MAU UMROH BERSAMA TRAVEL TERBAIK DI INDONESIA ALHIJAZ INDO WISTA..?

Paket Umroh Reguler, paket umroh ramadhan, paket umroh Turki, Paket Umroh dubai dan beberapa paket lainya

Jadwal Umroh Kami ada disetiap minggu, agar  lebih detail Anda bisa tanyakan detail ttg program kami, Sukses dan Berkah Untuk Anda

YOOK LANGSUNG WHATSAPP AJA KLIK DISINI 082124065740

Promo Paket Haji Plus 2015 di Jakarta 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.

Promo Paket Haji Plus 2015 di Jakarta 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.

Promo Paket Haji Plus 2015 di Jakarta

saco-indonesia.com, Cara Kerja Generator Set Generator adalah mesin yang dapat mengubah tenaga mekanis untuk menjadi tenag

saco-indonesia.com,

Cara Kerja Generator Set

Generator adalah mesin yang dapat mengubah tenaga mekanis untuk menjadi tenaga listrik dengan melalui proses induksi elektromagnetik. Generator ini telah memperoleh energi mekanis dari prime mover. Generator arus bolak-balik (AC) telah dikenal dengan sebutan alternator. Generator ini diharapkan dapat mensuplai tenaga listrik pada saat terjadi gangguan, dimana suplai tersebut akan digunakan untuk beban prioritas.

Sedangkan genset (generator set) merupakan bagian dari generator. Genset juga merupakan suatu alat yang dapat mengubah energi mekanik menjadi energi listrik. Genset atau sistem generator penyaluran adalah suatu generator listrik yang telah terdiri dari panel, berenergi solar dan terdapat kincir angin yang telah ditempatkan pada suatu tempat. Genset juga dapat digunakan sebagai sistem cadangan listrik atau “off-grid” (sumber daya yang tergantung atas kebutuhan pemakai). Genset juga sering digunakan oleh rumah sakit dan industri yang mempercayakan sumber daya yang mantap, seperti halnya area pedesaan yang tidak ada akses untuk secara komersial menghasilkan listrik. Generator telah terpasang satu poros dengan motor diesel, yang biasanya dengan menggunakan generator sinkron (alternator) pada pembangkitan. Generator sinkron ini terdiri dari dua bagian utama yaitu: sistem medan magnet dan jangkar. Generator ini kapasitasnya besar, medan magnetnya berputar karena terletak pada rotor.

 

Konstruksi generator AC adalah sebagai berikut:

1. Rangka stator
Terbuat dari besi tuang, rangka stator juga merupakan rumah dari bagian-bagian generator yang lain.

2. Stator
Stator telah memiliki alur-alur sebagai tempat untuk meletakkan lilitan stator. Lilitan stator telah berfungsi sebagai tempat GGL induksi.

3. Rotor
Rotor adalah bagian yang berputar, pada bagian ini juga terdapat kutub-kutub magnet dengan lilitannya yang dialiri arus searah, melewati cincin geser dan sikat-sikat.

4. Cincin geser
Terbuat dari bahan kuningan atau tembaga yang yang dipasang pada poros dengan memakai bahan isolasi. Slip ring ini akan berputar bersama-sama dengan poros dan rotor.

5. Generator penguat
Generator penguat juga merupakan generator arus searah yang dipakai sebagai sumber arus.

 

Pada umumnya generator AC ini akan dibuat sedemikian rupa, sehingga lilitan tempat terjadinya GGL induksi tidak akan bergerak, sedangkan kutub-kutub akan menimbulkan medan magnet berputar. Generator itu disebut dengan generator berkutub dalam, dapat dilihat pada gambar berikut.

Keuntungan generator kutub dalam bahwa untuk dapat mengambil arus tidak dibutuhkan cincin geser dan sikat arang. Karena lilitan-lilitan tempat terjadinya GGL itu tidak akan berputar. Generator sinkron juga sangat cocok untuk mesin-mesin dengan tegangan tinggi danarus yang besar.

Secara umum kutub magnet generator sinkron dibedakan atas 2 yaitu :

1. Kutub magnet dengan bagian kutub yang menonjol (salient pole).
Konstruksi seperti ini akan digunakan untuk putaran rendah, dengan jumlah kutub yang banyak. Diameter rotornya besar dan berporos pendek.

2. Kutub magnet dengan bagian kutub yang tidak menonjol (non salient pole).
Konstruksi seperti ini digunakan untuk putaran tinggi (1500 rpm atau 3000 rpm), dengan jumlah kutub yang sedikit. Kira-kira 2/3 dari seluruh permukaan rotor dibuat alur-alur untuk tempat lilitan penguat. Yang 1/3 bagian lagi juga merupakan bagian yang utuh, yang berfungsi sebagai inti kutub.

