RANDY BARFIELD ("R") interviews ABERJHANI ("A")
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Randall:
Why do you have this name some people cannot
pronounce?
Aberjhani: On August 25, 1990, I had a dream in which I was attending a class taught by angels teaching other angels and human beings to be their best possible selves. Within this dream, everyone called me Aberjhani (pronounced Ah-bear-zha-nee) and my only awareness of myself was as Aberjhani. When I woke up, I wrote the dream down but then forgot all about it. A few days later, I received a call from my former wife and she described a dream in which she said I had a different name. When she pronounced it, I checked my dream notebook and saw the name I had written down was almost identical to what she had said. When I said it out loud, I experienced what I can only describe as a flood of consciousness and identity that made me feel as if I were recovering from amnesia and remembering who I was for the first time in a long time. I changed my name tag at work (I was a manager for Waldenbooks at the time) the next day and have been Aberjhani ever since. I understand the name to mean one who loves God.
R: Where are you from?
A: Savannah, Georgia, United States.
R: Why have you not ventured beyond your state to live elsewhere and to see "the world"?
A: Actually I have. I attended colleges in St. Petersburg, Florida, Philadelphia, St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Francisco. I also traveled with the Air Force to Fairbanks, Alaska; all over England; and Berlin, Germany, a little before the wall came down. I also spent time in Indiana and Texas.
R: How would you describe your writing in general?
A: Since the mid-nineties I’ve described it as interactive or integral literature. This is partly because the different genres in which I write sometimes tend to overlap and partly because my hope has been that my writings create some kind of meaningful response in readers or listeners. I want whatever combination of words and ideas that presents itself to me to have some measure of the same stirring and positive impact upon my readers’ lives that favorite writers and other heroes have had upon my life.
R: What topic or two really provokes you as a writer and/or a citizen?
A: Personal spiritual empowerment and social justice or injustice.
R: Did your mother's guidance stem from any unusual intelligence?
A: My mother, Mrs. Willie Mae Griffin Lloyd, was an exceptionally intelligent woman whom I think passed on certain intellectual gifts to all of her offspring but she never actually had the opportunity to formally develop her own intelligence. She grew up in rural Georgia during the 1930s and 1940s, a time when most of the schools for African-Americans only went as far as the seventh grade. She used the spiritual wisdom, common sense, and level of education that she did receive to help her community advance as well as to maintain her family to the best of her ability. Her qualities as a natural leader earned her the nickname “Chief,” which is somewhat appropriate because her grandfather, my great-grandfather, was full-blooded Cherokee. In my own life, while growing up, my mother was more of an anchoring presence than a guiding one. Something about my nature led her to trust me from an early age to instinctively make the choices I needed to make to survive and thrive in the world. If you’ve never read my poem, “Return to Savannah,” that would be a good one to tell you something about her life and my place in it. Likewise, [you might read] the essays “Strength to Carry On” and “This Mother’s Son.”
R: Has your home state changed in any positive way since you have been able to remember?
A: I think it has changed in many positive ways. Racially, although we have our problems like everybody else, there’s more communication and cooperation than in the past. We also have a stronger awareness of our collective cultural identity and its living historical value. On the national level, we’ve been identified as lagging in educational resources and achievements but the Atlanta University System has always been an exception to that rule and we’re pushing now to incorporate some of the more advanced educational systems and theories into classrooms from kindergarten on up. We’ve definitely grown economically (though my wallet doesn’t know it yet) and community development-wise.
R: Do you think Afro-American fathers are more absent from the home than white fathers?
A: Statistically that seems to be the case but anyone who knows anything at all about statistics knows they are either representative or misrepresentative of the circumstances behind them. The breakdown we’re seeing today in African-American families is largely the twofold result of the drug abuse epidemic that swept through the country during the 1980s and 1990s plus the chronic unemployment and underemployment that has, as much as I hate to say it, historically been a sociological characteristic of African-American men as a group for too long. The unemployment and underemployment helped feed the drug traffic and abuse problem that led to cycles of criminality, early death from violence and disease, imprisonment, and further breakdown of the family. There are a number of such men who have reasoned that their families stood a better chance of survival without them because of the public assistance available to a woman head-of-household with children but not to a married male head-of-household without a job or with a job that pays minimal salary. On top of that, you can’t ignore the fact that various women actually choose to be single parents because they prefer the sense of self empowerment and authority that comes with being the matriarch who calls all the shots in their home.
R: Isn't the young Afro-American male the group with the highest level of unemployment?
