Harga Paket Haji Plus Desember 2015 di Jakarta Pusat
Harga Paket Haji Plus Desember 2015 di Jakarta Pusat 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 Haji Plus Desember 2015 di Jakarta Pusat 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.
Semuanya sudah terprogram, rapi, tersusun,
terencana tapi unpredictable dan yang pasti Allah mempercayakan prosesi ini pada sosok yang tepat
"IZROIL", malaikat yang saklek dengan aturan tanpa kompromi dan tawar menawar.
Semuanya
sudah terprogram, rapi, tersusun, terencana tapi unpredictable dan yang pasti Allah
mempercayakan prosesi ini pada sosok yang tepat "IZROIL", malaikat yang saklek dengan
aturan tanpa kompromi dan tawar menawar.
Pokoknya "Yang pernah hidup
di dunia, pasti akan mati tepat pada jadwal yang sudah ada di server utama "LAUHIL
MAHFUDZ"". Perlu diketahui kawan tinta Allah telah kering yang sudah JADI lama sekali
bahkan sebelum Allah menciptakan langit dan bumi.
Peraturan tentang kematian
Adalah :
1. Datang pada sesuatu yang pernah hidup
Allah
SWT berfirman : "Kullu Nafsin Dzaaiqotul Maut" ( 3 : 185 )
Tiap-tiap yang
berjiwa akan merasakan mati
Tenang saja kawan ... gak usah merinding, takut,
atau ngeri. Biasa sajalah ... Masih bernafas kan.. ?? ( alhamdulillah dulu dong .. :) )
2. Datangnya sewaktu-waktu
Allah SWT berfirman "Ainama
takuunu Yud'riikumul mautu Walau kuntum fii Burujim Musyayyadah" ( 4 : 78 )
Di
mana saja kamu berada, kematian akan mendapatkan kamu, kendatipun kamu di dalam benteng yang
tinggi lagi kokoh.
Sayangnya malaikat Izroil bukan mbah Google yang setia
menjawab setiap pertanyaan kita. Malaikat Izroil juga gak punya operator hotline yang bisa
menjawab telpon kita setiap saat kita butuhkan.
Makanya manusia secerdas Einstein aja
gak tahu kapan ajalnya. Belum ada dan saya jamin gak bakalan ada sebuah penemuan manusia yang
bisa nemuin "Kalkulator usia" ... Alat untuk menghitung ajal manusia.
Dan sayangnya juga malaikat Izroil juga tetap bisa melakukan tugasnya dimanapun dengan cara
apapun ...
Gak butuh "Death note",
Gak terpengaruh harga BBM yang
naik,
Gak bisa KO sama Bodyguard sekuat apapun
Gak ada yang bisa kucing-
kucingan sama malaikat yang satu ini kayak di film "Christmas Caroline".
Gak
ada yang bisa diajak tukeran,
Kalo waktunya datang gak bisa nawar, bahkan Koruptor
selicik apapun gak bisa melobi usianya sendiri.
3. Kematian bukanlah akhir
segalanya
Jangan percaya kalo ada yang bilang "Hidup cuma sekali".
Yang bener "Mati itu cuma sekali, kalo hidup berkali-kali, sebelum hidup ini kan udah
pernah hidup di alam arwah sama alam kandungan, bahkan abis mati kita idup lagi". (
Bukaan, bukan reinkarnasi macam kerasakti ato Avatar gitu ... Maksudnya dibangkitkan lagi untuk
menerima rapor di Hari Kebangkitan Internasional trus kita hidup deh di akhirat )
Allah SWT berfirman : Fiiha tahyauna wa fiiha tamuutuuna wa fiiha tukhrojuun ( 7 : 25 )
"Disanalah ( Bumi ) kalian dihidupkan, disanalah kalian dimatikan, dan disanalah
kalian dibangkitkan"
4. Sudah ada jadwalnya
Dan kalo
jadwalnya udah dateng, Malaikat Izroil pasti datang. Gak bakalan ada dialog macam iklan rokok
"Wani piro?" ( Kecuali dulu nabi Musa AS ).
"Wa maa kaana
linafsin an tamuuta illa biidznillahi kitaaban muajjala" ( 3 : 145 )
Tiada sesuatu
yang hidup kecuali dengan idzin Allah sebagai ketetapan yang telah ditentukan waktunya.
Hehe tenang saja kawan .... kalau belum waktunya gak akan datang kok Malaikat
Izroilnya. Walopun misalnya ada orang yang udah pengen mati, trus manggil manggil malaikat
Izroil, sms, bbm, mensen, ngewall hehe ( emang malaikat Izroil punya hp).
5. Ada saat dimana Kematian akan mati
Akan tiba saat dimana Allah akan
memensiunkan Izroil yakni ketika Kematian telah mati.
Dalam Kitabu Sifati
jannah wannar diterangkan bahwa suatu hari diakhirat nanti penduduk surga dan penduduk neraka
harus menghentikan aktivitasnya, Allah akan memberi pengumuman pada seluruh penduduk akhirat.
Penduduk surga khawatir, jika kehidupan nikmatnya disurga akan berakhir. Penduduk Neraka
bahagia, karena mungkin siksaannya akan berakhir. Kemudian Allah memberi pengumuman bahwa
kematian telah diserupakan dengan kambing, dan pada hari itu kematian akan disembelih mati.
Semenjak saat itu, tak ada lagi kefanaan, semua hidup selamanya. Yang di neraka disiksa
selamanya tanpa terhenti waktu. Yang di surga nikmat kekal selamanya.
6.
