June Jordan_Her Life and Letters

by Valerie Kinloch

  Black English is not exactly a linguistic buffalo, but we should understand its status as an endangered species, as a perishing, irreplaceable system of community intelligence, or we should expect its extinction, and, along with that, the extinguishing of much that constitutes our own proud, and singular identity.60

  Black English—which Jordan writes of in “Nobody Mean More to Me” and she employs in His Own Where, Soulscript, Fannie Lou Hamer, New Life: New Room, and other writings—signifies belonging, ways of knowing, freedom, citizenship, and language rights of black people. In the beginning of the essay, Jordan discusses her course at Stony Brook, entitled “In Search of the Invisible Black Woman,” and her students’ reactions to the language of Alice Walker’s character, Celie, in The Color Purple. As the class discussed the novel, many of the black students expressed their discomfort with Celie’s language, specifically its sound and structure. Instead of ignoring her students’ reactions, Jordan facilitated an activity of translation that soon led to the class developing guidelines for using Black English. This example illustrates Jordan’s commitment to preserving the cultural practices of people in both classrooms and communities.61

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  Her books on children’s rights, her classroom teaching, and her championing for universal equality are all hallmarks of her activist agenda.

  As argued throughout this volume, Jordan’s books, essays, poems, keynote addresses, and reports are connected to major political events of the time. The publication of His Own Where, and eventually her essay “Nobody Mean More to Me,” occurred at the outset of heightened attention toward the structure and functionality of neighborhoods in American cities and increasing levels of diversity in public-school classrooms. Similarly, Jordan’s political essays collected in Civil Wars (1981) are signs of her political growth toward, and progressive vision of, an international and feminist agenda. Her involvement, activism, and writing were no longer limited to the politics of Black Nationalism in U.S. cities. She was now more concerned with addressing the politics of struggle among black Americans and people in so-called “Third World” countries, a term, as I mention in the first chapter, that denotes nations colonized by other nations and that are typically considered underdeveloped, nonindustrialized, and poor. For Jordan, such countries include, Palestine, South Africa, and Lebanon as well as the region of Central America. The subjects of and audiences for her work had grown from being exclusively black Americans in urban and rural black communities to a universal audience willing to resist imperialism, discrimination, war, and systemic violence. This became Jordan’s way of embracing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of the beloved community and Malcolm X’s call for an international rights movement; the poet openly joined with a community of conscious, serious artists and activists.

  During this transformative period, Jordan demonstrated her commitment to fighting for the welfare of marginalized people by contemplating possible definitions of peace. For example, as a child she thought that she could encourage the government to intervene in the violent actions of her father, Granville, against her mother, Mildred. She called the government—political representatives, anyone with official power and authority—only to be ignored; no help or return phone call arrived. As an adult, Jordan soon realized that to fight this kind of abuse, and to get one step closer to peace, required solidarity among people from all parts of the world—from South Africa and Palestine to Cuba and the United States.

  In 1989, Jordan crafted the poem “War and Memory” and dedicated it to creative writer, Jane Creighton, now an associate professor of English at the downtown campus of the University of Houston. The poem establishes connections between familial violence, such as the kind experienced in her childhood home, and systemic violence, such as global wars, the murderous deaths of millions of poor people, and racial domination. Jordan writes: Daddy at the stove or sink. Large

  knife nearby or artfully

  suspended by his clean hand handsome

  even in its menace

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  slamming the silverware drawer

  open and shut/the spoons

  suddenly loud as the yelling

  at my mother62

  Later in the same poem, she continues:

  I’d match him fast

  for madness

  lineage in wild display

  age six . . .

  I would race about for weaponry

  another chair a knife

  a flowered glass

  the radio

  “You stop it, Daddy! Stop it!”63

  As a six-year-old child, young June Jordan quickly realized that she needed to take the power of physical violence away from her father and to break the silence imposed on her mother. She used her own weapons to defend her mother and herself from the “bully.” Near the poem’s conclusion (although there is never really an ending to any of Jordan’s poems) she asserts, “Peace never meant a thing to me,” before declaring,

  And from the freedom days

  that blazed outside my mind

  I fell in love

  I fell in love with Black men and White

  men Black

  women White women

  and I

  dared myself to say The Palestinians

  and I

  worried about unilateral words like Lesbian or Nationalist and I

  tried to speak Spanish when I travelled to Managua . . .

  and I wrote everything I knew how to write against apartheid64

  All of these actions taken by June Jordan confirm her resistance to the humiliation and degradation of humanity. In committing to an anti-imperialist, international movement of resistance, she revisited her familial past, including the realities of a violent father with loving tendencies. Her writings, from her children’s and young-adult books—including Fannie Lou Hamer and Kimako’s Story—to her political articles in The Progressive—including “The Big-Time

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  Coward” and “Eyewitness in Lebanon” (reprinted in Jordan’s Affirmative Acts)—all represent responses to inequalities of some kind: inattention to black activism, public neglect of the rights of youth, or the failure of U.S. foreign policy to avoid international warfare. The poet’s responses to these issues, and the activist efforts that followed, always found themselves in her classroom. In the 1980s at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she led teach-ins on apartheid and South Africa. In the 1990s at the University of California, Berkeley, she founded Poetry for the People, where she worked with young writers in poetry workshops and encouraged them to share their work at public readings.

