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Harga Paket Umroh Plus Murah di Cawang Hubungi 021-9929-2337 atau 0821-2406-5740 Alhijaz Indowisata adalah perusahaan swasta nasional yang bergerak di bidang tour dan travel. Nama Alhijaz terinspirasi dari istilah dua kota suci bagi umat islam pada zaman nabi Muhammad saw. yaitu Makkah dan Madinah. Dua kota yang penuh berkah sehingga diharapkan menular dalam kinerja perusahaan. Sedangkan Indowisata merupakan akronim dari kata indo yang berarti negara Indonesia dan wisata yang menjadi fokus usaha bisnis kami.

Harga Paket Umroh Plus Murah di Cawang Alhijaz Indowisata didirikan oleh Bapak H. Abdullah Djakfar Muksen pada tahun 2010. Merangkak dari kecil namun pasti, alhijaz berkembang pesat dari mulai penjualan tiket maskapai penerbangan domestik dan luar negeri, tour domestik hingga mengembangkan ke layanan jasa umrah dan haji khusus. Tak hanya itu, pada tahun 2011 Alhijaz kembali membuka divisi baru yaitu provider visa umrah yang bekerja sama dengan muassasah arab saudi. Sebagai komitmen legalitas perusahaan dalam melayani pelanggan dan jamaah secara aman dan profesional, saat ini perusahaan telah mengantongi izin resmi dari pemerintah melalui kementrian pariwisata, lalu izin haji khusus dan umrah dari kementrian agama. Selain itu perusahaan juga tergabung dalam komunitas organisasi travel nasional seperti Asita, komunitas penyelenggara umrah dan haji khusus yaitu HIMPUH dan organisasi internasional yaitu IATA.

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Ayam kampung atau biasa disebut ayam Buras (Bukan Ras) merupakan jenis ayam yang sudah yang banyak di ternakan secara tradisiona