Menjadi Peringatan Buat Orang iman
Kalo Kholifah Umar pernah ngendikan,
"Kafaa bil mauti Mauidzoh", Cukuplah kematian menjadi peringatan.
Mau apa lagi sih ... Pada akhirnya kan manusia cuma satu aja bisanya ... "menuhin kuota
umurnya dengan ngisi buku catatan amal"
Nah, pertanyaannya ... sampai
detik ini, sampai hembusan nafas yang ini, catatan mana yang paling banyak terisi ...
DEMI KIAAAAAAAAAAAN!!
Sumber: Dika Syahida/ldii
Editor:Liwon
Maulana(galipat)
CARA DIET SEHAT DAN ALAMI
Cara Diet Sehat dan Alami - Bukan telah menjadi rahasia lagi jika kebanyakan wanita pasti selalu ingin tampil sempurna dengan tu
Cara Diet Sehat dan Alami - Bukan telah menjadi rahasia lagi jika kebanyakan wanita pasti selalu ingin tampil sempurna dengan tubuh yang ramping semampai demi untuk kepuasan pribadi ataupun untuk menyenangkan pasangan. Oleh karena itu, banyak wanita rela mati-matian melakukan diet, bahkan banyak yang rela mengeluarkan kocek dalam-dalam hanya untuk bisa mendapatkan bentuk tubuh yang diinginkan. Tetapi jangan sampai obsesi itu membuat Anda melupakan cara diet sehat yang aman bagi tubuh. Obat-obatan pengurus mungkin bekerja secara instant untuk menguruskan tubuh anda, namun bahaya jangka panjangnya sangat mengerikan.
Diet Sehat dan Alami
Bagaimana pun juga, memilih cara diet alami akan lebih baik daripada melakukan hal-hal yang dapat membahayakan kesehatan untuk mendapatkan bentuk tubuh idaman secara instant. Sebenarnya ada beberapa pilihan bagi Anda untuk bisa mendapatkan tubuh ramping seperti yang diinginkan. Pilihan itu misalnya operasi sedot lemak, mengonsumsi obat-obatan pelangsing tubuh, atau mengoleskan krim yang dikatakan dapat melunturkan lemak di kulit.
Fenomena ini juga dapat menyebabkan banyak berdirinya klinik-klinik penurunan berat badan, terutama di kota-kota besar. Tapi tentunya ada juga klinik pelangsingan yang menawarkan program diet sehat secara alami. Sebaiknya anda mengumpulkan informasi sebanyak-banyaknya tentang berbagai efek samping yang mungkin terjadi, sebelum Anda memutuskan untuk memilih salah satu terapi untuk melangsingkan tubuh.
Tips Diet secara Sehat dan Alami
Memiliki tubuh langsing tanpa mengeluarkan uang terlalu banyak, tanpa sakit atau tersiksa karena lapar, masih dapat Anda lakukan cara diet alami. Berikut adalah beberapa hal yang dapat anda lakukan.
Tetaplah makan tiga kali secara teratur setiap hari. Terlambat makan akan dapat membuat Anda kelaparan dan makan dalam porsi banyak pada satu waktu. Dengan makan teratur, asupan makanan yang Anda konsumsi akan lebih teratur pula.
Makanlah di meja makan dan kunyahlah hidangan secara perlahan sehingga Anda sadar berapa jumlah kalori yang masuk ke tubuh Anda. Makan sambil nonton televisi atau main game hanya akan membuat Anda makan lebih banyak karena berkonsentrasi pada tayangan yang Anda lihat, bukan pada makanan yang anda konsumsi.
Jangan membiasakan diri makan malam atau ngemil mendekati jam tidur. Kebiasaan ini bisa menyebabkan berat badan Anda naik, dan Anda akan bangun dalam keadaan kelelahan karena pada waktu tidur, organ pencernaan masih harus bekerja mengolah makanan yang baru saja Anda santap.
Tambahkan teh hijau dan susu kedelai pada menu makanan Anda, karena teh hijau dipercaya dapat meluruhkan lemak dan kolesterol, sedangkan susu kedelai juga dapat memenuhi kebutuhan protein. Susu kedelai lebih sehat karena tidak mengandung kolesterol seperti susu hewan.
Tubuh membutuhkan karbohidrat sebagai sumber energi, tetapi konsumsi karbohidrat yang berlebihan, terutama karbohidrat olahan seperti nasi putih dan roti putih dapat menyebabkan kegemukan. Sebaiknya Anda mengganti konsumsi nasi putih dan roti dengan nasi merah dan roti gandum.
Gantilah kebiasaan ngemil dengan memperbanyak makan sayur dan buah. Anda akan merasa kenyang lebih lama, dan kebutuhan vitamin serta mineral Anda bisa terpenuhi.
Terakhir, untuk melengkapi program diet sehat dengan cara diet alami, luangkan waktu untuk berolah raga. Olah raga secara teratur juga dapat membantu mempercepat pembakaran kalori dalam tubuh Anda. Selain itu, olah raga dapat membantu menghilangkan stres dan membuat tubuh Anda lebih bugar.
Nah, mudah bukan menerapkan cara diet sehat dan alami? Diet dengan cara seperti ini memang tidak akan menunjukkan hasil secara instan. Namun, jika dijalankan dengan disiplin dan berkelanjutan, anda akan mendapatkan tubuh yang ideal tanpa efek samping. karena kebutuhan gizi anda masih tetap terpenuhi.
From T Magazine: Street Lit’s Power Couple
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?”
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.
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.”
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.”
Hard but Hopeful Home to ‘Lot of Freddies’
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Children playing last week in Sandtown-Winchester, the Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was raised. One young resident called it “a tough community.”