  Around the same time as the founding of Poetry for the People, Jordan spearheaded teach-ins on the Persian Gulf War. In the “Introduction” to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, she writes: Towards the end of the previous semester I had conceived, organized, and directed a campus-wide “Teach-in” on the Persian Gulf War. Faculty colleagues of many disciplines, and student activists of several ideologies, and of every color and ethnicity and sexual persuasion fused their energies to create a very powerful day that was decently documented by local television, radio and press. Ours was, I might add, proudly, the first such “Teach-in” in the U.S.A.65

  Finally, Jordan “had become part of an academic community where you could love school because school did not have to be something apart from, or in denial of, your own life and the multifarious new lives of your heterogeneous students!”66 She could finally connect her art, her teaching, and her activism, and they all served political purposes. She learned how to examine and reexamine her childhood in New York City in order to uncover the reasons for her protests and resistances. All the w
hile, she learned, with the support and admiration of her students, colleagues, and other activists, how to battle physical and global war with war—the kind of war that reflects the experiences of disenfranchised people. This latter lesson is also captured in June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. In particular, the previously anthologized section in the blueprint entitled “Poetry for the People in a Time of War,” a collection of writings by Jordan and her students, interrogates warfare from various vantage points: familial relationships, feminist perspectives, women and war, women and poverty, and women and body politics. In the poem “What I Mean,” student-poet Leslie Shown writes:

  I mean who do I really think might hear me

  shout across three thousand miles of telephone line

  that there’s nothin

  an Iraqi soldier might do to a Kuwaiti woman

  that an American soldier wouldn’t do to an Iraqi woman67

  Then in “To the Queers in Desert Storm,” Vu qui Trac writes:

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  As I look for you

  in the madmen’s wet dreams

  I never see the Hollywood casualties

  the Pentagon would-be stars

  Just hopeful upstarts

  in the aisle waiting

  to play heroes

  to pay cultural dues

  to die for bad art.68

  Both Shown and Trac’s poems reveal depictions of war. The first poem is rooted in dangerous politics, policies, ignored protests, and the failure of public morality: women living with no public protection from rape, brutality, or ongoing war. The second poem addresses fabricated news stories, capitalist perceptions, and glamorizations of war and fighting that forget the real casualties of violence and dismiss the horrors of the victimization of homosexuals in movies and the public sphere. Such ideas are further captured in “Case in Point,”

  “Bosnia Bosnia,” “The Bombing of Baghdad,” “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” “Rape Is Not a Poem,” and “A Poem about Vieques, Puerto Rico,”

  poems by Jordan that are collected in her various collections.

  As Jordan embraced an anti-imperialist, international, and feminist agenda, her identity shifted from a black woman writer in New York City to a writer and activist educator in Berkeley, California. She was becoming a strong advocate for children, young adults, and women. In a 1990 Essence Magazine interview with writers and activists June Jordan and Angela Davis, conducted by columnist Cheryll Greene, Jordan elaborates on the need for women to create networks of solidarity, insisting that such networks can bring to the forefront issues that affect and threaten all women:

  Well, if you put together, for starters, Native American, Latina and African American women in this country, . . . I think we would be able to bring about the kinds of drastic changes that we need—much more . . . quickly than otherwise.

  And these issues . . . also have their reverberations among impoverished Asian women. And then there are the poor white women.69

  Jordan wanted active alliances built in order to affect positive social change, be it peaceful or radical, for women, children, and communities of people tormented by violence. In 1987, she participated in a Washington, D.C.-based reading series for the Washington Project on the Arts exhibit War and Memory: In the Aftermath of Vietnam. At this event she read her poem “War and Memory,” making difficult parallels between the violence in her Brooklyn household and neighborhood to the violence of the Vietnam War and the Jewish Holocaust. In the 1990s, she continued to lead and participate in teachins, demonstrations, and rallies. In early 2000, she joined Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and other activists to protest the death warrant and possible execution

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  of political activist and journalist, Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of the 1982 murder of Pennsylvania police officer, Daniel Faulkner. (Abu-Jamal still asserts his innocence today.)

  In 2001, Jordan participated in a reading to benefit the Boston Women’s Fund for Breast Cancer. Throughout her life, she remained an active writer, even if, at times, it came at the sacrifice of her son, family, and intimate relationships. In her final days, she committed herself to completing her last book Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan, which was released three months after her death. During her lifetime, Jordan read her poetry at the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Library of Congress, the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, the Guggenheim Museum, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and on Pacifica Radio and National Public Radio.

  On September 22, 2002, members of the Black Caucus of the National Writers Union (NWU), the Seven Principles Institute Network (SPIN), and The Jazz Ministry Church in Manhattan sponsored “Remember June in September II: A Tribute to June Jordan” at Saint Peter’s church. In attendance were NWU founding member Sarah Wright; poets and writers E. Ethelbert Miller, Amina Baraka, Amiri Baraka, Louis-Reyes Rivera, and Aka Weekes; and pianist Richard Cummings, along with a host of more than two hundred supporters. In the spring of 2004, a coalition of University-Five College groups in Massachusetts collaborated to honor Jordan’s legacy by sponsoring “A Revolutionary Convening: The 2004 June Jordan Conference.” Then, on October 6, 2005, the Poetry Society of America along with Cave Canem, Copper Canyon Press, and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College in New York City sponsored “A Celebration of the Life and Work of June Jordan” in honor of the publication of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Participating in this event were writers Cornelius Eady, Joy Harjo, Bob Holman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jan Heller Levi, Donna Masini, Sara Miles, Honor Moore, and Adrienne Rich; as well as former Poetry for the People director Junichi Semitsu; author, Air America radio host, and close friend of Jordan, Laura Flanders; and Cave Canem fellow Shelagh Patterson.

  Additional tributes to recognize the publication of Jordan’s collected poems are scheduled in New York City and in San Francisco, California.

  Jordan’s life was anything but ordinary, and her quest for a “Beloved Community” without national borders was admirable. Throughout her lifetime, she stood against police brutality and the murders of countless black and Puerto Rican youths, especially in New York City. She supported the Palestinian struggle, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the fight against South African apartheid. Her poetry, such as “Moving Towards Home,” “Lebanon, Lebanon,” and “Apology to the People of Lebanon,” represents Jordan’s commitment to internationalizing coalitions to fight for freedom and justice, and to publicize the interconnectedness of local struggle to international struggle.

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  She sought freedom, love, justice, and equality for people, for herself, even if, as she admits, “Peace never meant a thing” to her.70

  Years after Jordan began to write books for children and young adults and after she began to write an increasing amount of poetry in response to the social and political conditions of life in America, she became disheartened with media portrayals of nationhood, especially in the United States. In particular, she believed that both the media and the government promote visions of nationhood, nationalism, identity, and citizenship that exclude nonwhite peoples, including youth, from integrating fully into the mainstream. Such beliefs are clearly articulated in her essay collections Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (1981), Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union (1992/1994), Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998), and Some of Us Did Not Die (2002). These writings establish parallels in the media’s treatment of black people between the 1960s and the 1990s. In her essay

  “Black History as Myth,” Jordan writes of how the media purposefully ignore the organizing efforts of communities of color
. She writes, “At the end of the 1960s, American mass media rolled the cameras away from Black life and the quantity of print on the subject became too small to read.”71 Before mention-ing the book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michelle Wallace in Civil Wars, Jordan insists, “the number of books published by and about Black people has been negligible since the beginning of this decade.”72

  One reason for such negligence is the portrayal of beauty and belonging that has become prevalent in popular culture and media circuits: “White Western authorities on beauty and honor and courage and historical accomplishment have denied and denigrated whatever and whoever does not fit their white Western imagery.”73 For example, many of the young people throughout the New York City boroughs with whom Jordan worked, did not fit into this imagery. She realized this early on, and she decided to take action against such images by mentoring and working with the talents of young people while affirming the beauty within them. In the late 1960s, she collaborated with educator, Terri Bush, and students in New York City. In the 1990s, Jordan worked with Lauren Muller and university students in California. In this way, she showed young people how words and emotions—their poetry—can work to combat racist and classist politics that govern mass media, state-based operations, and unfair educational practices.

  In addition to Jordan’s ongoing questioning of imposed standards and politics, she critiqued supposed ideals of liberty, democracy, and freedom as they help to define American leadership. For example, in her essay “America in Confrontation with Democracy,” Jordan writes about activist Jesse Jackson’s 1988 pursuit of the Democratic Presidential nomination: “Certainly, the phenomenon of a Black man bidding for the most powerful office in the world has raised, irreversibly, the expectations of Americans who . . . never even dreamed about accurate, or responsive, political representation.”74 After traveling to London in the late 1980s and realizing the lack of attention given to Jackson’s