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

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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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The Perspective of Beloved

I have an idea about the story in Beloved , but as we’re still really early in the novel it’s just a prediction. I’ll try and come back to the idea later on: What if this story is from the perspective of Denver? The novel is told in third person, obviously, so it’s not from her directly. But here’s the thing: the story is told in a way that there is a present-tense narrative, that is being intermittently interrupted by memories of the traumatic past. But those aren’t all separate memories - they’re the same memories, just cycled back to in more detail. So as you progress through the present-day narrative, the pieces of the story are filled in so that by the end, you have the full picture. This reminds me of what a child’s relationship is with their parent. You grow up with your parents, and progress through your life as they are also progressing through theirs. But they had things in their life before you. So as you grow up and they grow older, you hear their stories and as you get old...
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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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