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Hi! I'm Zona Hrnjak and this is my blog for African American Literature.

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the single letter i

My dad always said, or perhaps joked - the line with Serbs is thin - that the capital “I” in English is a testament to the vanity of the British. He’s not wrong in that English is probably one of the only languages which capitalizes exclusively this pronoun, although realistically I’d assume that there’s a niche linguistic explanation. Nonetheless, it’d be boring to merely assume this. You have to find some symbolism in everything, or maybe that’s just a side effect of reading Invisible Man. Admittedly, I’ve poked fun at people who try to extrapolate meaning from things like punctuation and capitalization. But the poem that Sarah presented, “I Have a Dream” by Pat Parker, made me remember my father’s remark. I realized that the capitalization was not an accident. While my father always referred to the “vanity of the British”, what was meant under the surface was a history of colonialism and the exploitation of others for the sake of profit; the capitalists of capitalists. For him, and ...
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Out of Context Images

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I sat down with  Mumbo Jumbo , a pen, and notebook on my desk, and the entire internet at my disposal. Every cryptic image would become a specimen for examination, a good Atonist explanation. But what we called “Reed glasses” transformed into “Reed contacts” into “Reed lasik surgery”, and now I can’t unsee much of the thesis Reed presented us with. So let’s just get two birds stoned at once; why go down a time consuming rabbit hole of research when I could simply explain that the point of the images is contained within their awkwardness. Including citations, a bibliography, newspaper excerpts, and the images, all make Mumbo Jumbo at a surface level appear something more like an academic text. This could be a conversation in and of itself of course, but images especially add to this. Usually you see them in the middle part of a non-fiction book or a history textbook, with added captions explaining what is being shown. However, Mumbo Jumbo lacks any captions and really the connectio...
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Esther and Holden: A story

As the composer Igor Stravinsky said, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit,”. This is at least how I, and undoubtedly some of you guys, felt about this project. You’re given a pretty limited set of requirements for what you can write, established characters, setting, et cetera. But within those limits, I found it all of a sudden a lot easier to write something. The combinations and possibilities were extremely fascinating. My story is from Esther’s perspective ten years later, in 1963, when she’s a writer and return to New York City. She meets Holden and they get to know each other a bit. It’s a story that looks at both of them ten years on, but now in the context of the 1963 political crises and culture (although part of the story is that things haven’t changed that much yet). My goal was to follow Esther’s thoughts over two days with Holden, and see where it goes. It's titled In Open Air, sort of "the opposite...
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