Kata Wisata menurut bahasa mengandung arti yang banyak. Akan tetapi dalam istilah yang dikenal sekarang lebih dikhususkan pada sebagian makna itu. Yaitu, yang menunjukkan berjalan-jalan ke suatu negara untuk rekreasi atau untuk melihat-lihat, mencari dan menyaksikan (sesuatu) atau semisal itu. Bukan untuk mengais (rezki), bekerja dan menetap. Silakan lihat kitab Al-Mu’jam Al-Wasith, 469.
Berbicara tentang wisata menurut pandangan Islam, maka harus ada pembagian berikut ini,
Pertama: Pengertian wisata umrah dalam Islam.
Islam datang untuk merubah banyak pemahaman keliru yang dibawa oleh akal manusia yang pendek, kemudian mengaitkan dengan nilai-nilai dan akhlak yang mulia. Wisata dalam pemahaman sebagian umat terdahulu dikaitkan dengan upaya menyiksa diri dan mengharuskannya untuk berjalan di muka bumi, serta membuat badan letih sebagai hukuman baginya atau zuhud dalam dunianya. Islam datang untuk menghapuskan pemahaman negatif yang berlawanan dengan (makna) wisata.
Diriwayatkan oleh Ibnu Hani dari Ahmad bin Hanbal, beliau ditanya tentang seseorang yang bepergian atau bermukim di suatu kota, mana yang lebih anda sukai? Beliau menjawab: "Wisata tidak ada sedikit pun dalam Islam, tidak juga prilaku para nabi dan orang-orang saleh." (Talbis Iblis, 340).
Ibnu Rajab mengomentari perkataan Imam Ahmad dengan mengatakan: "Wisata dengan pemahaman ini telah dilakukan oleh sekelompok orang yang dikenal suka beribadah dan bersungguh-sungguh tanpa didasari ilmu. Di antara mereka ada yang kembali ketika mengetahui hal itu." (Fathul-Bari, karangan Ibnu Rajab, 1/56)
Kamudian Islam datang untuk meninggikan pemahaman wisata dengan mengaitkannya dengan tujuan-tujuan yang mulia. Di antaranya
1. Mengaitkan wisata dengan ibadah, sehingga mengharuskan adanya safar -atau wisata- untuk menunaikan salah satu rukun dalam agama yaitu haji pada bulan-bulan tertentu. Disyariatkan umrah ke Baitullah Ta’ala dalam satahun.
Ketika ada seseorang datang kepada Nabi sallallahu alaihi wa sallam minta izin untuk berwisata dengan pemahaman lama, yaitu safar dengan makna kerahiban atau sekedar menyiksa diri, Nabi sallallahu alaihi wa sallam memberi petunjuk kepada maksud yang lebih mulia dan tinggi dari sekedar berwisata dengan mengatakan kepadanya, “Sesunguhnya wisatanya umatku adalah berjihad di jalan Allah.” (HR. Abu Daud, 2486, dinyatakan hasan oleh Al-Albany dalam Shahih Abu Daud dan dikuatkan sanadnya oleh Al-Iraqi dalam kitab Takhrij Ihya Ulumuddin, no. 2641). Perhatikanlah bagaimana Nabi sallallahu alaihi wa sallam mengaitkan wisata yang dianjurkan dengan tujuan yang agung dan mulia.
2. Demikian pula, dalam pemahaman Islam, wisata dikaitkan dengan ilmu dan pengetahuan. Pada permulaan Islam, telah ada perjalanan sangat agung dengan tujuan mencari ilmu dan menyebarkannya. Sampai Al-Khatib Al-Bagdady menulis kitab yang terkenal ‘Ar-Rihlah Fi Tolabil Hadits’, di dalamnya beliau mengumpulkan kisah orang yang melakukan perjalanan hanya untuk mendapatkan dan mencari satu hadits saja.