A: During the past five years, the unemployment rate of African-American men aged 16 to 61 has been upwards of 50% in many of our larger urban centers, including New York. And just for the record, many of these men have been extremely qualified for various positions.
R: Does God love you?
A: As He does you and all of His creation. In my world God is Love.
R: Is the Afro-American writing experience really different from the white American writing experience?
A: That would depend on the African-American writer and the white American writer in question. Certainly those African-American writers who draw on the defining aspects of African-American culture for their works are different from white American writers who do not. But if when you say “writing experience,” we’re also talking about the mainstream publishing experience, I would say that until recently there has been a huge difference. It has only been in the last decade that traditional publishers have begun to accept from African-American writers a large number of titles. This happened after the self-publishing revolution demonstrated that the market for such titles was a large and growing one. Before that, unless an African-American writer was able to duplicate and emulate perspectives and styles that might be considered Anglo-centric, he or she did not get published.
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R: Do you admire a particular Afro-American writer?
A: I have a tendency to admire schools of writers and literature rather than individuals. Along those lines, I definitely admire the writers whose lives I chronicled in “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance” and various writers of the 1960s and 1970s’ Black Arts Movement. Also, I’m pretty sure I owe a debt to the essays of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison as well as novels by Ann Petry and Richard Wright. I’m also a fan of French writers like Boris Vian, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Guillaume Appollinaire, and a number of others. Certain Latino writers such as Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Borges and others absolutely mesmerize me. Gao Xingian and Yukio Mishima are two of my favorite Asian writers. I also like a lot of the very extraordinary modern writers on AuthorsDen. For the ones that I’ve omitted, you can check out my books catalogued on Library Thing.com or my reviews on Amazon.com.
R: What piece(s) of advice would you give a young person who wants or says she/he wants to write?
A: Read as widely and diversely as you can. Most of the better writers tend to be heavy readers as well. Make a serious study of the craft and treat it with the respect it deserves because what we’re talking about has been one of the mainstays of civilization for centuries and there is a reason for that. Strive to endow your work with meaningful substance rather than surface glitter or shock value. Master rules of grammar before breaking them in the name of style. Enjoy the journey of discovery through literature.
R: In light of your dream of angels, do you believe you had an earlier life?
A: I don’t know if it’s possible to know something like that with certainty because I haven’t made up my mind whether reincarnation is actually a succession of lives experienced by a single soul or if it’s multi-generational memory that is biologically and spiritually encoded into our DNA. What I do know for certain is that the dream came to me at a time when I was studying a variety of spiritual traditions and teachings: Native American spirituality, Christian mysticism, the angelic communions of the Essenes, the Kabala, Sufism, New Age, Egyptian spiritual philosophies, and so on. Meditating upon these studies guided me into the core of my own spiritual consciousness and revealed my higher individual identity, which is something I believe we all have. There are numerous accounts in spiritual teachings about individuals receiving new names when acquiring an evolved spiritual consciousness, such as Saul in the Christian bible becoming Paul on the road to Damascus, and the American Muslim Malcolm Little becoming first Malcolm X and then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz as he evolved spiritually. This motif of evolving identities pops up in my newly completed novel. And the angelic presence has become a strong one in a series of poems I’m currently working on.
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R: In any of those places you
lived in and traveled to, did you experience
any first-hand
prejudice because of your skin color?
A: Sadly, I experienced prejudice in most of them. It hurt one of my white male friend’s feelings very badly one time in San Francisco when we were downtown standing on the curb with a co-worker, an older woman who also happened to be white, trying to hail a taxi for her. We had just left a restaurant where we celebrated somebody’s promotion. Within 15 minutes, several taxis, maybe four or five actually, with only the driver inside drove right past us. It finally occurred to me that they were ignoring us because of me, and I told my friends this. They argued that I had to be wrong because of where we were, so I stepped about 10 feet away from them and the curb because I knew the woman with us needed to get home. In less than a minute, the very next taxi that came along pulled up to the curb. My friends looked at me with their mouths open, but I suggested the woman go ahead and get in the cab. Then my friend and I decided to walk.
R: Does concentration on sex hinder a person's spiritual development or can the two coexist?