MESIN DIESEL

Mesin diesel termasuk mesin dengan pembakaran dalam atau disebut dengan motor bakar ditinjau dari cara memperoleh energi termalnya. Untuk dapat membangkikan listrik sebuah mesin diesel menggunakan generator dengan sistem penggerak tenaga disel atauyang biasa dikenal dengan sebutan Genset (Generator Set).

Keuntungan pemakaian mesin diesel sebagai Prime Mover
- Design dan instalasi sederhana
- Auxilary equipment sederhana
- Waktu pembebanan relatif singkat
- Konsumsi bahan bakar relatif murah dan hemat

Kerugian pemakaian mesin diesel sebagai Prime Mover
- Berat mesin yang sangat berat karena harus dapat menahan getaran serta kompresi yang tinggi.
- Starting awal berat, karena kompresinya tinggi yaitu sekitar 200 bar.
- Semakin besar daya maka mesin diesel tersebut dimensinya akan semakin besar pula, hal tersebut telah menyebabkan kesulitan jika daya mesinnya sangat besar.

Ada 2 komponen utama dalam genset yaitu:
1. Prime mover atau pengerak mula, dalam hal ini mesin diesel/engine
2. Generator.

Cara Kerja Mesin Diesel
Prime mover juga merupakan peralatan yang telah mempunyai fungsi menghasilkan energi mekanis yang diperlukan untuk dapat memutar rotor generator. Pada mesin diesel/engine telah terjadi penyalaan sendiri, karena proses kerjanya telah berdasarkan udara murni yang telah dimampatkan di dalam silinder pada tekanan yang tinggi (± 30 arm), sehingga temperatur di dalam silinder naik. Dan pada saat itu bahan bakar disemprotkan dalam silinder yang bertemperatur dan bertekanan tinggi melebihi titik nyala bahan bakar sehingga akan menyala secara otomatis.

Pada mesin diesel penambahan panas atau energi senantiasa dilakukan pada tekanan yang konstan. Pada mesin diesel, piston melakukan 2 langkah pendek menuju kepala silinder pada setiap langkah daya.

1. Langkah ke atas yang pertama merupakan angkah pemasukan dan penghisapan, di sini udara dan bahan bakar masuk sedangkan poros engkol berputar ke bawah.

2. Langkah kedua merupakan langkah kompresi, poros engkol terus berputar dapat menyebabkan torak naik dan menekan bahan bakar sehingga terjadi pembakaran. Kedua proses ini (1 dan 2) juga termasuk proses pembakaran.

3. Langkah ketiga merupakan langkah ekspansi dan kerja, di sini kedua katup yaitu katup isap dan buang tertutup sedangkan poros engkol terus berputar dan menarik kembali torak ke bawah.

4. Langkah keempat merupakan langkah pembuangan, disini katup buang terbuka dan dapat menyebabkan gas akibat sisa pembakaran terbuang keluar. Gas dapat keluar karena padaproses keempat ini torak kembali bergerak naik keatas dan menyebabkan gas dapat keluar. Kedua proses terakhir ini (3 dan 4) juga termasuk proses pembuangan.

5. Setelah keempat proses tersebut, maka proses berikutnya akan mengulang kembali proses yang pertama, dimana udara dan bahan bakar masuk kembali.

Editor : Dian Sukmawati
Sumber : jualgenset.co.id

 

Tanda kecil yang ditampakkan tubuh seringkali diremehkan. Padahal, tidak jarang parameter ini bermakna besar, yang mengindikasikan adanya kelainan atau bahaya dalam tubuh.

Saco-Indonesia.com - Tanda kecil yang ditampakkan tubuh seringkali diremehkan. Padahal, tidak jarang parameter ini bermakna besar, yang mengindikasikan adanya kelainan atau bahaya dalam tubuh. Tanda-tanda kecil tersebut mulai dari tumbuhnya area dengan warna berbeda pada kuku, sampai benjolan pada kelopak mata menandakan adanya ancaman pada tubuh.

“Tidak ada yang lebih tahu tubuh selain tuannya. Kitalah yang paling tahu apabila ada sesuatu yang tidak beres, " kata chief medical editor situs kesehatan WebMD, Michael Smith.

Ia menyarankan agar setiap orang dapat mengenal baik tubuhnya. Berikut 5 tanda yang harus diperiksa untuk mengetahui keadaan tubuh khususnya bagi seorang wanita :

- Cek siklus menstruasi, terutama bila mengalami pendarahan sepanjang bulan
Indikasi : Kebanyakan wanita mengindikasikan menstruasi (pendarahan) yang tidak teratur berhubungan dengan stres. Sekalipun benar, wanita juga sebaiknya waspada terhadap kemungkinan kanker rahim dan mulut rahim. Ketika kanker memasuki tahap lanjut dan menyerang jaringan terdekat, wanita bisa mengalami pendarahan yang terjadi di antara masa menstruasi, setelah berhubungan seksual, atau setelah menopause.

Tindakan lanjutan : Segera memeriksakan diri ke dokter kandungan. Kanker mulut Rahim menjadi penyebab utama kematian wanita. Pemeriksaan pap smear menjadi deteksi dini dan langkahpencegahan terjadinya kanker pembunuh wanita ini.

- Periksa kuku, terutama bila ada area gelap pada penampang kuku
Indikasi : Bukan cuma tahi lalat bermutasi yang mengindikasikan terjadinya kanker kulit. Penyakit ini juga bisa berkembang di bawah kuku. Area kekuningan, coklat, atau hitam bisa menjadi tanda bahaya. “Kanker kulit melanoma menjadi salah satu yang mematikan,” kata Smith. Menurut  American Cancer Society, setiap jam ada satu nyawa melayang karena melanoma. Beberapa tahun terakhir penderita melanoma semakin banyak, terutama pada wanita muda.

Tindak lanjut : Segera pergi ke dokter kulit (dermatologis). Menurut American Cancer Society, kanker yang cepat diketahui dan dilokalisasi berpeluang 98 persen disembuhkan. Lamanya terpapar dan terbakar sinar matahari saat kecil bisa menjadi faktor risiko. “Butuh 10 tahun bagi kanker kulit untuk berkembang. Sekalipun saat ini rutin menggunakan sunblock, pengalaman saat kecil bisa menjadi faktor risiko,” kata Smith.

- Periksa kulit, bila ada tumbuh jerawat atau bulu tebal


Indikasi : Kondisi ini merupakan tanda resistensi insulin dan produksi berlebihan hormon seks pria. Hal ini mengakibatkan kulit menjadi berminyak dan tumbuh rambut tebal pada wajah, dada, perut, punggung, jempol dan jari kaki. "Tandanya hampir sama dengan pubertas pada pria, " kata Smith. Smith menyarankan jangan malu bila menderita gejala ini. Namun pada wanita hal ini mungkin membutuhkan tes kesuburan.

Tindak lanjut : Segera ke dokter. Bila terjadi pada wanita, dokter mungkin akan menyarankan tes panggul, darah dan USG untuk memeriksa kondisi ini. Sebaiknya, aturlah pola hidup dan minum obat untuk mengendalikan produksi hormone androgen.

- Periksa ketiak, terutama bila ada  kulit gelap yang kasar
Indikasi : Kemungkinan adalah diabetes. Kelebihan insulin dalam aliran darah, menyebabkan sel kulit mengganda dalam waktu yang cepat. Hal ini menyebabkan terbangunnya jaringan yang mengandung pigmen lebih gelap. Akibatnya kulit di bawah lengan lebih gelap dan tebal.

Tindak lanjut : Tes urine menjadi cara jitu untuk mengetahui adakah diabetes dalam tubuh penderita. Menurut American Diabetes Association, cara ini menyelamatkan 12,6 juta wanita Amerika berusia 20-an dari diabetes. Langkah ini juga disarankan bagi yang berusia 45 tahun ke atas, terutama yang memiliki kelebihan berat badan.

- Periksa kelopak mata, terutama bila ada benjolan kecil dan lembut. Banyaknya riasan tidak mampu menutupi pembengkakan ini

Indikasi : Ada kelebihan kolesterol di bawah kulit. "Kalau bengkak ini menghilang berarti kadar kolesterol bertambah, sekitar 300 atau lebih," kata Smith. Kelebihan kolesterol merupakan faktor risiko gagal jantung, yang membunuh satu dari 4 wanita di Amerika

Tidak lanjut : Segera cek kandungan kolesterol dan tanyakan pada dokter bagaimana menguranginya. Pengurangan 10 persen kandungan kolesterol, akan mengurangi peluang diabetes hingga tiga kali lipat. Pola makan sehat kaya serat dan rajin olahraga menjadi jalan keluar.

Editor :Liwon Maulana(galipat)

Joseph Lechleider

Mr. Lechleider helped invent DSL technology, which enabled phone companies to offer high-speed web access over their infrastructure of copper wires.

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?”

Photo
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.

Photo
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.”

Photo
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.”

 

Artikel lainnya »