the G.R.I.T.S. Online Reading Club for the month of July 2008.

A showcase of award-winning art by Luther E. Vann, whose work is currently on exhibit at the Jepson Center in Savannah, Georgia, and writings by well-known author Aberjhani, ELEMENTAL has become one of the most acclaimed gift books on the market since its release in May.  The weekly newsmagazine Connect Savannah described ELEMENTAL as, “a beautiful book…the reproductions of the paintings are outstanding. The poems were inspired by the paintings, and make perfect companions for the reproductions… a real delight and was definitely worth the wait.” Art critic, author, and collector Ja A. Jahannes called it “A wondrously amazing book.”


In addition to ELEMENTAL, other titles featured on G.RI.T.S. include: Say You’re One of Them, by Uwem Kapan; When a Man Loves a Woman, by LaConnie Taylor Jones; Heavenly Places, by Kimberly Cash Tate; and Release Me, by Farrah Rochon. The G.R.I.T.S. Online Reading Club was established in 2000 and is now celebrating “8 Years of Reading Excellence Online!”

Vann’s ELEMENTAL exhibition at the Telfair Museum Jepson Center for the Arts is currently scheduled to run until September 14 and the artist is presently considering options for an even larger exhibition of his work to go on tour.

––30—

Home and the Wanderer, Part 2 of 2

In my life as a poet, change meant employing my pen to acknowledge the deaths and lives of people I had loved for as long as I could remember but who suddenly were gone. I noticed for the first time how closely the word “elegy” resembles the word “eulogy” when I wrote my first one in 1996 to commemorate the life of Sylvester Griffin, known and loved by family members as “Uncle Buster.”  I could have written Uncle Buster’s “Elegy for a Winged Lion” without having returned home but it is not likely I would have traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, to recite it at his funeral had I not been in Savannah.

What I had no way of knowing at the time was that his was only the first of many. In the years to follow would compose elegies for friends, cousins, sisters, a mother, and a father. Most of them I would share, some I would not. At one point, I realized I was experiencing the vocation of the poet as prophet or griot or shaman, bearing witness through verse to the sanctity of a given life. The revelation was a deeply humbling one because I did not know how to accept myself in such a role. Then others pointed out that may have been the primary reason I found myself playing it.

Whereas I started often writing poetry that chronicled the lives of others, I made the surprising discovery one day that others were writing poetry that chronicled mine. Sometimes, upon reading these works, I had to touch my face and take deep breaths to make sure I was not some spirit reading about his own death. For some reason, recognizing myself as a son, a brother, a warrior, a lover, an African American, a journalist, historian, or fiction writer had been easy. Believing I had earned the right to call myself a poet was not. Through the words of others, it turned out each time I read them that I was learning about my life, or, put more accurately, about my life as seen through the pens of poets across the country and across the ocean. I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant. 

To be an American poet is to be a poet not only of the self but of the people, in both the smaller communal sense of the word ‘people’ as well as the larger sense of that word, whether one wishes to be both or not. The American identity has never been a singular one and the voices of poets invariably sing, in addition to their own, the voices of those around them. Consequently, in the pages of The American Poet Who Went Home Again, readers experience the stories, meetings, and events that unfolded upon my own journey back home and that expanded my awareness of both me and the city where I was born.

These are stories of what it means to leave home as a youth seeking one’s individual fortune only to return as an adult suddenly responsible for the well-being of a parent, stories of what it means to strive to live the life of an artist while fully embracing one’s reality as an ordinary human being, of pressing forward in the face of tragedy and shakily standing one’s ground on legs of faith when it seems there is no safe or solid ground left on which one can stand.

by Aberjhani

Home and the Wanderer, Part 1 of 2




Why did I automatically agree with the American author Thomas Wolfe, who was from North Carolina, when I read the title of his classic book, You Can’t Go Home Again?  Being African-American and having grown up in Savannah, Georgia, it might have made more sense to take my biographical and literary clues from Zora Neale Hurston’s memoir, Dust Tracks On A Road, or Langston Hughes’ I Wonder As I Wander.

What would have been even more understandable is if I had known something about the life of fellow Savannah native James Alan McPherson, who in 1978 became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction when he got it for a collection of short stories entitled Elbow Room. But as far as I could tell, once McPherson’s talent and career placed him on the road leading out of his hometown, he was not often inclined to take public paths leading back to it.

Therefore, it was Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again that stuck, and that made me wonder why this might be true, why one could not go home again. Then I became aware of another title by the same author, Look Homeward Angel, not realizing at the time that it had been written before You Can’t Go Home Again. What I did understand was that the notion of “Home” for Wolfe as an author and individual was simultaneously painful, healing, damning, and inspiring. How could I not, after learning the first book had actually been published eleven years before the second, how could I not wonder what had happened between the bright promise of Look Homeward Angel, and Wolfe’s later dim realization that You Can’t Go Home Again?

The thought was a scary one because it forced me to consider what might happen if you reached the conclusion that you could not go home again while also discovering that you had no choice except to go home again. Aside from those that we bring with us while squeezing and squealing our way into the world, the traits and experiences that shape our basic character develop in those places we call home. Those who leave that environment to travel all about the global village and sample its various offerings––whether to their great joy or to their endless regret––often grow into personalities that no longer reflect with detailed precision the place from which they came.

Such an individual need not be considered superior or inferior, only evolved to such a point that he or she takes on the uniqueness of their own being––apart from their native community’s. Sometimes, the price of that uniqueness is unexpectedly high and can cause you to sacrifice many things in order to pay it. That sacrifice may, as Wolfe discovered, take the form of estrangement from what once was home. It might take the form of a marriage, a family, a career, your sanity, or even your life.

(continues with part 2)

Author-Poet Aberjhani

Literary Visions of a Soulwriter


Support independent publishing: buy this book on Lulu.









(Original cover art by Luther E. Vann)

Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World combines popular music culture, science fiction fantasy, and horror to create a uniquely engaging metaphysical epic. The story takes us inside the world of Danny Blue, a young man struggling to make peace with the death of his girlfriend, a gifted artist named Valerie Hyerman whose passing sparks the creation of a controversial spiritual movement. Was her death suicide, murder, or something completely different from either?

The stunning truth unfolds in Froggtown, a college community where many people are said to have “died dirty” and wander the streets in search of release from a spiritual limbo. Such a town seems an unlikely place for a superstar musician like Jimmy Redfyre to kick off his tour on Christmas Eve, or for his main rival Ruzahn to keep popping up in Danny Blue’s life. Moreover, how is it that both singers seem to have released songs about his life? Equally bizarre are the strange changes that Danny Blue himself begins to experience and that appear to be causing him to evolve from an ordinary human to something not so ordinary at all. Written with the visionary intensity of Franz Kafka, the mystical poetics of Khalil Gibran, and the psychological complexity of Philip K. Dick, Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World is a one-of-a-kind work of extraordinary modern fiction.



View my profile on Creative Thinkers International

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At 6:58pm on May 15th, 2008, jawar said…
How has this site helped your writing or publishing business if at all?

GOJAWAR.COM
At 1:30pm on November 8th, 2007, George Wilder Jr. said…
Hey, thanks for your salutation. I'm l little late. I felt like I was being honered. I actually felt good about myself with being author of the week. I will never forget it. Thanks again.
At 1:22pm on November 5th, 2007, Mark David Gerson said…
Thanks for the congrats. And congrats back at you for what feels like a herculean task, co-authoring the encyclopedia!
At 1:21pm on September 26th, 2007, Author-Poet Aberjhani said…

View my profile on Creative Thinkers International
 
 

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