Di antaranya adalah apa yang diucapkan oleh sebagian tabiin terkait dengan firman Allah Ta’ala:
“Mereka itu adalah orang-orang yang bertaubat, beribadah, memuji, melawat, ruku, sujud, yang menyuruh berbuat ma'ruf dan mencegah berbuat munkar dan yang memelihara hukum-hukum Allah. Dan gembirakanlah orang-orang mukmin itu." (QS. At-Taubah: 112)
Ikrimah berkata ‘As-Saa'ihuna’ mereka adalah pencari ilmu. Diriwayatkan oleh Ibnu Abi Hatim dalam tafsirnya, 7/429. Silakan lihat Fathul Qadir, 2/408. Meskipun penafsiran yang benar menurut mayoritas ulama salaf bahwa yang dimaksud dengan ‘As-Saaihin’ adalah orang-orang yang berpuasa.
3. Di antara maksud wisata dalam Islam adalah mengambil pelajaran dan peringatan. Dalam Al-Qur’anulkarim terdapat perintah untuk berjalan di muka bumi di beberapa tempat. Allah berfirman: “Katakanlah: 'Berjalanlah di muka bumi, kemudian perhatikanlah bagaimana kesudahan orang-orang yang mendustakan itu." (QS. Al-An’am: 11)
Dalam ayat lain, “Katakanlah: 'Berjalanlah kamu (di muka) bumi, lalu perhatikanlah bagaimana akibat orang-orang yang berdosa.” (QS. An-Naml: 69)
Al-Qasimi rahimahullah berkata; ”Mereka berjalan dan pergi ke beberapa tempat untuk melihat berbagai peninggalan sebagai nasehat, pelajaran dan manfaat lainnya." (Mahasinu At-Ta’wil, 16/225)
4. Mungkin di antara maksud yang paling mulia dari wisata dalam Islam adalah berdakwah kepada Allah Ta’ala, dan menyampaikan kepada manusia cahaya yang diturunkan kepada Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam. Itulah tugas para Rasul dan para Nabi dan orang-orang setelah mereka dari kalangan para shahabat semoga, Allah meridhai mereka. Para shabat Nabi sallallahu alaihi wa sallam telah menyebar ke ujung dunia untuk mengajarkan kebaikan kepada manusia, mengajak mereka kepada kalimat yang benar. Kami berharap wisata yang ada sekarang mengikuti wisata yang memiliki tujuan mulia dan agung.
5. Yang terakhir dari pemahaman wisata dalam Islam adalah safar untuk merenungi keindahan ciptaan Allah Ta’la, menikmati indahnya alam nan agung sebagai pendorong jiwa manusia untuk menguatkan keimanan terhadap keesaan Allah dan memotivasi menunaikan kewajiabn hidup. Karena refresing jiwa perlu untuk memulai semangat kerja baru. Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala berfirman:
Katakanlah: "Berjalanlah di (muka) bumi, maka perhatikanlah bagaimana Allah menciptakan (manusia) dari permulaannya, kemudian Allah menjadikannya sekali lagi. Sesungguhnya Allah Maha Kuasa atas segala sesuatu. (QS. Al-Ankabut: 20)
Kedua: Aturan wisata dalam Islam
Dalam ajaran Islam yang bijaksana terdapat hukum yang mengatur dan mengarahkan agar wisata tetap menjaga maksud-maksud yang telah disebutkan tadi, jangan sampai keluar melewati batas, sehingga wisata menjadi sumber keburukan dan dampak negatif bagi masyarakat. Di antara hukum-hukum itu adalah:
1. Mengharamkan safar dengan maksud mengagungkan tempat tertentu kecuali tiga masjid. Dari Abu Hurairah radhiallahu anhu sesungguhnya Nabi sallallahu’alai wa sallam bersabda:
لا تُشَدُّ الرِّحَالُ إِلا إِلَى ثَلاثَةِ مَسَاجِدَ الْمَسْجِدِ الْحَرَامِ وَمَسْجِدِ الرَّسُولِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ وَمَسْجِدِ الأَقْصَى (رواه البخاري، رقم 1132 ومسلم، رقم 1397)
“Tidak dibolehkan melakukan perjalanan kecuali ke tiga masjid, Masjidil Haram, Masjid Rasulullah sallallahu’alaihi wa saal dan Masjidil Aqsha." (HR. Bukhari, no. 1132, Muslim, no. 1397)
Hadits ini menunjukkan akan haramnya promosi wisata yang dinamakan Wisata Religi ke selain tiga masjid, seperti ajakan mengajak wisata ziarah kubur, menyaksikan tempat-tempat peninggalan kuno, terutama peninggalan yang diagungkan manusia, sehingga mereka terjerumus dalam berbagai bentuk kesyirikan yang membinasakan. Dalam ajaran Islam tidak ada pengagungan pada tempat tertentu dengan menunaikan ibadah di dalamnya sehingga menjadi tempat yang diagungkan selain tiga tempat tadi.
