June Jordan_Her Life and Letters
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campaign by international media, Jordan came back to New York City and tried to convince black media groups and leaders that Jackson “really had a shot at the title” and that “white Americans were listening to him.”75
Unfortunately, Jordan’s efforts were short lived. Media moguls, white and black alike, censored Jesse Jackson just as public support for his candidacy dramatically increased.76 Black media outlets did not have adequate resources to challenge the dominant media’s rejection of Jackson’s political vision, which included farmers, auto workers, working-class men and women, gays and lesbians, children and young adults, the Palestinian people, AIDS victims, and other people considered disfranchised. Further, Jordan believed that the censoring of Jackson via mass media reiterated “racist habits or attitudes in America” that did not decline during the Reagan administration despite popular belief to the contrary.77
During his presidential candidacy in 1988, Jesse Jackson beat Michael Dukakis to win the popular vote in the state of Michigan, but Jackson still did not become the Democratic nominee. He never reached the Oval Office; he was never inaugurated as president of the “free world.” Nevertheless, according to Jordan, his
Radiant temerity in the face of negligible funding, press censorship, and attack has elicited the respect, and restored the activist self-respect, of a new American majority: a multiracial populist coalition of citizens intent upon the humane expansion of their citizen entitlements.78
Jackson did not become the president, but for Jordan he “transformed the nature and the substance of acceptable political discourse in America.”79
Jordan learned a lot from Jackson’s campaign concerning politics. She was learning even more “about American censorship.”80
Jordan’s opposition to “white Western imagery” and her dedication to Jackson’s presidential campaign point to her own level of resistance to censorship.81 A few years before Jackson’s bid for the presidency, South End Press published Jordan’s essay collection On Call: Political Essays. In the book’s
“Introduction” the poet discusses, among other things, how editors of publishing companies “whitelisted” her because of her political stance on issues affecting U.S. foreign relations with the Middle East and Nicaragua. She writes,
“These editors hide behind ‘many of us’ who ‘have problems’ with me.
Apparently, there is some magisterial and unnameable ‘we’ who decided—in the cowardly passive voice—what ‘is publishable’ or not.” Jordan continues, “I need to know who is this ‘we,’ exactly? And what are ‘the problems?’”82 Jordan did not appreciate being censored; she refused to compromise her values and the direction she wanted her writing to follow.
As previously suggested, Jordan’s uncensored language of democracy and freedom implies a continual need to fight against acts of silence and degradation. Throughout On Call: Political Essays the poet documents firsthand encounters with the dangers of being different (the media can censor you) and
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with the consequences of concealing those differences (silencing one’s beliefs, values, and identities; accepting injustices; not fighting back). Her affirmations of freedom and justice and her refusal to be silenced took her to many places: London, Nicaragua, Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon. On many missions, she opposed racism, sexism, and violence in the United States and campaigned for human rights at home by conducting teach-ins, attending rallies and poetry readings, sitting in emergency rooms with police brutality victims , and organizing for and supporting Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign.
It is no coincidence that several years after the publication of On Call: Political Essays (1985), Jordan wrote the essay “Do You Do Well to Be Angry”
(2001), in which she discusses the destruction of “the world we thought we knew” and poses the question in relation to the aftermath of the September 11th attacks in 2001: “And how shall we rebuild?”83 How are we, the people living in this world, going to work together to create a new world that will not tolerate hate and will not promote hatred and oppression? For Jordan, such a world can only come to fruition through populist coalitions that are multifaceted: multiracial, multireligious, multilingual, and multicultural. She believed in “breaking the law:” when the law is wrong and unjust, “when the law produces and enjoins manifest and undue injury to a people, when the law punishes one people and privileges another, it is our moral obligation to break the law!”84 One could say that Jordan broke the law by marrying a young white man in the 1950s at the onset of her involvement in American politics and civil rights movements, or by publicly admitting, years later, that she was a bisexual who was not afraid to love beautiful women as well as men. One could also assume that the poet—in concert with organizer Kathy Engel, poets Sara Miles, Jane Creighton, and others—broke the law by participating in a 1982 UNICEF
benefit for humanitarian relief and against violence in Lebanon.