A: The two do coexist: most people engage spiritual marital ceremonies for the sake of having a romantic sexual partner with whom they can share great adventures in life. If you concentrate on sex at the right time then it can, I believe, actually enhance a person’s spiritual development. But those who obsess over sex to the exclusion of anything else tend to develop some very unhealthy destructive psychological dispositions. Sexual interaction as a gateway to authentic intimacy can help us to access the spiritual essence within each other. That’s why people in long-term marriages and intimate partnerships sometimes speak in terms of “becoming each other.” The intimacy strengthens trust, compassion, wisdom, love, self-knowledge and personal growth. Sexual addictions, like drug addictions, dilute an individual’s power to function in the everyday world of employment or family life. And yes, it can de-sensitize a person in regard to the finer nuances of spiritual growth and awareness.
R: What kind of people do you find difficult to appreciate?
A: Those who are unable to respect the validity of someone else’s life and experiences.
R: Basically, what is "Harlem Renaissance" about?
A: The Harlem Renaissance was an across-the-board cultural and political movement generated by African Americans during the 1920s and that lasted until the 1940s. It was named after the community of Harlem in New York City because Harlem at that time became one of the major geographic centers for African Americans migrating out of the South, Africans immigrating from Africa, and West Indians coming in from the islands. This moving congregation of people of African descent combined with other historical events, like the World Wars, advancements in technology, and the industrial revolution, to create a veritable explosion of creative works in literature, fine art, music, fashion, theatre, film, journalism, and social institutions. It’s because of the Harlem Renaissance that writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and quite a few more are enduring names in world literature. In addition to laying the foundation for the success of the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement, the renaissance also gave us the musical forms we all know and love as the blues, jazz, gospel music, and traditional African-American spirituals. We are currently in the midst of a second Harlem Renaissance serving to revitalize the now historic neighborhood. Obviously, you can get a lot more about this from my “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance” and my Creative Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance web site.
R: How did it feel when you learned “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance” had been listed as “one of the essential reference books for the home library” by Black Issues Book Review?
A: Like my co-author on the title,
Sandra L. West. We had accomplished what we set out to accomplish,
which was to provide the first encyclopedia documentation of one
of the most significant periods in
modern history. Since the
encyclopedia’s
publication in 2003, a lot of books have come out on the various
topics we covered, which means we helped
to spark further studies,
documentation, and popularization of the
subject. The encyclopedia
is in libraries
all over the world, there are dozens of plays out about the period,
more movies are being made about it, and more schools are including
extended studies of it in their curriculums.
R: How significant was it to you that readers in your hometown voted you “Best Poet/Spoken Word Artist of 2006?”
A: That was a profoundly spiritual and psychological event in my life. It came at a time when I was not only making peace with grief over my mother’s passing, but also as I was seeking ways to reestablish my public literary life after having lived in seclusion as a caregiver for half a decade. Anyone who has given up their own lifestyle in order to accommodate the needs of someone else knows that it’s very easy to lose any definitive sense of who you truly are while struggling to fulfill your tasks as a caregiver. Public performance had become a major part of my identity as a poet and suddenly it was wiped out. For readers to have confirmed that my work still mattered to them based primarily on my journalism, and on poems published in ESSENCE Magazine and my web sites meant a lot because it let me know that my voice was still being heard and my words still being valued. It restored a huge part of my sense of self and it gave me the creative energy I needed to continue writing poetry, like the Angel poems I started composing in July.
R: You’ve stated in different interviews that you started writing your novel about five years ago and you’ve posted excerpts from it on AuthorsDen during the past couple of years. What took you so long to complete it?
A: A hierarchy of priorities that forced me to concentrate first on family responsibilities then the completion of “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.” But I’m actually glad it took me this long because if I had completed and published it five years ago, certain elements of the book would be outdated right now. As it is, completing it at this time gave me back my edge.
R: What about Aberjhani's own father?
A: My father, Mr. Willie Moore, Sr., died 10 years ago. I wrote somewhat extensively about him in my essay, “The Us That Never Was.” Ours was one of those cases where we had just begun to learn how to appreciate each other as individuals when he died on his job as a construction worker. Ironically, he was not a very literate man at all but he had a lot of confidence in my future as a writer and he invested faithfully in my college education to help make that future happen.
R: Do you have any white male friends?
A: I have all kinds of friends, some of whom, as indicated earlier, do happen to be white males. One of the things about being a person attempting to live from a center of spiritual consciousness, as I do, is that I welcome or don’t welcome people into my life based on the contents of their character rather than the color of their skin. But I do find this question an interesting one because it illustrates part of a dilemma that the black male protagonist experiences in my novel when his significant other departs the physical world and he is left to sort out his feelings about one of their mutual acquaintances—a white male. He thinks of the mutual acquaintance as having been more his lady’s friend than his. Eventually, shared experiences and grief leads him to understand there’s no need to classify their relationship in any kinds of limiting terminology. They are simply two people who have been deeply wounded and permanently bound by the loss of someone they both loved.
R: Why do you think ghetto families stay in the local cycle where they are instead of "making the big break" and going to places like Texas or Nevada?
A: I will concede that there are people who live in what some call ghettoes, or trailer parks, slums, barrios, poor rural areas, etc., but there’s really no such thing as a “ghetto family.” Many people who live under such conditions do so because the patterns of their lives evolved out of “dysfunctional” situations impaired by drugs, unplanned pregnancies, discrimination (It’s not a myth.), faulty education, unemployment, underemployment, and so on. For those actually born there, home is where the community is and vice versa. They participate in the cycles of disempowerment because it is what they grow up believing life is supposed to be. Those fortunate enough to experience some kind of overview or insight that gives them a larger picture do work towards and often achieve better lives in other places. You catch quite a few of them making millions of dollars every year playing football or writing bestselling hip hop novels. You can also find them in Iraq, Afghanistan, and sometimes on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
R: Were you an excellent student as a boy and teenager?
A: As a boy in what we called elementary grade school, yes. Learning was my passion and up until the sixth grade I volunteered to take every extra course offered in what we called evening school and summer school. As a hypersensitive emotionally-challenged budding-poet teenager who lived in an economically, socially, and racially- challenging environment, I was not so excellent. The only thing that stopped my academics from going straight to hell in high school was a guidance counselor named Ms. Redding who spotted what she considered an anomaly between my very uneven high school grades and the IQ/aptitude tests that students of my generation and region had been taking since grade school. She decided that whatever my true intellectual capacity might be, it would have a better chance of development if she talked me into joining a government-sponsored college prep program called Upward Bound. She made me feel like a jackass when I said I planned on becoming a pimp or drug dealer like some of the locals in my neighborhood and told me God had better plans for me. I believed her, so as a high school junior I joined the program and got back into my childhood routine by taking additional classes on weekends and during the summer until I graduated.
R: How can Gao Xingjian be of interest to readers of this interview?
A: Hopefully readers of this interview are like me to some degree and enjoy reading about the dynamics of how exceptional literature makes its way into the world. Hopefully, they can appreciate the fact that that a Nobel Laureate such as Gao Xingjian is one of the most stylistically innovative, literarily versatile, and creatively prolific authors we have. And this isn’t even taking into account his visual art. I think too that readers would enjoy knowing about how this particular writer’s life converged so inextricably with his creative visions that to continue pursuing it he had to leave his native homeland of China and take up citizenship in France. For myself, I’m particularly grateful to Xingjian for the solution that his novel, “Soul Mountain,” helped provide to problems I was having with my own.
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R: What hurts you most?
A: On a global level: all the things that stop humanity from living in harmony with humanity. On a personal level: betrayal, deception, hypocrisy, bigotry, deliberate misrepresentation of my person or my work.
R: How can you alleviate that hurt?
A: By holding myself accountable for channeling as much unconditional love through my life as I can and by serving when and where possible as an agent for positive change in the world.
R: Which is dominant--the musician or the writer?
A: I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that. Do you mean more dominant in society or in my creative life? If it’s the former, I would probably say the musician. If the latter, in my individual creative life, I would have to say the writer. Much of my life has evolved around my work and passions as a writer. Even my time in the Air Force was as a journalist. Music has informed a good deal of my passion for writing but I did not develop my instincts for musicianship beyond singing in college choirs and writing some song lyrics for local bands back in the 1990s. One reason I’m so grateful for the opportunity to have worked on “The Goddess and the Skylark, Dancing through the Word Labyrinth” CD, with Mark Rockeymoore and Nordette Adams, is that it provided an extraordinary means to resurrect those musical impulses buried inside of me. Between it my online radio station, the Global Z-Ped Music Player at IAC (Independent Artists Company) I’m developing a hunger to delve more deeply into it.
R: Where do you plan to see Aberjhani ten years from now?
A: Ten years from now I should have completed at least two or three more novels, two more books of history, a play, a movie script, and two CDs. I’m also overdue to spend some time on the African Continent and in France and Italy, so I plan on making those rounds as well.
R: What is the current state of rock music?
A: What I know of rock music is what I check out on IAC (Independent Artists Company), which has some very fine musicians indeed. I would, however, say that rock music like everything else is in a state of flux but I’m not sure it’s riding the waves as well as some of its counterparts, like hip hop and country. Two of the primary characters in my novel are musicians and one is a very nihilistic kind of rocker whose vision of ultimate power and joy ends with his personal desires. I think there may be parallels to that in what some people refer to as rock’s stunted growth. I don’t know. What does recent sale of Kurt Cobain’s music for however many mega-millions say about the state of rock music?
END of Interview
Aberjhani: On August 25, 1990, I had a dream in which I was attending a class taught by angels teaching other angels and human beings to be their best possible selves. Within this dream, everyone called me Aberjhani (pronounced Ah-bear-zha-nee) and my only awareness of myself was as Aberjhani. When I woke up, I wrote the dream down but then forgot all about it. A few days later, I received a call from my former wife and she described a dream in which she said I had a different name. When she pronounced it, I checked my dream notebook and saw the name I had written down was almost identical to what she had said. When I said it out loud, I experienced what I can only describe as a flood of consciousness and identity that made me feel as if I were recovering from amnesia and remembering who I was for the first time in a long time. I changed my name tag at work (I was a manager for Waldenbooks at the time) the next day and have been Aberjhani ever since. I understand the name to mean one who loves God.
R: Where are you from?
A: Savannah, Georgia, United States.
R: Why have you not ventured beyond your state to live elsewhere and to see "the world"?
A: Actually I have. I attended colleges in St. Petersburg, Florida, Philadelphia, St. Paul, Minnesota, and San Francisco. I also traveled with the Air Force to Fairbanks, Alaska; all over England; and Berlin, Germany, a little before the wall came down. I also spent time in Indiana and Texas.
R: How would you describe your writing in general?
A: Since the mid-nineties I’ve described it as interactive or integral literature. This is partly because the different genres in which I write sometimes tend to overlap and partly because my hope has been that my writings create some kind of meaningful response in readers or listeners. I want whatever combination of words and ideas that presents itself to me to have some measure of the same stirring and positive impact upon my readers’ lives that favorite writers and other heroes have had upon my life.
R: What topic or two really provokes you as a writer and/or a citizen?
A: Personal spiritual empowerment and social justice or injustice.
R: Did your mother's guidance stem from any unusual intelligence?
A: My mother, Mrs. Willie Mae Griffin Lloyd, was an exceptionally intelligent woman whom I think passed on certain intellectual gifts to all of her offspring but she never actually had the opportunity to formally develop her own intelligence. She grew up in rural Georgia during the 1930s and 1940s, a time when most of the schools for African-Americans only went as far as the seventh grade. She used the spiritual wisdom, common sense, and level of education that she did receive to help her community advance as well as to maintain her family to the best of her ability. Her qualities as a natural leader earned her the nickname “Chief,” which is somewhat appropriate because her grandfather, my great-grandfather, was full-blooded Cherokee. In my own life, while growing up, my mother was more of an anchoring presence than a guiding one. Something about my nature led her to trust me from an early age to instinctively make the choices I needed to make to survive and thrive in the world. If you’ve never read my poem, “Return to Savannah,” that would be a good one to tell you something about her life and my place in it. Likewise, [you might read] the essays “Strength to Carry On” and “This Mother’s Son.”
R: Has your home state changed in any positive way since you have been able to remember?
A: I think it has changed in many positive ways. Racially, although we have our problems like everybody else, there’s more communication and cooperation than in the past. We also have a stronger awareness of our collective cultural identity and its living historical value. On the national level, we’ve been identified as lagging in educational resources and achievements but the Atlanta University System has always been an exception to that rule and we’re pushing now to incorporate some of the more advanced educational systems and theories into classrooms from kindergarten on up. We’ve definitely grown economically (though my wallet doesn’t know it yet) and community development-wise.
R: Do you think Afro-American fathers are more absent from the home than white fathers?
A: Statistically that seems to be the case but anyone who knows anything at all about statistics knows they are either representative or misrepresentative of the circumstances behind them. The breakdown we’re seeing today in African-American families is largely the twofold result of the drug abuse epidemic that swept through the country during the 1980s and 1990s plus the chronic unemployment and underemployment that has, as much as I hate to say it, historically been a sociological characteristic of African-American men as a group for too long. The unemployment and underemployment helped feed the drug traffic and abuse problem that led to cycles of criminality, early death from violence and disease, imprisonment, and further breakdown of the family. There are a number of such men who have reasoned that their families stood a better chance of survival without them because of the public assistance available to a woman head-of-household with children but not to a married male head-of-household without a job or with a job that pays minimal salary. On top of that, you can’t ignore the fact that various women actually choose to be single parents because they prefer the sense of self empowerment and authority that comes with being the matriarch who calls all the shots in their home.
R: Isn't the young Afro-American male the group with the highest level of unemployment?
A: During the past five years, the unemployment rate of African-American men aged 16 to 61 has been upwards of 50% in many of our larger urban centers, including New York. And just for the record, many of these men have been extremely qualified for various positions.
R: Does God love you?
A: As He does you and all of His creation. In my world God is Love.
R: Is the Afro-American writing experience really different from the white American writing experience?
A: That would depend on the African-American writer and the white American writer in question. Certainly those African-American writers who draw on the defining aspects of African-American culture for their works are different from white American writers who do not. But if when you say “writing experience,” we’re also talking about the mainstream publishing experience, I would say that until recently there has been a huge difference. It has only been in the last decade that traditional publishers have begun to accept from African-American writers a large number of titles. This happened after the self-publishing revolution demonstrated that the market for such titles was a large and growing one. Before that, unless an African-American writer was able to duplicate and emulate perspectives and styles that might be considered Anglo-centric, he or she did not get published.
R: Do you admire a particular Afro-American writer?
A: I have a tendency to admire schools of writers and literature rather than individuals. Along those lines, I definitely admire the writers whose lives I chronicled in “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance” and various writers of the 1960s and 1970s’ Black Arts Movement. Also, I’m pretty sure I owe a debt to the essays of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison as well as novels by Ann Petry and Richard Wright. I’m also a fan of French writers like Boris Vian, Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Guillaume Appollinaire, and a number of others. Certain Latino writers such as Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Federico Garcia Lorca, Borges and others absolutely mesmerize me. Gao Xingian and Yukio Mishima are two of my favorite Asian writers. I also like a lot of the very extraordinary modern writers on AuthorsDen. For the ones that I’ve omitted, you can check out my books catalogued on Library Thing.com or my reviews on Amazon.com.
R: What piece(s) of advice would you give a young person who wants or says she/he wants to write?
A: Read as widely and diversely as you can. Most of the better writers tend to be heavy readers as well. Make a serious study of the craft and treat it with the respect it deserves because what we’re talking about has been one of the mainstays of civilization for centuries and there is a reason for that. Strive to endow your work with meaningful substance rather than surface glitter or shock value. Master rules of grammar before breaking them in the name of style. Enjoy the journey of discovery through literature.
R: In light of your dream of angels, do you believe you had an earlier life?
A: I don’t know if it’s possible to know something like that with certainty because I haven’t made up my mind whether reincarnation is actually a succession of lives experienced by a single soul or if it’s multi-generational memory that is biologically and spiritually encoded into our DNA. What I do know for certain is that the dream came to me at a time when I was studying a variety of spiritual traditions and teachings: Native American spirituality, Christian mysticism, the angelic communions of the Essenes, the Kabala, Sufism, New Age, Egyptian spiritual philosophies, and so on. Meditating upon these studies guided me into the core of my own spiritual consciousness and revealed my higher individual identity, which is something I believe we all have. There are numerous accounts in spiritual teachings about individuals receiving new names when acquiring an evolved spiritual consciousness, such as Saul in the Christian bible becoming Paul on the road to Damascus, and the American Muslim Malcolm Little becoming first Malcolm X and then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz as he evolved spiritually. This motif of evolving identities pops up in my newly completed novel. And the angelic presence has become a strong one in a series of poems I’m currently working on.
A: Sadly, I experienced prejudice in most of them. It hurt one of my white male friend’s feelings very badly one time in San Francisco when we were downtown standing on the curb with a co-worker, an older woman who also happened to be white, trying to hail a taxi for her. We had just left a restaurant where we celebrated somebody’s promotion. Within 15 minutes, several taxis, maybe four or five actually, with only the driver inside drove right past us. It finally occurred to me that they were ignoring us because of me, and I told my friends this. They argued that I had to be wrong because of where we were, so I stepped about 10 feet away from them and the curb because I knew the woman with us needed to get home. In less than a minute, the very next taxi that came along pulled up to the curb. My friends looked at me with their mouths open, but I suggested the woman go ahead and get in the cab. Then my friend and I decided to walk.
R: Does concentration on sex hinder a person's spiritual development or can the two coexist?
A: The two do coexist: most people engage spiritual marital ceremonies for the sake of having a romantic sexual partner with whom they can share great adventures in life. If you concentrate on sex at the right time then it can, I believe, actually enhance a person’s spiritual development. But those who obsess over sex to the exclusion of anything else tend to develop some very unhealthy destructive psychological dispositions. Sexual interaction as a gateway to authentic intimacy can help us to access the spiritual essence within each other. That’s why people in long-term marriages and intimate partnerships sometimes speak in terms of “becoming each other.” The intimacy strengthens trust, compassion, wisdom, love, self-knowledge and personal growth. Sexual addictions, like drug addictions, dilute an individual’s power to function in the everyday world of employment or family life. And yes, it can de-sensitize a person in regard to the finer nuances of spiritual growth and awareness.
R: What kind of people do you find difficult to appreciate?
A: Those who are unable to respect the validity of someone else’s life and experiences.
R: Basically, what is "Harlem Renaissance" about?
A: The Harlem Renaissance was an across-the-board cultural and political movement generated by African Americans during the 1920s and that lasted until the 1940s. It was named after the community of Harlem in New York City because Harlem at that time became one of the major geographic centers for African Americans migrating out of the South, Africans immigrating from Africa, and West Indians coming in from the islands. This moving congregation of people of African descent combined with other historical events, like the World Wars, advancements in technology, and the industrial revolution, to create a veritable explosion of creative works in literature, fine art, music, fashion, theatre, film, journalism, and social institutions. It’s because of the Harlem Renaissance that writers like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and quite a few more are enduring names in world literature. In addition to laying the foundation for the success of the 1960s’ Civil Rights Movement, the renaissance also gave us the musical forms we all know and love as the blues, jazz, gospel music, and traditional African-American spirituals. We are currently in the midst of a second Harlem Renaissance serving to revitalize the now historic neighborhood. Obviously, you can get a lot more about this from my “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance” and my Creative Spirit of the Harlem Renaissance web site.
R: How did it feel when you learned “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance” had been listed as “one of the essential reference books for the home library” by Black Issues Book Review?
R: How significant was it to you that readers in your hometown voted you “Best Poet/Spoken Word Artist of 2006?”
A: That was a profoundly spiritual and psychological event in my life. It came at a time when I was not only making peace with grief over my mother’s passing, but also as I was seeking ways to reestablish my public literary life after having lived in seclusion as a caregiver for half a decade. Anyone who has given up their own lifestyle in order to accommodate the needs of someone else knows that it’s very easy to lose any definitive sense of who you truly are while struggling to fulfill your tasks as a caregiver. Public performance had become a major part of my identity as a poet and suddenly it was wiped out. For readers to have confirmed that my work still mattered to them based primarily on my journalism, and on poems published in ESSENCE Magazine and my web sites meant a lot because it let me know that my voice was still being heard and my words still being valued. It restored a huge part of my sense of self and it gave me the creative energy I needed to continue writing poetry, like the Angel poems I started composing in July.
R: You’ve stated in different interviews that you started writing your novel about five years ago and you’ve posted excerpts from it on AuthorsDen during the past couple of years. What took you so long to complete it?
A: A hierarchy of priorities that forced me to concentrate first on family responsibilities then the completion of “Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance.” But I’m actually glad it took me this long because if I had completed and published it five years ago, certain elements of the book would be outdated right now. As it is, completing it at this time gave me back my edge.
R: What about Aberjhani's own father?
A: My father, Mr. Willie Moore, Sr., died 10 years ago. I wrote somewhat extensively about him in my essay, “The Us That Never Was.” Ours was one of those cases where we had just begun to learn how to appreciate each other as individuals when he died on his job as a construction worker. Ironically, he was not a very literate man at all but he had a lot of confidence in my future as a writer and he invested faithfully in my college education to help make that future happen.
R: Do you have any white male friends?
A: I have all kinds of friends, some of whom, as indicated earlier, do happen to be white males. One of the things about being a person attempting to live from a center of spiritual consciousness, as I do, is that I welcome or don’t welcome people into my life based on the contents of their character rather than the color of their skin. But I do find this question an interesting one because it illustrates part of a dilemma that the black male protagonist experiences in my novel when his significant other departs the physical world and he is left to sort out his feelings about one of their mutual acquaintances—a white male. He thinks of the mutual acquaintance as having been more his lady’s friend than his. Eventually, shared experiences and grief leads him to understand there’s no need to classify their relationship in any kinds of limiting terminology. They are simply two people who have been deeply wounded and permanently bound by the loss of someone they both loved.
R: Why do you think ghetto families stay in the local cycle where they are instead of "making the big break" and going to places like Texas or Nevada?
A: I will concede that there are people who live in what some call ghettoes, or trailer parks, slums, barrios, poor rural areas, etc., but there’s really no such thing as a “ghetto family.” Many people who live under such conditions do so because the patterns of their lives evolved out of “dysfunctional” situations impaired by drugs, unplanned pregnancies, discrimination (It’s not a myth.), faulty education, unemployment, underemployment, and so on. For those actually born there, home is where the community is and vice versa. They participate in the cycles of disempowerment because it is what they grow up believing life is supposed to be. Those fortunate enough to experience some kind of overview or insight that gives them a larger picture do work towards and often achieve better lives in other places. You catch quite a few of them making millions of dollars every year playing football or writing bestselling hip hop novels. You can also find them in Iraq, Afghanistan, and sometimes on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
R: Were you an excellent student as a boy and teenager?
A: As a boy in what we called elementary grade school, yes. Learning was my passion and up until the sixth grade I volunteered to take every extra course offered in what we called evening school and summer school. As a hypersensitive emotionally-challenged budding-poet teenager who lived in an economically, socially, and racially- challenging environment, I was not so excellent. The only thing that stopped my academics from going straight to hell in high school was a guidance counselor named Ms. Redding who spotted what she considered an anomaly between my very uneven high school grades and the IQ/aptitude tests that students of my generation and region had been taking since grade school. She decided that whatever my true intellectual capacity might be, it would have a better chance of development if she talked me into joining a government-sponsored college prep program called Upward Bound. She made me feel like a jackass when I said I planned on becoming a pimp or drug dealer like some of the locals in my neighborhood and told me God had better plans for me. I believed her, so as a high school junior I joined the program and got back into my childhood routine by taking additional classes on weekends and during the summer until I graduated.
R: How can Gao Xingjian be of interest to readers of this interview?
A: Hopefully readers of this interview are like me to some degree and enjoy reading about the dynamics of how exceptional literature makes its way into the world. Hopefully, they can appreciate the fact that that a Nobel Laureate such as Gao Xingjian is one of the most stylistically innovative, literarily versatile, and creatively prolific authors we have. And this isn’t even taking into account his visual art. I think too that readers would enjoy knowing about how this particular writer’s life converged so inextricably with his creative visions that to continue pursuing it he had to leave his native homeland of China and take up citizenship in France. For myself, I’m particularly grateful to Xingjian for the solution that his novel, “Soul Mountain,” helped provide to problems I was having with my own.
R: What hurts you most?
A: On a global level: all the things that stop humanity from living in harmony with humanity. On a personal level: betrayal, deception, hypocrisy, bigotry, deliberate misrepresentation of my person or my work.
R: How can you alleviate that hurt?
A: By holding myself accountable for channeling as much unconditional love through my life as I can and by serving when and where possible as an agent for positive change in the world.
R: Which is dominant--the musician or the writer?
A: I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that. Do you mean more dominant in society or in my creative life? If it’s the former, I would probably say the musician. If the latter, in my individual creative life, I would have to say the writer. Much of my life has evolved around my work and passions as a writer. Even my time in the Air Force was as a journalist. Music has informed a good deal of my passion for writing but I did not develop my instincts for musicianship beyond singing in college choirs and writing some song lyrics for local bands back in the 1990s. One reason I’m so grateful for the opportunity to have worked on “The Goddess and the Skylark, Dancing through the Word Labyrinth” CD, with Mark Rockeymoore and Nordette Adams, is that it provided an extraordinary means to resurrect those musical impulses buried inside of me. Between it my online radio station, the Global Z-Ped Music Player at IAC (Independent Artists Company) I’m developing a hunger to delve more deeply into it.
R: Where do you plan to see Aberjhani ten years from now?
A: Ten years from now I should have completed at least two or three more novels, two more books of history, a play, a movie script, and two CDs. I’m also overdue to spend some time on the African Continent and in France and Italy, so I plan on making those rounds as well.
R: What is the current state of rock music?
A: What I know of rock music is what I check out on IAC (Independent Artists Company), which has some very fine musicians indeed. I would, however, say that rock music like everything else is in a state of flux but I’m not sure it’s riding the waves as well as some of its counterparts, like hip hop and country. Two of the primary characters in my novel are musicians and one is a very nihilistic kind of rocker whose vision of ultimate power and joy ends with his personal desires. I think there may be parallels to that in what some people refer to as rock’s stunted growth. I don’t know. What does recent sale of Kurt Cobain’s music for however many mega-millions say about the state of rock music?
END of Interview
© Poetry Life and Times~February 2007