DeeNA

About the Book

Take a journey with an eight year old on the back of a pink elephant named DeeNA, a journey that starts with a single question, and travels through time and space. Humanity’s history is rewound to the beginning, back 4.5 million years ago to the rise of hominids all they way through the truths of DNA research. It takes him back to the beginning of the African Diaspora and reconciles outdated dogmas of the past to reflect a new direction in humanity’s understanding of who we are and what we all share. From a band of 10,000 to 6.6 billion we have proliferated ourselves across the globe and have created many forms of expression that reveal our ways of lives that were separated by large geographical features like oceans, mountains or deserts. Now that we have no place on earth to travel we find ourselves able to communicate instantly and share knowledge for the first time since humanity separated itself into societies. We find out that there is no such thing as a society with many races, but a race [Homo sapiens] with many societies. There is no such thing as race. What has been done is the racialization of humanity. What you hear, smell, touch and taste is African because this is an African world populated by Africans.

About the Author

A. R. grew up in up state New York. His family like many families during the sixties was broken with no positive male role model in the home. With five children and another months away his mother made the “great northern migration” from our birth place Florida to Rochester, New York, from Seminole territory to Irondequoit territory. There he began drawing at the age of eight and was awarded an artistic scholarship for three years to attend the Creative Workshop in the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester. Through out his life he has been connected with the art world majoring in high school and in his undergraduate studies. His works of bronze can be seen in Portland’s Art Museum, the Freed Contemporary Gallery, building monuments, and in homes across the country and also in South Korea. He has a master’s degree in education with endorsements in studio art and art history. He served as a survival instructor in the Unites States Air Force. A. R. creates art and artists in Oregon.