Clearly, Jordan’s obsession with how violence, persecution, and censorship control the actions of some people further reiterates her belief in “breaking the law” by muddying how people are labeled and categorized. In her essay
“Hunting for Jews?” Jordan admits, “I am a walking ground zero because I am, obviously, not white,” before ending with, “I’m saying, ‘Are you hunting for Jews? You’re looking for me.’”85 This controversial passage signifies how Jordan began to reimagine the very boundaries that exist between and among people, and which often prevent coalitions from being formed across religious, ethnic, and racial lines. Through her language—her open, uncensored, and provocative language—Jordan joins with people whose lives are in danger, whether Jewish, Palestinian, gay and lesbian, black, poor, or working class. She insists that we all confront the darkness of categorization to search for truth and justice through language. Her determination to cross ethnic and religious lines in order to collaborate with Palestinians and Jewish people attests to this ideal. Such a search can lead to rebuilding a free and democratic world.
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In “Declaration of an Independence I Would Just as Soon Not Have”
(1976), Jordan takes up the issue of truth and language solidifying the path-way of unity by writing:
Suppose the hunger and the famine afflicting some 800 million lives on earth is a fact that leaves you nauseous, jumpy, and chronically enraged. No matter how intense your wrath may be, no matter how personally knowledgeable you may be about the cause and the conceivable remedies for this monstrous and unnecessary curse upon innocent human beings, you, by yourself, can do damned little, if anything, to destroy these facts of abject experience. But what can you join?
Where can you sign up, sign in?86
Jordan’s question, “where can you sign up?” illustrates her belief in a democracy that includes all people and supports the efforts of these people to acquire their identities, histories, and rights. Reason, democracy, and justice should be restored if the people are to ever have a chance to reclaim their lives, a point presented in her poem “Moving Towards Home” (1982). In this poem, the poet declares:
I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home.87
To understand the dynamics of June Jordan as poet and essayist, black woman and mother, teacher and author of children’s and young-adult literature, local and international advocate for justice is to understand her life in relation to politics and education. She was a political writer, a revolutionary artist, and a r
espected educator who valued the voices and experiences of people working toward justice, love, equality, and democracy. Her resistance to violence in all forms is the cornerstone of her legacy—one that draws on the “Beloved Community” of socially committed activists and artists from every part of the world. Jordan always returned to her classrooms to advocate this message. In the following chapter, I visit this message of empowerment by examining June Jordan’s Poetry for the People Collective at the University of California, Berkeley, and her focus on teaching students that “what [they] have to say is not only valid but necessary.”88
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Affirmative Acts: Political Essays
In “Travelin’ Shoes (for June Jordan),” poet Ruth Forman recalls how Jordan challenged her Poetry for the People students at the University of California, Berkeley to move beyond printed words in order to critique the languages of their own lives in relation to larger narratives of belonging and ownership. Forman begins:
June,
I remember your blues words, pieces of a blues collective, from our first poetry reading.
The one that came from us around the table in 102 Barrows with our poetry guidelines and you sitting at the end challenging us but with laughter, always with laughter. Was it 102 Barrows? Whatever room it was, in the middle of all that theory and ivory tower, we noticed something real going on. Something magical. . . . We have power in learning what we have to say is not only valid but necessary. . . . You push us to locate our voices despite a language that teaches us distance from our own homes. And we can celebrate each other in this process for now our words know exactly their meaning, their place in context of this world, and we are a different people and we are not alone.1
As articulated in the selected passages from Forman’s published letter, June Jordan’s teaching appointment in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley, and her sentiments concerning the role of the poet and the importance of quality, creative, and inclusive forms of education, are factors that influenced her writing and activism from the 1990s until her death in 2002.
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Some of Jordan’s representative publications during this time include Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union (1992); Haruko/Love Poetry (1993); I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995); Kissing God Goodbye (1997); Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998); Solider: A Poet’s Childhood (2000); and, posthumously, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2003) and Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005). Her many writings and teaching appointments, especially “around the table in 102 Barrows”2 at Berkeley, demonstrate her commitment to using words and working with people to change the world.
During her tenure at Berkeley, Jordan was an active participant in student-organized readings and she spoke at many political protests and academic conferences. She developed the Poetry for the People Collective, organized a teach-in on the Persian Gulf War, and accepted an invitation from Matthew Rothchild, editor of The Progressive, to be a regular contributor to the magazine. And it was at Berkeley where she confronted her breast cancer while continuing to teach, write, and work for social justice.
This chapter examines Jordan’s professional and political involvements during this time by paying close attention to how the poet’s life and writings were greatly influenced by associations with personal friends, academic colleagues, and students, particularly the students in her Poetry for the People program.3
It begins with a detailed description of the pedagogical practices of the Poetry for the People collective and moves into an examination of Jordan’s stance on affirmation action, bilingual education, and the racialization of poverty. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco, California, the poet’s writing assignments for The Progressive, and her position on rape and the politics of sexuality.