Ayam kampung atau biasa disebut ayam Buras (Bukan Ras) merupakan jenis ayam yang sudah yang banyak di ternakan secara tradisional  di pedesaana. Sebutan ayam kampung adalah merujuk kepada ayam yang memang kenyataanya banyak ditemukan di kampung-kampung, walaupun memang ada juga Beternak ayam Kampung di Perkotaan. Jenis ayam kampung cukup beragam, tetapi pada umumnya memiliki sifat yang relatif sama yaitu lebih kebal/tahan terhadap penyakit dibandingkan dengan ayam ras . Ayam kampung juga lebih tahan terhadap gejala Stress. Dan itulah salah-satu keunggulan Ayam kampung, disamping masih banyak lagi keunggulan-keunggulan ayam kampung (Ayam Ras) dibandingkan dengan ayam ras. Beberapa keunggulan ayam kampung dibandingkan dengan ayam ras. Ayam kampong lebih kebal terhadap serangan berbagai penyakit Lebih tahan stress, tidak terganggu dengan suasana lingkungan yang hiruk pikuk. Memiliki adaptasi yang tinggi terhadap perubahan lingkungan . Lebih toleran terhadap perubahan cuaca Harga jual lebih tinggi disbanding ayam ras Telurnya di anggap lebih berkhasiat, sehingga harga jual telurnya lebih mahal Dagingnya lebih enak dan gurih di banding ayam potong (ras) Permintaan akan kebutuhan ayam kampung cukup tinggi Bangsa-bangsa ayam kampung sampai saat ini tidak diketahui dengan pasti, tetapi ayam hutan (gallus varius linnaeus) diperkirakan sebagai nenek moyang ayam kampung. Hal ini terlihat dari sifat-sifat dan morfologi ayam kampung yang mempunyai kemiripan dengan ayam hutan. Warna bulu ayam kampung sangat beragam, yaitu mulai dari hitam, putih, kekuningan, merah tua,atau kombinasi, dari warna-warna tersebut. Pemeliharaan ternak ayam buras di Pandaisikek Pemilihan Bibit Ternak. Pemilihan bibit ayam kampung secara umum juga sama dengan ayam ras, yaitu dipilih bibit dari induk yang mempunyai kemampuan produksi tinggi, misalnya dari kemampuan bertelurnya, sifat tumbuhnya dan mempunyai performance yang sehat, lincah, tidak cacat, mata cerah, tidak ada kotoran yang menempel dibubur, serta bulu tampak baik dan mengembang. Kandang Ternak Ayam Buras. Perkandangan untuk pemeliharaan ayam kampung sangat tergantung dari cara pemeliharaan itu sendiri. Pemeliharaan ayam secara ekstensif atau dilepas hanya memerlukan jenis perkandangan yang seadanya. Kandang hanya berfungsi untuk tidur pada malam hari. Jenis kandang atau pemeliharaan ternak ayam buras/ ternak ayam kampung secara semi intensif dibuat lebih baik dari kandang untuk pemeliharaan secara akstensif karena selain untuk tidur pada malam hari, kandang juga digunakan untuk melakukan aktifitas. Sementara kandang untuk pemeliharaan ayam kampung secara intensif perlu mendapatkan perhatian khusus. Kandang dapat dibuat seperti pada kandang ayam ras karena pada pemeliharaan ternak ayam buras/ ternak ayam kampung secara intensif, ayam kampung akan dipelihara secara terus menerus didalam sehingga kandang berfungsi sebagai tempat tinggal, aktifitas makan, minum, istirahat, dan berproduksi. Sistem kandang yang digunakan bisa sama dengan sistem-sistem kandang ayam ras petelur, yaitu sistem liter dan sistem sangkar. Kepadatan kandang juga perlu diperhatikan. Penggunaan wadah pakan dan minum juga sama dengan ayam petelur. Penempatan wadah dan pakan minuman juga sama yaitu ditempatkan secara berdekatan. Pemeliharaan ayam kampung juga bisa dilakukan secara ekstensif dan intensif. Pemeliharaan secara ekstensif adalah pemeliharaan dengan cara dilepas dan ayam dibiarkan berkeliaran mencari pakan sendiri. Pemeliharaan ini menghasilkan produksi yang rendah. Sementara pemeliharaan secara intensif yaitu dengan cara mengandangkan ayam. Kebutuhan ayam seperti meningkatkan produksi. Pada pemeliharaan secara tradisional, produksi telur rata-rata 30-40 butir per tahun. sementara dengan pemeliharaan intensif dapat meningkat menjadi 163 butir per 200 hari. Pakan Ayam Buras. Pada pemeliharaan ayam kampung secara intensif, pemberian pakan dapat dilakukan seperti pada ayam ras petelur. Namun karena kemampuan produksi ayam kampung terbatas tidak seperti ayam ras petelur. Pemberian pakannya bisa dicampur sendiri. Bahan pakan yang digunakan antara lain jagung giling, bekatul dan konsentrat jadi dan sayur-sayuran. Konversi pakan pada ayam kampung sekitar 4,9. Pemberian pakan dibedakan dalam pakan awal (starter), pertumbuhan (grower) dan masa bertelur (layer). Selain hasil ramuan sendiri, pakan yang diberikan pada ayam pedaging juga bisa berupa pakan jadi. Pencegahan Penyakit Ternak Ayam Buras. Pemeliharaan kesehatan pada ayam kampung tidak jauh beda dengan ayam ras, yaitu melalui program pembersihan kandang, perlengkapannya dan lingkungannya; sanitasi; serta hapus hama kandang. Penyakit yang sering menyerang ayam kampung yaitu new castle (NW), cronic deceaces (CRD) dan cacar. Hal-hal yang biasa dilakukan dalam pencegahan penyakit pada ayam kampung sebagai berikut: -      Hindarkan anak ayam dari perubahan cuaca, anak ayam dapat diberi tambahan vitamin karena pada kondisi ini, anak ayam mudah terserang penyakit. -      Memberikan vaksinasi ND secara teratur -      Berikan pakan yang cukup berkualitas -      Jaga kerbersihan, perlengkapan dan lingkup kandang -      Berikan obat bila perlu saja -      Berikan obat cacing dan antibiotik secara berkala Akan tetapi perlakuan-perlakuan tersebut di atas belumlah dilaksanakn oleh peternak ayam, hal ini disebabkan karena tujuan beternak ayam hanyalah sebagai usaha sampingan dan ada juga yang hanay sekedar hobby saja. Panen Ternak Ayam Buras. Hasil panen ayam kampung berupa telur dan daging. Dibandingkan ayam ras, telur dan daging ayam kampung yang mempunyai rasa yang lebih khas dan lebih disukai oleh konsumen. Produksi daging ayam kampung dapat dilakukan pada ayam dara atau ayam dara apkir. Ayam kampung bisa dijual dalam keadaan hidup atau karkas. Pembibitan pada ayam kampung. tidak seperti ayam ras yang dilakukan oleh breding farm. Pembibitan ayam kampung dilakukan secara alami oleh induk yang menetaskan telurnya sendiri atau secara penetasan buatan dengan menggunakan mesin tetes oleh peternak atau pengusaha peternakan. Lama penetasan telur ayam kampung sekitar 18 hari. Cara penetasan sama dengan ayam ras. (EC-1266).

saco-indonesia.com, Akibat dari perebutan lahan persawahan, menantu dan mertua, Sardiansyah yang berusia (35) tahun dan Muhammad

saco-indonesia.com, Akibat dari perebutan lahan persawahan, menantu dan mertua, Sardiansyah yang berusia (35) tahun dan Muhammad Jude yang berusia (56) tahun telah terlibat duel dengan menggunakan senjata tajam di tengah pesawahan Pangkrat, Desa Maronge, Kabupaten Sumbawa. Akibat dari perkelahian tersebut, keduanya telah mengalami luka tebasan.

Kapolsek Plampang Iptu Mathias AW ketika dihubungi , juga mengatakan, perkelahian antara menantu dan kakak mertuanya itu berlatar belakang memperebutkan lahan pesawahan.

Dia melanjutkan, sebelumnya dua tahun yang lalu lahan itu telah diperebutkan oleh Muhammad Jude dengan saudara kandungnya, Saleh Jude, yang juga merupakan mertua dari Sardiansyah.

"Persoalan ini juga sempat ditangani oleh pihak Pospol Maronge, di mana lahan yang telah diperebutkan tersebut kemudian telah dikuasai oleh Saleh Jude. Akhirnya, lahan sawah itu diserahkan kepada menantunya, Sardiansyah, yang sudah setahun terakhir ini mengelolanya," ujar Mathias.

Pada Senin (30/12) siang, Muhammad Jude datang dan membajak lahan itu, yang rencananya juga akan digunakan untuk bercocok tanam.

Sardiansyah pun telah keberatan melihat aksi Muhammad Jude, hingga menegur kakak dari mertuanya itu. Saling ngotot, Sardiansyah dan Muhammad Jude akhirnya telah terlibat 'duel' dengan sengit.

Perkelahian di lokasi pesawahan Pangkrat, Desa Maronge, Kecamatan Maronge itu telah mengakibatkan Sardiansyah, guru ngaji di Dusun Unter Ngengas, Desa Maronge, hingga menderita luka di bagian wajahnya.

Sedangkan Muhammad Jude, warga Dusun Sekayu, Desa Berora, Lopok, telah mengalami luka serius karena dadanya tertusuk pisau dan hingga kini masih harus menjalani perawatan medis di RSUD Sumbawa.

"Sardiansyah kemudian telah mendatangi Polsek Plampang untuk dapat melaporkan kasus itu secara resmi, dia diserang dengan menggunakan parang, dan melakukan upaya untuk membela diri, hingga ujung parang yang dipegang Muhammad Jude mengenai badannya sendiri.

"Keterangan ini masih sepihak, karena kami belum meminta keterangan dari terlapor (Muhammad Jude) yang kini masih berbaring di RSUD Sumbawa. Menurut informasi keluarganya, pihak Muhammad Jude juga akan melaporkan kasus yang sama," ujar Mathias.

Dikatakan Mathias, pihaknya juga akan mengoordinasikan kasus ini dengan Polres Sumbawa untuk mendapat petunjuk lebih lanjut, apakah penanganannya dilakukan di Polsek atau di Polres.


Editor : Dian sukmawati

HOBART, Tasmania — Few places seem out of reach for China’s leader, Xi Jinping, who has traveled from European capitals to obscure Pacific and Caribbean islands in pursuit of his nation’s strategic interests.

So perhaps it was not surprising when he turned up last fall in this city on the edge of the Southern Ocean to put down a long-distance marker in another faraway region, Antarctica, 2,000 miles south of this Australian port.

Standing on the deck of an icebreaker that ferries Chinese scientists from this last stop before the frozen continent, Mr. Xi pledged that China would continue to expand in one of the few places on earth that remain unexploited by humans.

He signed a five-year accord with the Australian government that allows Chinese vessels and, in the future, aircraft to resupply for fuel and food before heading south. That will help secure easier access to a region that is believed to have vast oil and mineral resources; huge quantities of high-protein sea life; and for times of possible future dire need, fresh water contained in icebergs.

It was not until 1985, about seven decades after Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole, that a team representing Beijing hoisted the Chinese flag over the nation’s first Antarctic research base, the Great Wall Station on King George Island.

But now China seems determined to catch up. As it has bolstered spending on Antarctic research, and as the early explorers, especially the United States and Australia, confront stagnant budgets, there is growing concern about its intentions.

China’s operations on the continent — it opened its fourth research station last year, chose a site for a fifth, and is investing in a second icebreaker and new ice-capable planes and helicopters — are already the fastest growing of the 52 signatories to the Antarctic Treaty. That gentlemen’s agreement reached in 1959 bans military activity on the continent and aims to preserve it as one of the world’s last wildernesses; a related pact prohibits mining.

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But Mr. Xi’s visit was another sign that China is positioning itself to take advantage of the continent’s resource potential when the treaty expires in 2048 — or in the event that it is ripped up before, Chinese and Australian experts say.

“So far, our research is natural-science based, but we know there is more and more concern about resource security,” said Yang Huigen, director general of the Polar Research Institute of China, who accompanied Mr. Xi last November on his visit to Hobart and stood with him on the icebreaker, Xue Long, or Snow Dragon.

With that in mind, the polar institute recently opened a new division devoted to the study of resources, law, geopolitics and governance in Antarctica and the Arctic, Mr. Yang said.

Australia, a strategic ally of the United States that has strong economic relations with China, is watching China’s buildup in the Antarctic with a mix of gratitude — China’s presence offers support for Australia’s Antarctic science program, which is short of cash — and wariness.

“We should have no illusions about the deeper agenda — one that has not even been agreed to by Chinese scientists but is driven by Xi, and most likely his successors,” said Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a former senior official in the Australian Department of Defense.

“This is part of a broader pattern of a mercantilist approach all around the world,” Mr. Jennings added. “A big driver of Chinese policy is to secure long-term energy supply and food supply.”

That approach was evident last month when a large Chinese agriculture enterprise announced an expansion of its fishing operations around Antarctica to catch more krill — small, protein-rich crustaceans that are abundant in Antarctic waters.

“The Antarctic is a treasure house for all human beings, and China should go there and share,” Liu Shenli, the chairman of the China National Agricultural Development Group, told China Daily, a state-owned newspaper. China would aim to fish up to two million tons of krill a year, he said, a substantial increase from what it currently harvests.

Because sovereignty over Antarctica is unclear, nations have sought to strengthen their claims over the ice-covered land by building research bases and naming geographic features. China’s fifth station will put it within reach of the six American facilities, and ahead of Australia’s three.

Chinese mappers have also given Chinese names to more than 300 sites, compared with the thousands of locations on the continent with English names.

In the unspoken competition for Antarctica’s future, scientific achievement can also translate into influence. Chinese scientists are driving to be the first to drill and recover an ice core containing tiny air bubbles that provide a record of climate change stretching as far back as 1.5 million years. It is an expensive and delicate effort at which others, including the European Union and Australia, have failed.

In a breakthrough a decade ago, European scientists extracted an ice core nearly two miles long that revealed 800,000 years of climate history. But finding an ice core going back further would allow scientists to examine a change in the earth’s climate cycles believed to have occurred 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago.

China is betting it has found the best location to drill, at an area called Dome A, or Dome Argus, the highest point on the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. Though it is considered one of the coldest places on the planet, with temperatures of 130 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, a Chinese expedition explored the area in 2005 and established a research station in 2009.

“The international community has drilled in lots of places, but no luck so far,” said Xiao Cunde, a member of the first party to reach the site and the deputy director of the Institute for Climate Change at the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. “We think at Dome A we will have a straight shot at the one-million-year ice core.”

Mr. Xiao said China had already begun drilling and hoped to find what scientists are looking for in four to five years.

To support its Antarctic aspirations, China is building a sophisticated $300 million icebreaker that is expected to be ready in a few years, said Xia Limin, deputy director of the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration in Beijing. It has also bought a high-tech fixed-wing aircraft, outfitted in the United States, for taking sensitive scientific soundings from the ice.

China has chosen the site for its fifth research station at Inexpressible Island, named by a group of British explorers who were stranded at the desolate site in 1912 and survived the winter by excavating a small ice cave.

Mr. Xia said the inhospitable spot was ideal because China did not have a presence in that part of Antarctica, and because the rocky site did not have much snow, making it relatively cheap to build there.

Anne-Marie Brady, a professor of political science at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and the author of a soon-to-be-released book, “China as a Polar Great Power,” said Chinese scientists also believed they had a good chance of finding mineral and energy resources near the site.

“China is playing a long game in Antarctica and keeping other states guessing about its true intentions and interests are part of its poker hand,” she said. But she noted that China’s interest in finding minerals was presented “loud and clear to domestic audiences” as the main reason it was investing in Antarctica.

Because commercial drilling is banned, estimates of energy and mineral resources in Antarctica rely on remote sensing data and comparisons with similar geological environments elsewhere, said Millard F. Coffin, executive director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies in Hobart.

But the difficulty of extraction in such severe conditions and uncertainty about future commodity prices make it unlikely that China or any country would defy the ban on mining anytime soon.

Tourism, however, is already booming. Travelers from China are still a relatively small contingent in the Antarctic compared with the more than 13,000 Americans who visited in 2013, and as yet there are no licensed Chinese tour operators.

But that is about to change, said Anthony Bergin, deputy director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “I understand very soon there will be Chinese tourists on Chinese vessels with all-Chinese crew in the Antarctic,” he said.

 

THE WRITERS ASHLEY AND JAQUAVIS COLEMAN know the value of a good curtain-raiser. The couple have co-authored dozens of novels, and they like to start them with a bang: a headlong action sequence, a blast of violence or sex that rocks readers back on their heels. But the Colemans concede they would be hard-pressed to dream up anything more gripping than their own real-life opening scene.

In the summer of 2001, JaQuavis Coleman was a 16-year-old foster child in Flint, Mich., the former auto-manufacturing mecca that had devolved, in the wake of General Motors’ plant closures, into one of the country’s most dangerous cities, with a decimated economy and a violent crime rate more than three times the national average. When JaQuavis was 8, social services had removed him from his mother’s home. He spent years bouncing between foster families. At 16, JaQuavis was also a businessman: a crack dealer with a network of street-corner peddlers in his employ.

One day that summer, JaQuavis met a fellow dealer in a parking lot on Flint’s west side. He was there to make a bulk sale of a quarter-brick, or “nine-piece” — a nine-ounce parcel of cocaine, with a street value of about $11,000. In the middle of the transaction, JaQuavis heard the telltale chirp of a walkie-talkie. His customer, he now realized, was an undercover policeman. JaQuavis jumped into his car and spun out onto the road, with two unmarked police cars in pursuit. He didn’t want to get into a high-speed chase, so he whipped his car into a church parking lot and made a run for it, darting into an alleyway behind a row of small houses, where he tossed the quarter-brick into some bushes. When JaQuavis reached the small residential street on the other side of the houses, he was greeted by the police, who handcuffed him and went to search behind the houses where, they told him, they were certain he had ditched the drugs. JaQuavis had been dealing since he was 12, had amassed more than $100,000 and had never been arrested. Now, he thought: It’s over.

But when the police looked in the bushes, they couldn’t find any cocaine. They interrogated JaQuavis, who denied having ever possessed or sold drugs. They combed the backyard alley some more. After an hour of fruitless efforts, the police were forced to unlock the handcuffs and release their suspect.

JaQuavis was baffled by the turn of events until the next day, when he received a phone call. The previous afternoon, a 15-year-old girl had been sitting in her home on the west side of Flint when she heard sirens. She looked out of the window of her bedroom, and watched a young man throw a package in the bushes behind her house. She recognized him. He was a high school classmate — a handsome, charismatic boy whom she had admired from afar. The girl crept outside and grabbed the bundle, which she hid in her basement. “I have something that belongs to you,” Ashley Snell told JaQuavis Coleman when she reached him by phone. “You wanna come over here and pick it up?”

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Three of the nearly 50 works of urban fiction published by the Colemans over the last decade, often featuring drug deals, violence, sex and a brash kind of feminism.Credit Marko Metzinger

In the Colemans’ first novel, “Dirty Money” (2005), they told a version of this story. The outline was the same: the drug deal gone bad, the dope chucked in the bushes, the fateful phone call. To the extent that the authors took poetic license, it was to tone down the meet-cute improbability of the true-life events. In “Dirty Money,” the girl, Anari, and the crack dealer, Maurice, circle each other warily for a year or so before coupling up. But the facts of Ashley and JaQuavis’s romance outstripped pulp fiction. They fell in love more or less at first sight, moved into their own apartment while still in high school and were married in 2008. “We were together from the day we met,” Ashley says. “I don’t think we’ve spent more than a week apart in total over the past 14 years.”

That partnership turned out to be creative and entrepreneurial as well as romantic. Over the past decade, the Colemans have published nearly 50 books, sometimes as solo writers, sometimes under pseudonyms, but usually as collaborators with a byline that has become a trusted brand: “Ashley & JaQuavis.” They are marquee stars of urban fiction, or street lit, a genre whose inner-city settings and lurid mix of crime, sex and sensationalism have earned it comparisons to gangsta rap. The emergence of street lit is one of the big stories in recent American publishing, a juggernaut that has generated huge sales by catering to a readership — young, black and, for the most part, female — that historically has been ill-served by the book business. But the genre is also widely maligned. Street lit is subject to a kind of triple snobbery: scorned by literati who look down on genre fiction generally, ignored by a white publishing establishment that remains largely indifferent to black books and disparaged by African-American intellectuals for poor writing, coarse values and trafficking in racial stereotypes.

But if a certain kind of cultural prestige is shut off to the Colemans, they have reaped other rewards. They’ve built a large and loyal fan base, which gobbles up the new Ashley & JaQuavis titles that arrive every few months. Many of those books are sold at street-corner stands and other off-the-grid venues in African-American neighborhoods, a literary gray market that doesn’t register a blip on best-seller tallies. Yet the Colemans’ most popular series now regularly crack the trade fiction best-seller lists of The New York Times and Publishers Weekly. For years, the pair had no literary agent; they sold hundreds of thousands of books without banking a penny in royalties. Still, they have earned millions of dollars, almost exclusively from cash-for-manuscript deals negotiated directly with independent publishing houses. In short, though little known outside of the world of urban fiction, the Colemans are one of America’s most successful literary couples, a distinction they’ve achieved, they insist, because of their work’s gritty authenticity and their devotion to a primal literary virtue: the power of the ripping yarn.

“When you read our books, you’re gonna realize: ‘Ashley & JaQuavis are storytellers,’ ” says Ashley. “Our tales will get your heart pounding.”

THE COLEMANS’ HOME BASE — the cottage from which they operate their cottage industry — is a spacious four-bedroom house in a genteel suburb about 35 miles north of downtown Detroit. The house is plush, but when I visited this past winter, it was sparsely appointed. The couple had just recently moved in, and had only had time to fully furnish the bedroom of their 4-year-old son, Quaye.

In conversation, Ashley and JaQuavis exude both modesty and bravado: gratitude for their good fortune and bootstrappers’ pride in having made their own luck. They talk a lot about their time in the trenches, the years they spent as a drug dealer and “ride-or-die girl” tandem. In Flint they learned to “grind hard.” Writing, they say, is merely a more elevated kind of grind.

“Instead of hitting the block like we used to, we hit the laptops,” says Ashley. “I know what every word is worth. So while I’m writing, I’m like: ‘Okay, there’s a hundred dollars. There’s a thousand dollars. There’s five thousand dollars.’ ”

They maintain a rigorous regimen. They each try to write 5,000 words per day, five days a week. The writers stagger their shifts: JaQuavis goes to bed at 7 p.m. and wakes up early, around 3 or 4 in the morning, to work while his wife and child sleep. Ashley writes during the day, often in libraries or at Starbucks.

They divide the labor in other ways. Chapters are divvied up more or less equally, with tasks assigned according to individual strengths. (JaQuavis typically handles character development. Ashley loves writing murder scenes.) The results are stitched together, with no editorial interference from one author in the other’s text. The real work, they contend, is the brainstorming. The Colemans spend weeks mapping out their plot-driven books — long conversations that turn into elaborate diagrams on dry-erase boards. “JaQuavis and I are so close, it makes the process real easy,” says Ashley. “Sometimes when I’m thinking of something, a plot point, he’ll say it out loud, and I’m like: ‘Wait — did I say that?’ ”

Their collaboration developed by accident, and on the fly. Both were bookish teenagers. Ashley read lots of Judy Blume and John Grisham; JaQuavis liked Shakespeare, Richard Wright and “Atlas Shrugged.” (Their first official date was at a Borders bookstore, where Ashley bought “The Coldest Winter Ever,” the Sister Souljah novel often credited with kick-starting the contemporary street-lit movement.) In 2003, Ashley, then 17, was forced to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. She was bedridden for three weeks, and to provide distraction and boost her spirits, JaQuavis challenged his girlfriend to a writing contest. “She just wasn’t talking. She was laying in bed. I said, ‘You know what? I bet you I could write a better book than you.’ My wife is real competitive. So I said, ‘Yo, all right, $500 bet.’ And I saw her eyes spark, like, ‘What?! You can’t write no better book than me!’ So I wrote about three chapters. She wrote about three chapters. Two days later, we switched.”

The result, hammered out in a few days, would become “Dirty Money.” Two years later, when Ashley and JaQuavis were students at Ferris State University in Western Michigan, they sold the manuscript to Urban Books, a street-lit imprint founded by the best-selling author Carl Weber. At the time, JaQuavis was still making his living selling drugs. When Ashley got the phone call informing her that their book had been bought, she assumed they’d hit it big, and flushed more than $10,000 worth of cocaine down the toilet. Their advance was a mere $4,000.

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The roots of street lit, found in the midcentury detective novels of Chester Himes and the ‘60s and ‘70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines.Credit Marko Metzinger

Those advances would soon increase, eventually reaching five and six figures. The Colemans built their career, JaQuavis says, in a manner that made sense to him as a veteran dope peddler: by flooding the street with product. From the start, they were prolific, churning out books at a rate of four or five a year. Their novels made their way into stores; the now-defunct chain Waldenbooks, which had stores in urban areas typically bypassed by booksellers, was a major engine of the street-lit market. But Ashley and JaQuavis took advantage of distribution channels established by pioneering urban fiction authors such as Teri Woods and Vickie Stringer, and a network of street-corner tables, magazine stands, corner shops and bodegas. Like rappers who establish their bona fides with gray-market mixtapes, street-lit authors use this system to circumnavigate industry gatekeepers, bringing their work straight to the genre’s core readership. But urban fiction has other aficionados, in less likely places. “Our books are so popular in the prison system,” JaQuavis says. “We’re banned in certain penitentiaries. Inmates fight over the books — there are incidents, you know? I have loved ones in jail, and they’re like: ‘Yo, your books can’t come in here. It’s against the rules.’ ”

The appeal of the Colemans’ work is not hard to fathom. The books are formulaic and taut; they deliver the expected goods efficiently and exuberantly. The titles telegraph the contents: “Diary of a Street Diva,” “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Murderville.” The novels serve up a stream of explicit sex and violence in a slangy, tangy, profane voice. In Ashley & JaQuavis’s books people don’t get killed: they get “popped,” “laid out,” get their “cap twisted back.” The smut is constant, with emphasis on the earthy, sticky, olfactory particulars. Romance novel clichés — shuddering orgasms, heroic carnal feats, superlative sexual skill sets — are rendered in the Colemans’ punchy patois.

Subtlety, in other words, isn’t Ashley & JaQuavis’s forte. But their books do have a grainy specificity. In “The Cartel” (2008), the first novel in the Colemans’ best-selling saga of a Miami drug syndicate, they catch the sights and smells of a crack workshop in a housing project: the nostril-stinging scent of cocaine and baking soda bubbling on stovetops; the teams of women, stripped naked except for hospital masks so they can’t pilfer the merchandise, “cutting up the cooked coke on the round wood table.” The subject matter is dark, but the Colemans’ tone is not quite noir. Even in the grimmest scenes, the mood is high-spirited, with the writers palpably relishing the lewd and gory details: the bodies writhing in boudoirs and crumpling under volleys of bullets, the geysers of blood and other bodily fluids.

The luridness of street lit has made it a flashpoint, inciting controversy reminiscent of the hip-hop culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s. But the street-lit debate touches deeper historical roots, reviving decades-old arguments in black literary circles about the mandate to uplift the race and present wholesome images of African-Americans. In 1928, W. E. B. Du Bois slammed the “licentiousness” of “Home to Harlem,” Claude McKay’s rollicking novel of Harlem nightlife. McKay’s book, Du Bois wrote, “for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Similar sentiments have greeted 21st-century street lit. In a 2006 New York Times Op-Ed essay, the journalist and author Nick Chiles decried “the sexualization and degradation of black fiction.” African-American bookstores, Chiles complained, are “overrun with novels that . . . appeal exclusively to our most prurient natures — as if these nasty books were pairing off back in the stockrooms like little paperback rabbits and churning out even more graphic offspring that make Ralph Ellison books cringe into a dusty corner.”

Copulating paperbacks aside, it’s clear that the street-lit debate is about more than literature, touching on questions of paternalism versus populism, and on middle-class anxieties about the black underclass. “It’s part and parcel of black elites’ efforts to define not only a literary tradition, but a racial politics,” said Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor of English and African-American Studies at Princeton University. “There has always been a sense that because African-Americans’ opportunities to represent themselves are so limited in the first place, any hint of criminality or salaciousness would necessarily be a knock on the entire racial politics. One of the pressing debates about African-American literature today is: If we can’t include writers like Ashley & JaQuavis, to what extent is the foundation of our thinking about black literature faulty? Is it just a literature for elites? Or can it be inclusive, bringing urban fiction under the purview of our umbrella term ‘African-American literature’?”

Defenders of street lit note that the genre has a pedigree: a tradition of black pulp fiction that stretches from Chester Himes, the midcentury author of hardboiled Harlem detective stories, to the 1960s and ’70s “ghetto fiction” of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, to the current wave of urban fiction authors. Others argue for street lit as a social good, noting that it attracts a large audience that might otherwise never read at all. Scholars like Nishikawa link street lit to recent studies showing increased reading among African-Americans. A 2014 Pew Research Center report found that a greater percentage of black Americans are book readers than whites or Latinos.

For their part, the Colemans place their work in the broader black literary tradition. “You have Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin — all of these traditional black writers, who wrote about the struggles of racism, injustice, inequality,” says Ashley. “We’re writing about the struggle as it happens now. It’s just a different struggle. I’m telling my story. I’m telling the struggle of a black girl from Flint, Michigan, who grew up on welfare.”

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The Colemans in their new four-bedroom house in the northern suburbs of Detroit.Credit Courtesy of Ashley and JaQuavis Coleman

Perhaps there is a high-minded case to be made for street lit. But the virtues of Ashley & JaQuavis’s work are more basic. Their novels do lack literary polish. The writing is not graceful; there are passages of clunky exposition and sex scenes that induce guffaws and eye rolls. But the pleasure quotient is high. The books flaunt a garish brand of feminism, with women characters cast not just as vixens, but also as gangsters — cold-blooded killers, “murder mamas.” The stories are exceptionally well-plotted. “The Cartel” opens by introducing its hero, the crime boss Carter Diamond; on page 9, a gunshot spatters Diamond’s brain across the interior of a police cruiser. The book then flashes back seven years and begins to hurtle forward again — a bullet train, whizzing readers through shifting alliances, romantic entanglements and betrayals, kidnappings, shootouts with Haitian and Dominican gangsters, and a cliffhanger closing scene that leaves the novel’s heroine tied to a chair in a basement, gruesomely tortured to the edge of death. Ashley & JaQuavis’s books are not Ralph Ellison, certainly, but they build up quite a head of steam. They move.

The Colemans are moving themselves these days. They recently signed a deal with St. Martin’s Press, which will bring out the next installment in the “Cartel” series as well as new solo series by both writers. The St. Martin’s deal is both lucrative and legitimizing — a validation of Ashley and JaQuavis’s work by one of publishing’s most venerable houses. The Colemans’ ambitions have grown, as well. A recent trilogy, “Murderville,” tackles human trafficking and the blood-diamond industry in West Africa, with storylines that sweep from Sierra Leone to Mexico to Los Angeles. Increasingly, Ashley & JaQuavis are leaning on research — traveling to far-flung settings and hitting the books in the libraries — and spending less time mining their own rough-and-tumble past.

But Flint remains a source of inspiration. One evening not long ago, JaQuavis led me on a tour of his hometown: a popular roadside bar; the parking lot where he met the undercover cop for the ill-fated drug deal; Ashley’s old house, the site of his almost-arrest. He took me to a ramshackle vehicle repair shop on Flint’s west side, where he worked as a kid, washing cars. He showed me a bathroom at the rear of the garage, where, at age 12, he sneaked away to inspect the first “boulder” of crack that he ever sold. A spray-painted sign on the garage wall, which JaQuavis remembered from his time at the car wash, offered words of warning:

WHAT EVERY YOUNG MAN SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT USING A GUN:
MURDER . . . 30 Years
ARMED ROBBERY . . . 15 Years
ASSAULT . . . 15 Years
RAPE . . . 20 Years
POSSESSION . . . 5 Years
JACKING . . . 20 YEARS

“We still love Flint, Michigan,” JaQuavis says. “It’s so seedy, so treacherous. But there’s some heart in this city. This is where it all started, selling books out the box. In the days when we would get those little $40,000 advances, they’d send us a couple boxes of books for free. We would hit the streets to sell our books, right out of the car trunk. It was a hustle. It still is.”

One old neighborhood asset that the Colemans have not shaken off is swagger. “My wife is the best female writer in the game,” JaQuavis told me. “I believe I’m the best male writer in the game. I’m sleeping next to the best writer in the world. And she’s doing the same.”

 

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