Abu Hurairah radhiallahu anhu berkata, "Aku pergi Thur (gunung Tursina di Mesir), kemudian aku bertemu Ka’b Al-Ahbar, lalu duduk bersamanya, lau beliau menyebutkan hadits yang panjang, kemudian berkata, "Lalu aku bertemu Bashrah bin Abi Bashrah Al-Ghifary dan berkata, "Dari mana kamu datang?" Aku menjawab, "Dari (gunung) Thur." Lalu beliau mengatakan, "Jika aku menemuimu sebelum engkau keluar ke sana, maka (akan melarang) mu pergi, karena aku mendengar Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam bersabda: “Jangan melakukan perjalanan kecuali ke tiga masjid, ke Masjidil Haram, Masjidku ini dan Masjid Iliyya atau Baitul Maqdis." (HR. Malik dalam Al-Muwatha, no. 108. Nasa’i, no. 1430, dinyatakan shahih oleh Al-Albany dalam Shahih An-Nasa’i)
Maka tidak dibolehkan memulai perjalanan menuju tempat suci selain tiga tempat ini. Hal itu bukan berarti dilarang mengunjungi masjid-masjid yang ada di negara muslim, karena kunjungan kesana dibolehkan, bahkan dianjurkan. Akan tetapi yang dilarang adalah melakukan safar dengan niat seperti itu. Kalau ada tujuan lain dalam safar, lalu diikuti dengan berkunjung ke (masjid), maka hal itu tidak mengapa. Bahkan terkadang diharuskan untuk menunaikan jum’at dan shalat berjamaah. Yang keharamannya lebih berat adalah apabila kunjungannya ke tempat-tempat suci agama lain. Seperti pergi mengunjungi Vatikan atau patung Budha atau lainnya yang serupa.
2. Ada juga dalil yang mengharamkan wisata seorang muslim ke negara kafir secara umum. Karena berdampak buruk terhadap agama dan akhlak seorang muslim, akibat bercampur dengan kaum yang tidak mengindahkan agama dan akhlak. Khususnya apab ila tidak ada keperluan dalam safar tersebut seperti untuk berobat, berdagang atau semisalnya, kecuali Cuma sekedar bersenang senang dan rekreasi. Sesungguhnya Allah telah menjadikan negara muslim memiliki keindahan penciptaan-Nya, sehingga tidak perlu pergi ke negara orang kafir.
Syekh Shaleh Al-Fauzan hafizahullah berkata: “Tidak boleh Safar ke negara kafir, karena ada kekhawatiran terhadap akidah, akhlak, akibat bercampur dan menetap di tengah orang kafir di antara mereka. Akan tetapi kalau ada keperluan mendesak dan tujuan yang benar untuk safar ke negara mereka seperti safar untuk berobat yang tidak ada di negaranya atau safar untuk belajar yang tidak didapatkan di negara muslim atau safar untuk berdagang, kesemuanya ini adalah tujuan yang benar, maka dibolehkan safar ke negara kafir dengan syarat menjaga syiar keislaman dan memungkinkan melaksanakan agamanya di negeri mereka. Hendaklah seperlunya, lalu kembali ke negeri Islam. Adapun kalau safarnya hanya untuk wisata, maka tidak dibolehkan. Karena seorang muslim tidak membutuhkan hal itu serta tidak ada manfaat yang sama atau yang lebih kuat dibandingkan dengan bahaya dan kerusakan pada agama dan keyakinan. (Al-Muntaqa Min Fatawa Syekh Al-Fauzan, 2 soal no. 221)
Penegasan tentang masalah ini telah diuraikan dalam situs kami secara terperinci dan panjang lebar. Silakan lihat soal no. 13342, 8919, 52845.
3. Tidak diragukan lagi bahwa ajaran Islam melarang wisata ke tempat-tempat rusak yang terdapat minuman keras, perzinaan, berbagai kemaksiatan seperti di pinggir pantai yang bebas dan acara-acara bebas dan tempat-tempat kemaksiatan. Atau juga diharamkan safar untuk mengadakan perayaan bid’ah. Karena seorang muslim diperintahkan untuk menjauhi kemaksiatan maka jangan terjerumus (kedalamnya) dan jangan duduk dengan orang yang melakukan itu.
Para ulama dalam Al-Lajnah Ad-Daimah mengatakan: “Tidak diperkenankan bepergian ke tempat-tempat kerusakan untuk berwisata. Karena hal itu mengundang bahaya terhadap agama dan akhlak. Karena ajaran Islam datang untuk menutup peluang yang menjerumuskan kepada keburukan." (Fatawa Al-Lajnah Ad-Daimah, 26/332)
Bagaimana dengan wisata yang menganjurkan kemaksiatan dan prilaku tercela, lalu kita ikut mengatur, mendukung dan menganjurkannya?
Para ulama Al-Lajnah Ad-Daimah juga berkata: “Kalau wisata tersebut mengandung unsur memudahkan melakukan kemaksiatan dan kemunkaran serta mengajak kesana, maka tidak boleh bagi seorang muslim yang beriman kepada Allah dan hari Akhir membantu untuk melakukan kemaksiatan kepada Allah dan menyalahi perintahNya. Barangsiapa yang meninggalkan sesuatu karena Allah, maka Allah akan mengganti yang lebih baik dari itu. (Fatawa Al-Lajnah Ad-Daimah, 26/224)
4. Adapun berkunjung ke bekas peninggalan umat terdahulu dan situs-situs kuno , jika itu adalah bekas tempat turunnya azab, atau tempat suatu kaum dibinasakan sebab kekufurannya kepada Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala, maka tidak dibolehkan menjadikan tempat ini sebagai tempat wisata dan hiburan.
Para Ulama dalam Al-Lajnah Ad-Daimah ditanya, ada di kota Al-Bada di provinsi Tabuk terdapat peninggalan kuno dan rumah-rumah yang diukir di gunung. Sebagian orang mengatakan bahwa itu adalah tempat tinggal kaum Nabi Syu’aib alaihis salam. Pertanyaannya adalah, apakah ada dalil bahwa ini adalah tempat tinggal kaum Syu’aib –alaihis salam- atau tidak ada dalil akan hal itu? dan apa hukum mengunjungi tempat purbakala itu bagi orang yang bermaksuk untuk sekedar melihat-lihat dan bagi yang bermaksud mengambil pelajaran dan nasehat?
Mereka menjawab: “Menurut ahli sejarah dikenal bahwa tempat tinggal bangsa Madyan yang diutus kepada mereka Nabiyullah Syu’aib alaihis shalatu was salam berada di arah barat daya Jazirah Arab yang sekarang dinamakan Al-Bada dan sekitarnya. Wallahu’alam akan kebenarannya. Jika itu benar, maka tidak diperkenankan berkunjung ke tempat ini dengan tujuan sekedar melihat-lihat. Karena Nabi sallallahu’alaihi wa sallam ketika melewati Al-Hijr, yaitu tempat tinggal bangsa Tsamud (yang dibinasakan) beliau bersabda: “Janganlah kalian memasuki tempat tinggal orang-orang yang telah menzalimi dirinya, khawatir kalian tertimpa seperti yang menimpa mereka, kecuali kalian dalam kondisi manangis. Lalu beliau menundukkan kepala dan berjalan cepat sampai melewati sungai." (HR. Bukhari, no. 3200 dan Muslim, no. 2980)
Ibnu Qayyim rahimahullah berkomentar ketika menjelaskan manfaat dan hukum yang diambil dari peristiwa perang Tabuk, di antaranya adalah barangsiapa yang melewati di tempat mereka yang Allah murkai dan turunkan azab, tidak sepatutnya dia memasukinya dan menetap di dalamnya, tetapi hendaknya dia mempercepat jalannya dan menutup wajahnya hingga lewat. Tidak boleh memasukinya kecuali dalam kondisi menangis dan mengambil pelajaran. Dengan landasan ini, Nabi sallallahu’alaihi wa sallam menyegerakan jalan di wadi (sungai) Muhassir antara Mina dan Muzdalifah, karena di tempat itu Allah membinasakan pasukan gajah dan orang-orangnya." (Zadul Ma’ad, 3/560)
Al-Hafiz Ibnu Hajar rahimahullah berkata dalam menjelaskan hadits tadi, "Hal ini mencakup negeri Tsamud dan negeri lainnya yang sifatnya sama meskipun sebabnya terkait dengan mereka." (Fathul Bari, 6/380).
Silakan lihat kumpulan riset Majelis Ulama Saudi Arabia jilid ketiga, paper dengan judul Hukmu Ihyai Diyar Tsamud (hukum menghidupkan perkampungan Tsamud). Juga silahkan lihat soal jawab no. 20894.
5. Tidak dibolehkan juga wanita bepergian tanpa mahram. Para ulama telah memberikan fatwa haramnya wanita pergi haji atau umrah tanpa mahram. Bagaimana dengan safar untuk wisata yang di dalamnya banyak tasahul (mempermudah masalah) dan campur baur yang diharamkan? Silakan lihat soal jawab no. 4523, 45917, 69337 dan 3098.
6. Adapun mengatur wisata untuk orang kafir di negara Islam, asalnya dibolehkan. Wisatawan kafir kalau diizinkan oleh pemerintahan Islam untuk masuk maka diberi keamanan sampai keluar. Akan tetapi keberadaannya di negara Islam harus terikat dan menghormati agama Islam, akhlak umat Islam dan kebudayaannya. Dia pun di larang mendakwahkan agamanya dan tidak menuduh Islam dengan batil. Mereka juga tidak boleh keluar kecuali dengan penampilan sopan dan memakai pakaian yang sesuai untuk negara Islam, bukan dengan pakaian yang biasa dia pakai di negaranya dengan terbuka dan tanpa baju. Mereka juga bukan sebagai mata-mata atau spionase untuk negaranya. Yang terakhir tidak diperbolehkan berkunjung ke dua tempat suci; Mekkah dan Madinah.
Ketiga:
Tidak tersembunyi bagi siapa pun bahwa dunia wisata sekarang lebih dominan dengan kemaksiatan, segala perbuatan buruk dan melanggar yang diharamkan, baik sengaja bersolek diri, telanjang di tempat-tempat umum, bercampur baur yang bebas, meminum khamar, memasarkan kebejatan, menyerupai orang kafir, mengambil kebiasaan dan akhlaknya bahkan sampai penyakit mereka yang berbahaya. Belum lagi, menghamburkan uang yang banyak dan waktu serta kesungguhan. Semua itu dibungkus dengan nama wisata. Maka ingatlah bagi yang mempunyai kecemburuan terhadap agama, akhlak dan umatnya kepada Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala, jangan sampai menjadi penolong untuk mempromosikan wisata fasik ini. Akan tetapi hendaknya memeranginya dan memerangi ajakan mempromosikannya. Hendaknya bangga dengan agama, wawasan dan akhlaknya. Hal tersebut akan menjadikan negeri kita terpelihara dari segala keburukan dan mendapatkankan pengganti keindahan penciptaan Allah ta’ala di negara islam yang terjaga.
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.”