Poetry for the People (P4P), founded by June Jordan at the University of California, Berkeley in 1991, is a student-centered poetry workshop/program that addresses writing, language, literacy development, and social activism.
Designed to help bring about democratic education both on the university campus and in the surrounding community, the program provides students with knowledge and practice in writing poetry as a tool of expression.
Additionally, the program is designed to help historically underrepresented populations of students, participants, and citizens develop poetry skills and produce writings and performances that promote genuine awareness of their surroundings. On one level, P4P is invested in making poetry accessible to everyone, not just academics of a dominant culture: the P4P course description explains that “all students, regardless of academic discipline or status (Freshmen to Graduate) are eligible for enrollment.”4 On another level, P4P is committed to providing everyone, particularly those who feel silenced and ignored, with empowering ways to use poetry as an expressive tool. Students investigate their roles in social, political, and educational spheres; develop spaces where their opinions and voices can be heard; and “reach towards the
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development of literacy in today’s world literature of poetry.”5 Poetry for the People is not concerned with producing writing for publishers, academics, and various mainstream discourse communities;6 instead, P4P is focused on the validation and empowerment of people in communities as they learn how to use poetry and language to enact change in society.
P4P began as a course with approximately twenty students when Jordan was a professor in the African American Studies Department at Berkeley.7 In 1995, the P4P class had “sixty to seventy students” who met for three hours one day a week;8 in January 1998, there were approximately one hundred and seventy-five students. At the inception of the program, Jordan established
“ground rules” to foster an inclusive classroom community that promoted values of social justice in education and an activist pedagogy. Jordan’s initial rules for a respectful classroom include the following:
1. “The People” shall not be defined as a group excluding or derogating anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, class, or age. 2. “The People” shall consciously undertake to respect and to encourage each other to feel safe enough to attempt the building of a community of trust in which all may try to be truthful and deeply serious in the messages they craft for the world to contemplate. 3. Poetry for the People rests upon a belief that the art of telling the truth is a necessary and a healthy way to create powerful, and positive, connections among people who, otherwise, remain (unknown and unaware) strangers.
The goal is not to kill connections but, rather, to create and to deepen them among truly different men and women.9
In addition to maintaining an inclusive learning environment, members build a classroom community of tolerance and respect, while refusing to devalue various types of experience, literacy, and knowledge that have academic value.
The poetry in the classroom comes from a variety of sources with particular emphasis placed on those poets who are not a part of the traditional academic canon, but rather poets whose work reflects the diversity of students at Berkeley and in the Bay Area.10 Students push the act of writing beyond the simple structuring of words on paper to engage in the processes of critical thinking, collaborating, writing, and performing. At the end of every semester, student poets perform and publish a collection of their work. Students also have an opportunity to become student-teacher poets (STP) who instruct future groups of P4P students and lead poetry-writing programs in local high schools.
The P4P curriculum and program have achieved much success at the Uni
versity of California, Berkeley and in the surrounding communities of outreach. In California, for example, the program works with Dublin Women’s Prison, Berkeley High School, Mission Cultural Center, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. There is also growing national interest in programs similar to P4P: Youth Speaks—based in San Francisco, with affiliate programs in New York City and Seattle, and expanding to other cities—is a spoken-word poetry and creative-writing program that encourages young people to write
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and perform their work and get involved within local communities. While it appears as though many programs have been founded with similar goals and under the direction of P4P alumni and student-teacher poets, the extent to which these programs are running and following Jordan’s pedagogical practices is somewhat unclear.11
What is clear, however, is that interest in P4P and in the literary contributions of Jordan did not diminish when the poet died: P4P continues to thrive as a successful educational program at UC Berkeley, and a Senior Seminar class on June Jordan was offered by Berkeley’s English Department shortly after the poet’s death.12 Additionally, there are many poets who studied with P4P who are pushing boundaries and demonstrating the influence such a program can have. Former P4P student Michael Datcher is author of My Brother’s Keeper and Raising Fences: A Black Man’s Love Story, editor of the poetry collection Black Love, and coeditor of Tough Love: Cultural Criticism & Familial Observations on the Life and Death of Tupac Shakur. Other P4P alums include Ruth Forman, author of the poetry collections We Are the Young Magicians and Renaissance, and Samiya Bashir, the 1994 Poet Laureate of the University of California system.
Jordan’s efforts at establishing P4P in California, a conservative state with liberal tendencies, speak to her devotion to expand the public’s understanding of higher education. In “Finding the Haystack in the Needle or, The Whole World of America and the Challenge of Higher Education,” the poet asserts the following position: