June Jordan I was looking at the Ceiling and Then I saw the Sky
Inscribed and signed by June Jordan. Fine book in a near fine dustjacket. Signed first edition
June Millicent Jordan was a Jamaican American, bisexual poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Born: July 9, 1936, Harlem, New York, NY
Died: June 14, 2002, Berkeley, CA
One of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed Jamaican American writers of her generation, poet, playwright and essayist June Jordan was known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Over a career that produced twenty-seven volumes of poems, essays, libretti, and work for children, Jordan engaged the fundamental struggles of her era: for civil rights, women’s rights, and sexual freedom. A prolific writer across genres, Jordan’s poetry is known for its immediacy and accessibility as well as its interest in identity and the representation of personal, lived experience—her poetry is often deeply autobiographical. Jordan’s work also frequently imagines a radical, globalized notion of solidarity amongst the world’s marginalized and oppressed. In volumes like Some Changes (1971), Living Room (1985) and Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997 (1997), Jordan uses conversational, often vernacular English to address topics ranging from family, bisexuality, political oppression, racial identity and racial inequality, and memory. Regarded as one of the key figures in the mid-century American social, political and artistic milieu, Jordan also taught at many of the country’s most prestigious universities including Yale, State University of New York-Stony Brook, and the University of California-Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People. Her honors and awards included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award.
Born July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, Jordan had a difficult childhood and an especially fraught relationship with her father. Her parents were both Jamaican immigrants and, she recalled in Civil Wars: Selected Essays, 1963-80 (1981), “for a long while during childhood I was relatively small, short, and, in some other ways, a target for bully abuse. In fact, my father was the first regular bully in my life.” But Jordan also has positive memories of her childhood and it was during her early years that she began to write. Though becoming a poet “did not compute” for her parents, they did send the teen-aged Jordan to prep schools where she was the only Black student. Her teachers encouraged her interest in poetry, but did not introduce her to the work of any Black poets. After high school Jordan enrolled in Barnard College in New York City. Though she enjoyed some of her classes and admired many of the people she met, she felt fundamentally at odds with the predominately White, male curriculum and left Barnard to study at the University of Chicago, prior to returning to Barnard to finish her BA degree.
In 1955, Jordan married Michael Meyer, a White Columbia University student. Interracial marriages faced considerable opposition at the time, and Jordan and her husband divorced after ten and a half years, leaving Jordan to support their son. At about the same time, Jordan’s career began to take off. First working in film, Jordan explored the impact of environment and architecture on the lives of low-income Black families, working with the architect Buckminster Fuller. In 1966 she began teaching at the City College of the City University of New York, and in 1969 she published her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me. Aimed at young readers, the book was originally a project of Langston Hughes. In a vernacular voice, Who Look at Me describes several paintings of Black Americans, prints of which are included in the book. Jordan felt strongly about the use of Black English, seeing it as a way to keep Black community and culture alive. She encouraged her young students to write in that idiom through her writing workshops for Black and Puerto Rican children. With Terri Bush, she edited a collection of her young pupils’ writings, The Voice of the Children; she also edited the enormously popular and influential Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (1970; reprinted 2004).
Jordan’s concern for children remained central to her work. Her 1971 novel for young adults, His Own Where, also written in Black English, explores Jordan’s interests in environmental design. Sixteen-year-old Buddy, and his younger girlfriend, Angela, try to create a world of their own in an abandoned house near a cemetery. Jordan explained her feelings about the book to De Veaux: “Buddy acts, he moves. He is the man I believe in, the man who will come to lead his people into a new community.” Jordan’s other work for young people includes Dry Victories (1972), New Life: New Room (1975), and Kimako’s Story (1981), inspired by the young daughter of Jordan’s friend, fellow writer Alice Walker.
Although Jordan had not written specifically for young readers since Kimako’s Story, she explores her own formative years in Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2000). Jordan’s searing description of learning to be a “good little soldier” under the severe tutelage of her father who drove her to be strong and smart, to appreciate beauty, but often at the cost of a beating, is told in the voice of a child. Jordan explained her goal for the book in an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth of NewsHour: “I wanted to honor my father, first of all, and secondly, I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative, and to see that there’s a complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for, let alone encourage, and to understand that this is an okay story…a story, I think, with a happy outcome.” Jordan further commented in an Essence interview: “My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.” Booklist critic Stephanie Zvirin observed that Soldier, written “in the flowing language of a prose poem” is “a haunting coming-of-age memoir.”
Throughout her long career, Jordan gained renown as both an essayist and political writer, penning a regular column for the Progressive. In Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002), published the same year of the author’s death from breast cancer, Jordan presents thirty-two previously published essays as well as eight new tracts. The essays examine a wide range of topics, from sexism, racism, and Black English to trips the author made to various places, the decline of the U.S. educational system, and the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote, “Some of the stronger pieces here…address the vast complex of injustice that is contemporary American life.” An edition of Jordan’s collected poems was also published posthumously. That volume, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005), includes various poems published from 1969 through 2001, many of which discuss her battle with cancer. Janet St. John, writing in Booklist, declared the book “a must-read for those wanting to learn and be transformed by Jordan’s opinions and impressions.” Other posthumous volumes include We’re On: A June Jordan Reader (2017).
In an obituary for the San Francisco Chronicle, Annie Nakao wrote that the author “left a mountain of literary and political works.” Nakao added: “As I discovered soon enough when I picked up a June Jordan work, its contents could shout, caress, enrage. The thing it never did was leave you unengaged.” In an article of appreciation in the Los Angeles Times following the author’s death, Lynell George explained how the author “spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didn’t show.” George further stated that throughout her life the author “continued to publish across the map, swinging form to form as the occasion or topic demanded. Through poetry, essays, plays, journalism, even children’s literature, she engaged such topics as race, class, sexuality, capitalism, single motherhood and liberation struggles around the globe.” However, Jordan perhaps understood her own legacy best. In an interview with Alternative Radio before her death, Jordan was asked about the role of the poet in society. Jordan replied: “The role of the poet, beginning with my own childhood experience, is to deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words.” She continued: “Always to be as honest as possible and to be as careful about the trust invested in you as you possibly can. Then the task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks…I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something. I feel that it’s a spirit task.”
June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Jamaican American, bisexual poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.[1][2]
Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.[3]
Jordan was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Personal life
3 Career
4 Literary topics and influence
5 Contributions to feminist theory
5.1 "Report from the Bahamas"
5.1.1 Privilege
5.1.2 Concepts of race, class, and gender
5.1.3 Common identity vs. individual identity
6 Death and legacy
7 Honors and awards
8 Reception
9 Bibliography
10 References
11 External links
Early life
Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan.[4] Her father was a postal worker for the USPS and her mother was a part-time nurse.[5] When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York.[4] Jordan credits her father with passing on his love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven.
Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood. She explores her complicated relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but who would also beat her for the slightest misstep and call her "damn black devil child".[6] In her 1986 essay "For My American Family", Jordan explores the many conflicts in growing up as the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, whose visions of their daughter's future far exceeded the urban ghettos of her present.[7] Jordan's mother died by suicide, as is mentioned in On Call: Political Essays.[8] Jordan recalls her father telling her: "There was a war against colored people, I had to become a soldier."[6]
After attending Brooklyn's Midwood High School for a year,[4] Jordan enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England.[9] Throughout her education, Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe"[10] by attending predominantly white schools; however, she was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City.[1]
Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book Civil Wars, writing:
No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America.[11]
Due to this disconnect with the predominantly male, white curriculum, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. June Jordan emerged as a poet and political activist when black female authors were beginning to be heard.[12]
Personal life
At Barnard College, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955.[1] She subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago,[1] where she pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957. In 1958, Jordan gave birth to the couple's only child, Christopher David Meyer.[1] The couple divorced in 1965, and Jordan raised her son alone.[1]
After the Harlem Riots of 1964, Jordan found that she was starting to hate all white people.[1] She wrote:[1]
... it came to me that this condition, if it lasted, would mean that I had lost the point: not to resemble my enemies, not to dwarf my world, not to lose my willingness and ability to love.
— June Jordan, ISBN 0195156773[full citation needed]
From that time on, Jordan wrote with love.[1] She also identified as bisexual in her writing, which she refused to deny, even when this status was stigmatized.[1][13]
Career
Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, and one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) of which was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript, edited by Jordan, has been reissued.
She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process for the libretto of the opera, Jordan said:
The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks, I mean, that's all I did. I didn't do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now.[14]
Jordan began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 she taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. She became the director of The Poetry Center at SUNY at Stony Brook and was an English professor there from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 she was a full professor in the departments of English, Women's Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jordan was known as "the Poet of the People".[15] At Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program, Jordan said:
I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success.[16]
Jordan composed three guideline points that embodied the program, which was published with a set of her students' writings in 1995, entitled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.[16] She was not only a political activist and a poet, but she wrote children's books as well.[17]
Literary topics and influence
Jordan felt strongly about using Black English as a legitimate expression of her culture, and she encouraged young black writers to use that idiom in their writing. She continued to influence young writers with her own published poetry, such as her collections, Dry Victories (1972), New Life (1975), and Kimako's Story (1981).[18]
Jordan was dedicated to respecting Black English (AAVE) and its usage (Jordan 1). In her piece "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,"[19] Jordan criticizes the world's quickness to degrade the usage of Black English, or any other form considered less than "standard". She denounced "white English" as standard English, saying that in stark contrast to other countries, where students are allowed to learn in their tribal language, "compulsory education in America compels accommodation to exclusively White forms of 'English.' White English, in America, is 'Standard English.'" "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan" opens On Call (1985), a collection of her essays.
Jordan tells the story of working with her students to see the structure that exists within Black English, and respect it as its own language rather than a broken version of another language. Black English was spoken by most of the African-American students in her classes but was never understood as its own language. She presented it to them for the first time in a professional setting where they ordinarily expected work in English to be structured by "white standards." From this lesson, the students created guidelines for Black English.
Jordan's commitment to preserve Black English was evident in her work. She wrote: "There are three qualities of Black English— the presence of life, voice, and clarity—that intensify to a distinctive Black value system that we became excited about and self-consciously tried to maintain."[20]
In addition to her writing for young writers and children, Jordan dealt with complex issues in the political arena. She engaged topics "like race, class, sexuality, capitalism, single motherhood, and liberation struggles across the globe." [18] Passionate about feminist and Black issues, Jordan "spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didn't show." [18] Her poetry, essays, plays, journalism, and children's literature integrated these issues with her own experience, offering commentary that was both insightful and instructive.
When asked about the role of the poet in society in an interview before her death, Jordan replied: ?The role of the poet, beginning with my own childhood experience, is to deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words."[18]
Contributions to feminist theory
"Report from the Bahamas"
In her 1982 classic personal essay "Report from the Bahamas", Jordan reflects on her travel experiences, various interactions, and encounters while in The Bahamas. Writing in narrative form, she discusses both the possibilities and difficulties of coalition and self-identification on the basis of race, class, and gender identity. Although not widely recognized when first published in 1982, this essay has become central in the United States to women's and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology. Jordan reveals several issues as well as important terms regarding race, class, and gender identity.
Privilege
Jordan repeatedly grapples with the issue of privilege in both her poems and essays, emphasizing the term when discussing issues of race, class, and gender identity. She refuses to privilege oppressors who are similar to or more like certain people than other oppressors might be. She says that there should be no thought of privilege because all oppression and oppressors should be viewed at an equal standpoint.
Concepts of race, class, and gender
"[In 'Report from the Bahamas'] Jordan describes the challenges of translating languages of gender, sexuality, and blackness across diasporic space, through the story of a brief vacation in the Bahamas."[21] Vacationing in the Bahamas, Jordan finds that the shared oppression under race, class, and/or gender is not a sufficient basis for solidarity. She notes:
"These factors of race and class and gender absolutely collapse.. .whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection." They may serve well as indicators of commonly felt conflict, but as elements of connection they seem about as reliable as precipitation probability for the day after the night before the day.
As Jordan reflects on her interactions with a series of black Bahamian women, from the hotel maid "Olive" to the old women street sellers hawking trinkets, she writes:
I notice the fixed relations between these other Black women and myself. They sell and I buy or I don't. They risk not eating. I risk going broke on my first vacation afternoon. We are not particularly women anymore; we are parties to a transaction designed to set us against each other. (41)
Interspersing reflections of her trip with examples her role as a teacher advising students, Jordan details how her own expectations are constantly surprised. For instance, she recounts how an Irish woman graduate student with a Bobby Sands bumper sticker on her car provided much needed assistance to a South African student who was suffering from domestic violence. Such compassion was at odds with Jordan's experience in her neighborhood of being terrorized by ethnic Irish teenagers hurling racial epithets.
Jordan's concluding lines emphasize the imperative to forge connection actively rather than assuming it on the basis of shared histories:
I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us ... I must make the connection real between me and these strangers everywhere before those other clouds unify this ragged bunch of us, too late.[22]
Common identity vs. individual identity
Jordan explores that, as human beings, we possess two very contrasting identities. The first identity is the common identity, which is the one that has been imposed on us[22] by a long history of societal standards, controlling images, pressure, a variety of stereotypes, and stratification. The second is the individual identity that we have chosen[22] once we are given the chance and feel are ready to expose our true selves.
Death and legacy
Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, on June 14, 2002, aged 65.[1] Shortly before her death, she completed Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book). It was published posthumously. In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the 1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.[23]
In 2004, the June Jordan School for Equity (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in San Francisco was named after her by its first ninth grade class. They selected her through a democratic process of research, debate, and voting.[24] A conference room was named for her in the University of California, Berkeley's Eshleman Hall, which is used by the Associated Students of the University of California.[citation needed]
In June 2019, Jordan was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City’s Stonewall Inn.[25][26] The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history,[27] and the wall’s unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.[28]
Honors and awards
Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969–70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. She also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998, as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994.
She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).[29]
In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, had to compete (and won) in the category "Lesbian Poetry" at the Lambda Literary Awards, even though Jordan identified as bisexual. However, BiNet USA led the bisexual community in a multi-year campaign eventually resulting in the addition of a Bisexual category, starting with the 2006 Awards.
Reception
Author Toni Morrison commented:
In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into death's mouth ... [Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept ... I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.[30]
Poet Adrienne Rich noted:
Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival—of the body, and mind, and the heart.[30]
Alice Walker stated:
Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet.[30]
Thulani Davis wrote:
In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, 'A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here.'[31]
Bibliography
Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969, OCLC 22828
Soulscript (editor), Doubleday, 1970, OCLC 492067711
The Voice of the Children, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970 (co-editor), OCLC 109494
Some Changes, Dutton, 1971, OCLC 133482
His Own Where. Feminist Press. 2010. ISBN 978-1-55861-658-5.
Dry Victories, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, ISBN 978-0-03-086023-2
Fannie Lou Hamer, Crowell, 1972, ISBN 978-0-690-28893-3
New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, Emerson Hall, 1974, ISBN 978-0-87829-055-0
New Life, Crowell, 1975, ISBN 978-0-690-00211-9
Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954–1977, Random House, 1977, ISBN 978-0-394-40937-5
Passion, Beacon Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0-8070-3218-3
Kimako's Story, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, ISBN 978-0-395-31604-7
Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981, ISBN 978-0-8070-3232-9; Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster. 1995. ISBN 978-0-684-81404-9.
Living Room: New Poems, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985, ISBN 978-0-938410-26-3
On Call: Political Essays, South End Press, 1985, ISBN 978-0-89608-268-7
Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems, Virago, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85381-042-8
Moving Towards Home, Virago, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85381-043-5
Naming Our Destiny, Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-938410-84-3
Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon Books, 1992, ISBN 978-0-679-40625-9
Technical Difficulties: New Political Essays
Haruko: Love Poems, High Risk Books, 1994, ISBN 978-1-85242-323-0
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Scribner, 1995
June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. Taylor & Francis. 1995. ISBN 978-0-415-91168-9.
Kissing God Goodbye, Anchor Books, 1997, ISBN 978-0-385-49032-0
Affirmative Acts: Political Essays, Anchor Books, 1998, ISBN 9780385492256
Soldier: A Poet's Childhood. Basic Civitas Books. 2001. ISBN 978-0-465-03682-0. June Jordan.
Some of Us Did Not Die. Basic Civitas Books. 2003. ISBN 978-0-465-03693-6.
Soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry. Random House Digital, Inc. 2004. ISBN 978-0-7679-1846-6. (editor, reprint)
Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) (edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles), ISBN 978-1-55659-228-7
'
Jordan, June (1939-2002)
In both her poetry and her essays, June Jordan called for the rejection of stereotypical views of bisexuality, and she associated sexual independence with political commitment.
Born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants, June Jordan grew up in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Her childhood in one of the largest black urban areas in the country, coupled with her three high school years at a predominantly white preparatory school, gave Jordan an early understanding of racial conflicts.
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She attended Barnard College, where she met and married Michael Meyer, a white Columbia University student who shared her political beliefs. Divorced after eleven years, Jordan continued studying architectural design and working as a free-lance political journalist to support herself and her son.
Her broad-based inclusive politics were significantly influenced by her work in 1964 with visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, her mother's suicide in 1966, her meetings with Fannie Lou Hamer in 1969, and her travels to Nicaragua in the 1980s.
She began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York and also taught at Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence, and Yale; in 1989, she became a professor of African-American studies at University of California, Berkeley, and began writing a political column for The Progressive magazine. She has received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Rockefeller Grant, the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award.
Although primarily known for her poetry, Jordan wrote essays, plays, novels, and musicals. The title of her 1989 collection of new and previously published poems, Naming Our Destiny, succinctly describes her ethical vision, as well as a central theme in her work: the importance of individual and collective self-determination.
This dual emphasis on personal and communal autonomy, coupled with the belief that her own self-determination entails recognizing and affirming the interconnections between herself and apparently dissimilar peoples, gives Jordan's work an aggressive optimism and a diversity that grow increasingly complex in her later writings.
Throughout her work, she explored multiple personal, national, and international issues, including her relationships with female and male lovers, homophobia, Black English, racial violence in Atlanta, South African apartheid, and the Palestinian crisis.
Given the opposition bisexuals have received from both heterosexual and lesbian and gay communities, Jordan's willingness to identify herself openly as bisexual established an extremely important precedent. Her most radical statement can be found in "A New Politics of Sexuality" (in Technical Difficulties, 1993), where she calls for a "new, bisexual politics of sexuality."
In addition to rejecting the stereotypical views of bisexuals, she associates sexual independence with political commitment and maintains that homophobia and heterosexism do not represent "special interest" concerns or secondary forms of oppression less important than racism or sexism. Indeed, she suggests that sexual oppression is perhaps the most deeply seated form of human conflict.
Jordan enacted her bisexual politics in "A Short Note to My Very Critical Friends and Well-Beloved Comrades," "Meta-Rhetoric," "Poem for Buddy," and other poems in Naming Our Destiny, where she rejected restrictive labels and exclusionary political positions based on sexuality, color, class, or nationality.
On June 14, 2002, June Jordan died of breast cancer.
June Jordan, who came of age as a poet when the voices of black female writers were just beginning to be heard, died on June 14 at her home in Berkeley, Calif.
She was 65. The cause was breast cancer, which she fought for a decade, said Adrienne Torff, a friend.
Like the careers of Audre Lord and Alice Walker, Ms. Jordan's was forged by the black arts movement of the 60's and 70's. Her poetry was imbued with advocacy for the poor, for women and the disenfranchised.
In an interview yesterday, Ms. Walker, a close friend, called the small, elegant but tough Ms. Jordan, ''unwillingly nonviolent.'' In ''Poem About Police Violence,'' she wrote about the so-called accidental death of a black man in police custody: ''Tell me something/ what you think would happen if/ everytime they kill a black boy/ then we kill a cop/ everytime they kill a black man/ then we kill a cop/ you think the accident rate would lower/ subsequently?''
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Still, Ms. Jordan could be a poet of great delicacy, as in ''On a New Year's Eve,'' in which she describes watching a lover sleep: ''and/ as I watch your arm/ your/ brown arm/ just/ before it moves/ I know/ all things are dear/ that disappear/ all things are dear/ that disappear.''
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She was the author or editor of 28 books, essays and novels for children and the libretto for the 1995 opera by John Adams ''I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.''
She was also a teacher. At the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a professor of African-American Studies, she founded Poetry for the People, which trains undergraduates to take poetry to community groups as a form of political empowerment.
Ms. Jordan was born in Harlem, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, a postal clerk, and Mildred, a nurse. Ms. Jordan's mother was deeply depressed and eventually committed suicide.
Her father had wanted a boy and referred to her as ''he.'' In ''Soldier: A Poet's Childhood'' (Basic Civitas Books, 1999) she described being brutally beaten by him: ''Like a growling beast, the roll-away mahogany doors rumble open, and the light snaps on and a fist smashes into the side of my head and I am screaming awake: 'Daddy! What did I do?!' '' Yet her father helped forge her identity as a writer, she said, giving her books by Paul Lawrence Dunbar and forcing her to memorize Shakespeare.
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In a radio interview two years ago, Ms. Jordan appeared to have come to terms with her father. She said: ''He didn't know what to do to try to provide against the failure of his only child in this new land. I think that probably contributed to the violence of his frustration. But that he loved me and thought me capable of anything and everything there was never any doubt.''
After the family moved to Brooklyn, Ms. Jordan became the only black student at Midwood High School. Later, she won a scholarship to the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, now the coeducational Northfield-Mount Hermon School.
After Northfield she attended Barnard College in New York City where she met Michael Meyer, a white student. The couple married and had a son, Christopher, who lives in Montana.
In her book of essays, ''Civil Wars'' (Scribner's, 1996), Ms. Jordan wrote of the difficulties of an interracial marriage. In 1966 the couple divorced. She raised her son largely on her own, struggling to eke out a living as a freelance journalist. She was a researcher and writer for Mobilization for Youth in New York, and in 1967 she got a teaching job at City College. Two years later she published a children's book, ''Who Look at Me?''
To the end, she remained involved in politics. In September Basic Civitas books is scheduled to publish ''Some of Us Did Not Die,'' which contains essays on Israel, Islam and O. J. Simpson. The book's title is from a poem she read last year in a speech at Barnard. She spoke of her battle with breast cancer and about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which she said proved the need for a secular democracy that protects the rights of ''male/ female/Jew/ Gentile/ Muslim.''
She read from a poem in which she imagined her dying body and a predatory hawk gliding overhead: ''He makes that dive/ to savage/ me/ and inches/ from the blood flood lusty/ beak/ I roll away/ I speak/ I laugh out loud/ Not yet/ big bird of prey/ not yet.''
Correction: June 20, 2002
An obituary on Tuesday about the poet June Jordan misspelled the middle name of an author whose books she credited with having helped forge her identity as a writer. He was Paul Laurence Dunbar, not Lawrence.
Correction: June 27, 2002
An obituary of the poet June Jordan on June 18 misspelled the surname of a poet whose career, like Ms. Jordan's, was forged by the black arts movement of the 60's and 70's. She was Audre Lorde, not Lord.
“I still do not recognize a necessary conflict between the sonnet and the bow and arrow,” wrote June Jordan in 1986, “I do not accept that immersion into our collective quest for things beautiful will cripple our own ability to honor the right of all human beings to survive.” Through a dazzling range of poems, essays, articles, lectures, speeches, and reviews, June Jordan stands at the interstice of beauty and politics. Her work demonstrates a rare and unceasing commitment to the realization of social justice, political equality, and to the unseen possibilities of true human coalitions across race, sex, and class. Currently a professor of African American studies at The University of California at Berkeley and a regular columnist for The Progressive, Jordan is the award-winning author of 21 books, including 1992’s collection of essays Technical Difficulties (Vintage) and the recently published book of poems Haruko Love Poems (Serpent’s Tail/High Risk). Poetry for the People, a book project with her students, will be published by Routledge this fall. Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan’s work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress. But sitting in her light-filled living room in Berkeley, Jordan was most eager to discuss her libretto for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (Scribner’s), an experimental contemporary opera created in collaboration with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars. Featuring sets painted by California graffiti artists and music by a jazz, funk, and rock fusion ensemble, the story in songs of this “earthquake-romance” centers on the young lives of men and women in Los Angeles struggling to find and articulate love in the midst of moral and physical devastation, tragedy, and upheaval. Like all of her work, the opera strives to bear witness to the human ability to survive nightmares of injustice and embrace visions of a more hopeful future.
Josh Kun Why did you choose to set the opera in Los Angeles?
June Jordan It’s the most heterogeneous city in the United States and demographically probably represents the forecast for the country. That’s why. Folks will work it out in the context of that extreme diversity, or we won’t.
JK Your opera dealt with young people within a context that is fairly uncharacteristic these days, in that it was hopeful. It was not drenched in cynicism or nihilism—or any of the other phrases that get hammered down our throats in both the academic and popular presses. Was that a conscious move?
JJ Absolutely. That’s one of the reasons I was excited to take this on, because I saw it as an opportunity to present Americans under 25 years old through a completely different prism, one which is realistically hopeful.
JK As opposed to?
JJ Well, when people use the word hopeful often the next word behind that is idiotic.
JK Or utopian.
JJ Or utopian, naive, mistaken. This opera is realistic and hopeful. Yeah, both. (pause) My take is based on my actual experience at UC Berkeley, so you can’t argue with me about this. I know that there are all these different components embodied by all of us, and I also know the tremendous positive possibilities of people working together. I’ve spoken with reporters and so on who patronize me, and I think: you can go ahead and patronize all you want, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s in my face, my life, my ears—every day. I’ve been teaching here for five years. And my course, Poetry for the People is, if you will, a laboratory and the results are in. It works and it’s people under 25 who are making it work.
JK Let me ask you about the process the three of you went through to put the opera together. Did you write the libretto first?
JJ The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks I mean, that’s all I did. I didn’t do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner’s has published now.
JK Did writing with the knowledge that it was going to be sung stretch or change the writing process for you?
JJ Yeah. I wrote everything with the determination to rhyme as much as possible and to have many rhythmical attributes, loading every line and every stanza to facilitate the transliteration of the work into music. John asked me to tape most of it, which I did, so he could hear how I intended it to sound. We had a couple of conversations trying to figure out a common language for his music and my music, so to speak, so that he could move it from words into his vocabulary. I think we partly succeeded. What is very striking about this piece is that the words are clear throughout. Peter has been fastidious about insisting on enunciation and John took painstaking care in protecting the clarity of the words and verse.
JK That’s a lucky situation.
JJ Yeah! From what I understand sometimes people don’t speak to each other after all this.
Jordan_01.jpg
The cast of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams, libretto by June Jordan and directed by Peter Sellars. Photos © 1995 by Ken Freidman, courtesy of Lincoln Center.
JK How did you come up with the characters? Were you trying to stick within types or were you trying to disrupt the representations of those types?
JJ I wanted to have a cast representative of the people who live in LA, the people that I teach and work with here at UC Berkeley. I came up with all the characters except for Tiffany, the crime television reporter—she was Peter’s brainstorm. I don’t watch television, so I didn’t know such a thing as crime-as-news existed. I was incredulous when he told me about it. He gave me a list of programs to watch and I was like, “Oh, my God!” And together, Peter and I figured out the Asian-American character, Rick. Actually, I was trying to have everyone in the cast be equal.
JK Equal as far as actual lines?
JJ Yeah. How many times you get a solo, how many times you get to the center stage.
JK The ultimate egalitarian opera?
JJ I was really trying very hard. (laughter) It’s an all-star cast. The first character I was hot about was David, the black Baptist preacher, ‘cause I thought that was such obvious, dramatic material. To start the piece with a gospel praise song about a girl who, “like to make me lose my religion!” You think you know who this person is and then you realize you don’t, and that’s true for all the characters. Rick is so eloquent in the courtroom, but then one-to-one the guy can’t talk. I made a deliberate effort to dislodge people from their familiar habits of expectation about other folks they don’t really know.
JK One of the things I found so striking about the opera is that it deals with various kinds of earthquakes—both actual and concrete as well as symbolic and metaphorical—I was wondering what it is, for you, about the concept of an earthquake that is so attractive or seductive to work within? In your essay, “Unrecorded Agonies,” you write about the feelings of being unsettled and how this can be a productive space.
JJ Actually, I had just arrived in California when the Loma Prieta took place and it was because I saw how most people responded to it that I decided to stay. People were completely humane and the volunteers were fabulous. That had a profound effect upon me. Secondly, my idea of romance is that it’s like an earthquake. From the very beginning I didn’t call it an opera, I called it an “earthquake-romance.” After I finished Act One, I asked Peter if he could do an earthquake onstage and he said, “Absolutely!” So I said, “Here we go!” And then I had huge problems figuring out how to get from Act One to Act Two; I was stumbling around. Peter came up from L.A. and we were brainstorming and on the counter I had a very beautiful edition of the Koran that someone had sent to me. So Peter pulled it out and came to the section towards the end about the earthquake. It says that when an earthquake occurs, every atom of evil will be known and every atom of good will be known. And we thought, “That’s it!” Now I knew what I was going to aim for; a kind of denudation would take place between and among people, that a natural catastrophe would coerce or make possible. I felt very solid about having an earthquake. But I didn’t want it to be a cheap shot or a deus-ex-machina, or to be melodramatic. When Peter found that in the Koran, I thought: This is something that folks have recognized forever, that possibility of coming clean in a disaster.
JK I was re-reading the libretto this morning, that lyric, “Sometimes the news ain’t something that you choose.” At that point I thought of the opera as a blues response to the earthquake and the romance of contemporary life—getting the news that you don’t choose and enduring it, transcending it.
JJ Yeah, you’re onto something there. I’ve been saying it another way, and I hope folks will notice that although everybody is beleaguered, nobody gives up on the love. So, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a good news piece. But it’s a lot of good news coming out of a lot of bad news.
JK I went back and looked at your essay, “Where Is the Love?” where you write about the ability to love yourself as the necessary precursor to loving another, and to forging alliances and coalitions across race, gender, and class through that love. How did you see love operating in this piece?
JJ I thought of it as what Leila describes, in the opera: “Everybody wants to be somebody’s straight up number one.” It’s sexual, it’s exclusive, but it doesn’t mean the closing off of the rest of the world. It’s a happy starting place. It’s a huge excitement, not ho-hum. To be very excited about somebody else and have that somebody else be very excited about you, is very wonderful. This is the way to go, and that’s what I mean by love. I don’t mean anything other than that.
JK Another earthquake.
JJ Yeah. It’s coming out of yourself, really. It’s a deeply appreciative and enthusiastic awareness of somebody else. I mean, in general. It’s what we’re living for and that’s what I’m fighting for. I think of myself as a political person doing whatever I do, but basically what I aim for is to make love a reasonable possibility. ‘Cause if things are really horrifying all the time, I don’t think it is a reasonable possibility. If we’re living in a climate of awesome cruelty exercised by folks who have power over us, it can happen, but I don’t think it becomes reasonable. But it’s that possibility that makes living worthwhile. My commitment to love is not an alternative to my political commitments. It’s the same thing. Except in this piece I was able to concentrate overwhelmingly on the lyrical side of the quest between two people, again and again.
JK Yet it’s a quest that’s linked together by an overt political backdrop. All of your characters had to overcome tremendous odds to articulate many different things, political or otherwise, but the one thing that was struggling to become possible was the articulation of love. It was a moving ending.
JJ Oh yeah? Good, I’m glad. Peter says he thinks of it as a kind of Shakespearean epilogue. When I finished Act Two, Peter flew up and the next morning we read it together. We just wept. I said, “Do you think it’s too sad?” And Peter said, “No, it’s truthful.” So I’m relieved that when you see it on stage, at least at this point, we’ll see how it evolves, indeed it is very moving and disturbing. If people are devastated, that’s not the intention. We don’t want folks walking out of there feeling wrecked.
Jordan_03.jpg
Scene from I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.
JK Even the title, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, which is taken from a post-earthquake observation of destruction, can be looked at in two ways. First, there is a hole where my roof should be. On the other hand, by the end of the piece, it becomes a very hopeful statement: I’m looking beyond the ceiling to the bigger sky. That’s a nice inversion. Let me ask you a bit about the character Mike, the white cop, who throughout the piece is associated with a closeted queer sexuality. I wanted to hear more about this character especially in the light of your other work, your writings on bi-sexuality, your recent poetry and essays like, “A New Politics of Sexuality.” So many of your longer romance songs are built into the conventions of heterosexual romance, I was wondering how his character was meant to work in and out of that.
JJ What I was looking at there, was to show somebody who is in love with the idea of being a man, which most people are, including women. The whole culture is about John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and so, to me, there is a homoerotic content to it. I was hoping that the character could help people toward a revelation. I think of him as a do-good Clint Eastwood. He’s sincerely a good guy who’s in the Marines, plays basketball…
JK Likes being in the locker room more than he is aware…
JJ Slapping each other on the butt, yeah, he likes guys. Then you have to look at that and say, “What does that mean?” ‘Cause if you really, really like guys and you really, really, like looking at men then you’re really, really not that crazy about women, probably. Right? I was interested in trying to confront people with that, have them look at that as a possible revelation.
JK Especially because he’s a cop.
JJ ‘Cause he’s a cop, right. I’m not entirely happy yet with how he’s been realized, but I’m hoping we’ll get someplace where he’s a total guy-guy. The idea that he might be gay would be the farthest thing from his mind. And I want him to be a queer basher. In the rewrite I’ve made him a little more obnoxious and a little more obvious. He is ready to kill queers. I’m talking serious queer basher. So that when you get into Act Two, it’s like, “Whoa! Talk about earthquakes.” Why are you so overwrought about somebody else’s sexuality unless your own is not nailed down? This is the sort of question I’m trying to raise with Mike. It’s a very tricky thing that I’m trying to pull off and maybe it won’t work. I don’t know. I wanted to have him remain sympathetic, so I wanted it to be clear that he really does good things. He’s a committed guy. He’s what I call a community activist and he means well. He believes that everything he does is about being a good man. So he’s not coming from an evil place. And he’s also completely committed to this woman reporter, Tiffany, who rides with him in his car and is so infatuated with him. She’s excited just tagging along. He’s never had anybody like that. I tried to make it clear that there are a lot of people who are out of touch with themselves, most of us I think. He happens to be out of touch with himself in this way. He really does love Tiffany, it’s just a different kind of love each of them is talking about. What I was trying to do was to make each person realistic and complicated. So that if I could persuade you that each of these people was somebody to care about and cherish, then you would be cherishing somebody real and not a fantasy or some hero—somebody like yourself. I developed a legal pad for each character: What does he eat? What does he wear? What kind of shoes? What color socks? What kind of cereal? What kind of music? What kind of girl does he like? Everything I could possibly think of I had a pad for each of them, then I started figuring out, okay, who’s gonna hook up with whom? I didn’t have that clear at all.
JK The ultimate matchmaker role! To actually set up your characters.
JJ This is my party! But on the political side what was really creepy was that Propositions 184 and 187 were not a twinkle in anybody’s eye when I wrote the libretto. [Proposition 187 denies all state benefits except emergency medical care to undocumented immigrants and Proposition 184 is California’s “three strikes” law.] Now, suddenly, this is everybody’s opera out here because we’re all in it. (pause) I want to say something about the word ‘opera.’ It is a story in song. Everything is sung and nothing is spoken, which is partly the definition of an opera. Another definition, according to Leonard Bernstein, is that there are parallel plots and subplots. There is love. There is tragedy. There is triumph. There is extremity throughout. I thought that this context would automatically confer a dignity and stature upon these young men and women that otherwise might not be available to them.
June Jordan: A Third-Wave
Feminist towards a GenderedDemocratic Poetics
Abeer Refky Seddeek
Associate Professor in English Literature
College of Language and Communication (CLC)
Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime
Transport (AASTMT)
28
Abstract
The aim of the present study is threefold: to prove that the
American poet June Jordan (1936-2002) is able to combine her
social and political views along with her personal life to serve
public causes such as political oppression, African-American
identity, democracy in the US, and racial inequality; to reflect her
feminist advocation of shared human rights and goals for a better
society; and to underline her globalized notion of solidarity
amongst the world’s marginalized and oppressed in their search
for democracy and freedom. The study is based on Nicky Marsh’s
Democracy in Contemporary US Women’s Poetry (2007), its
debate on third-wave feminism and democratic theory, and the
complexities of being public in the US culture. The study proves
that Jordan’s poetry examines the discursive assumptions of
democracy in the US, contributes to the democratic tradition of the
US contemporary culture through the gender theory that considers
citizenship and publicness as the main concepts of third-wave
feminism, and suggests new democratic cultures by its variety of
publics and feminist discourse. The study concludes that Jordan’s
feminist discourse focuses on the relation between the private, the
political and the public and creates a strong public discourse
capable of reforming the inequality deeply implanted in the
contaminated formative discourses. As a third-wave feminist,
Jordan is concerned with the conflict between a feminist and a
democratic identity to form a new poetic language for being
public. She adopts the gender theory that investigates the sociopolitical implications of democracy and exhibits the female
identity as a societal construct. Jordan’s poetry suggests new
models of gendered democratic poetics and shows that social
reality shapes the poet’s identity through which reality is
deconstructed and offered alternatives.
Key words: Feminist discourse, Gendered-democratic poetics,
Political activism, The political and the personal, The
public and the private, Third-wave feminism
29
جون جوردان : شاعرة الموجة النسویة الثالثة والشاعریة الجنسانیة الدیمقراطیة
ملخص
ً: إثبات أن الشاعرة الأمریكیة
ترتكز الد ارسة الحالیة على ثلاثة محاور أساسیة، ألا وهى أولا
جون جوردان (١٩٣٦-٢٠٠٢ (تمتلك القدرة على الدمج بین آ ارئها الاجتماعیة والسیاسیة
وحیاتها الخاصة لخدمة قضایا عامة مثل القهر السیاسي، والهویة الأفریقیة الأمریكیة،
وثانی : توضیح دعم ً والدیمق ارطیة في الولایات المتحدة الأمریكیة، والتمییز العنصري. ا
ًا: إلقاء الضوء
جوردان النسوي لحقوق وأهداف الإنسان المشتركة نحو مجتمع أفضل. وثالث
على مفهومها عن التضامن العالمي بین المهمشین والمقهورین في العالم أثناء بحثهم عن
الدیمق ارطیة والحریة.
وتستخدم الد ارسة كتاب الكاتبة النسویة نیكي مارش "الدیمق ارطیة في شعر الشاع ارت
الأمریكیات المعاص ارت" (٢٠٠٧ ،(وما یشمله من تعریف بالموجة الثالثة النسویة والنظریة
الدیمق ارطیة وصعوبات التحول إلى الخطاب العام في الثقافة الأمریكیة.
وتثبت الد ارسة قیام جوردان بتحلیل الافت ارضات الخطابیة حول الدیمق ارطیة بالولایات المتحدة
ٕ سهامها في التقالید الدیمق ارطیة للثقافة المعاصرة للولایات المتحدة من خلال
الأمریكیة، وا
نظریة النوع التي تعتبر المواطنة والعمومیة بمثابة المفهومین الرئیسیین في الموجة الثالثة
النسویة، وطرحها لثقافات دیمق ارطیة جدیدة من خلال التنوع في الآ ارء العامة والخطاب
النسوي. وتخلص الد ارسة إلى أن الخطاب النسوي لجوردان یركز على العلاقة بین الخاص
ا یستطیع إصلاح اللامس
ً
ا قوی
ً
ا عام
والسیاسي والعام ویطور خطاب اواة المترسخة في وسائل ً
الخطاب الشكلیة الملوثة.
ولكونها شاعرة تندرج تحت مظلة الموجة الثالثة النسویة ، تهتم جوردان بالص ارع بین الم أرة
والهویة الدیمق ارطیة لصیاغة لغة شعریة جدیدة لمعالجة القضایا العامة. وتتبنى جوردان
نظریة النوع التي تبحث في مضامین الدیمق ارطیة الاجتماعیة والسیاسیة وتوضح الهویة
النسویة ككیان مجتمعي.
ًا جدیدة للشاعریة الدیمق ارطیة ویبین كیفیة تشكیل الواقع
كما یقدم شعر جوردان أی ًضا نماذج
الاجتماعي لهویة الشاعر وتفككه من خلال تلك الهویة لطرح بدائل جدیدة.
الكلمات المفتاحیة: الخطاب النسوي – الشاعریة الجنسانیة الدیمق ارطیة – النشاط السیاسي
– السیاسي والخاص – العام والخاص – الموجة الثالثة النسویة
30
31
1. Introduction
1.1 Significance of the Study
The American poet, June Jordan (1936-2002) was a poet,
playwright, essayist, and professor of English at the University of
California, Berkeley. Jordan has earned critical praise and
popular recognition for her exceptional literary skill and her
strong social and political insights. She is one of the widelypublished and highly-acclaimed African-American writers in
history. Jordan believes that the role of the poet in society is to
earn the trust of his/her audience and to be as honest and as
careful as he/she possibly can.
This paper attempts to show Jordan’s revolutionary spirit
through her social commitment and conscientious activism,
which are evident in her poems, and to prove that she is able to
combine her social and political works and views with her
personal life to serve public causes. In addition, the paper
explains that Jordan uses conversational, often vernacular
English, to address topics on family, political oppression,
African-American identity and racial inequality. Her poetry
highlights the African-American personal struggles of everyday
life and the political oppression that this race is subjected to in a
satirical style, which reflects the poet’s bitterness and rage.
Jordan uses Black English and irony to reflect a culture that is
violent, anti-black, and anti-feminist. Her images combine
different emotions and voices that reflect her wide-ranging
aesthetic and human concerns. Jordan’s poetry reflects her
feminist advocation of human rights. Through her influential
feminist vision, Jordan creates an “antiracist, antihomophobic US
feminism” in an aesthetic form that is thematically
“comprehensive, humane, and charged with conviction” (“June
Jordan” 237).
32
Jordan addresses shared human goals in search for a better
society. Her poetry tackles issues related to identity and the
recreation of the private/personal. It is associated with politics and
foregrounds “a radical, globalized notion of solidarity amongst the
world’s marginalized and oppressed” (Phillips). She belongs to the
“second renaissance” of African-American arts in the 1960s and
1970s, as she is one of the initiators of the “cultural revival and the
rise of the black consciousness in the 1960s” (“June Jordan” 236).
Jordan bridges the gap between local and international issues,
fights for humanity at large, opposes injustice that is rampant in
the whole world, and calls for freedom for all the oppressed
minorities. She draws attention to the “emotional, physical and
political spaces required for the survival of marginalized peoples
everywhere” (Kinloch 163-64). This is manifested in her
commitment to the people in the US, Nicaragua, Lebanon, South
Africa, Bosnia, Palestine, etc. This commitment enables her to
discover the multicultural and multiracial identities as well as
feminist politics, third-world activism, and power movements.
Consequently, her dedication to freedom and to humanity at large
has a provocative and strengthening effect on civil rights
movements and the lives of disenfranchised women, children, and
men. Jordan also plays a significant role in some of the major
African-American political movements calling for the rights of
women and for a democratic society.
The significance of studying Jordan’s poetry is thus
threefold. Firstly, her poetry examines the discursive assumptions
or the discursive representation of democracy in the US culture.
Secondly, it contributes to the democratic tradition in the US
contemporary culture through the gender theory, which argues that
citizenship and publicness are the main concepts of third-wave
feminism. Thirdly, it suggests new kinds of democratic cultures by
means of its variety of publics and its feminist discourse, which
renews the possibilities of the democratic contract.
33
1.2 Democracy in the US and Third-Wave Feminism
Alternatives
This paper analyzes Jordan’s contribution to the democratic
tradition in the US contemporary culture through the recent
gender theory, which argues about citizenship and publicness as
the main concepts of third-wave feminism, in an attempt to
reveal that her poetry suggests new kinds of democratic cultures
by means of its variety of publics. In 2003, poetry emerged as a
new sphere that investigated “national democratic culture”
(Marsh 1). Advocating democracy in the US is twofold: it is
characterized by unequal mechanisms, on the one hand, and the
ideological, “semiotic relations of representation” (4), on the
other. In this regard, Jordan attempts to question the US
democratic culture by investigating its discursive assumptions or
representation in the American culture.
Theories of US democracy adopt two perspectives: A
laissez-faire liberalism, which advocates that liberty mean
noninterference or any compulsion by force, and the republican
tradition that reinforces political participation and active civic
identity. Theorists of both sides, the Left (Liberals) and the Right
(Republicans), strive to rescue the concept of democracy from
the control of “institutional individualism” and to enhance the
concept of the “democratic public sphere” (March 4). The Leftist
attempts are divided between the public “rational deliberative
models” and the more “radical agonal models” (4). Such
attempts, with reference to critic Seyla Benhabib (1950- ), call
for the active participation of collective identities. The Right side
or conservative thinkers, with reference to the political theorist,
Chantal Mouffe (1943- ), assume that the tension between
equality and liberty provides the indefiniteness or indeterminacy
that is essential for democracy. They believe that democracy
threatens the religious power relations and fosters the concept of
34
multiculturalism. Thus, it can be assumed that the Right
(Republicans) adopts a more rational perspective of democracy.
All attempts to define modern democracy are as cultural as
they are political. Ken Hirschkop argues that modern democracy,
advocated by the Leftist perspective, is not only the outcome of
the totality of power relations, but also of the intersubjective
linguistic patterns that frame it (37). Thus, democracy is a
discursive construct despite the existence of the freedom of
speech. The intersubjective relations of US exceptionalism,
aiming at constituting collective identities, can be traced in the
poetry of various American poets, such as Walt Whitman, Robert
Frost, George Oppen, William Carlos Williams and Robert
Pinksy. Pinksy underlines the anti-poetic nature of US democracy
as well as the intersubjectivity of poetry that represents
democracy’s fragile social contract – that is the presence or
absence of an auditor. Therefore, such terms used in debates on
democracy as “individual and collective, public and private, unity
and difference, security and contingency” (Marsh 5) are essential
in American poetry and specifically in the poetry of Jordan.
Gender is an integral part of the discussions about democracy
since the dynamics of sexual politics obviously influence US
democracy’s nationalist discourses and women’s relationship to
the division between the public and the private that plays an
exasperating role in the discourses of democracy. The Liberal and
the Republican democratic traditions have opposite viewpoints;
whereas the Liberals find freedom in the private, the Republicans
find it in the public. The second-wave feminism deconstructs the
political activities of liberalism in drawing a line between the
public and the private. Feminist critics paid attention to the
“masculinist content of the republican civic identity” (Marsh 5) or,
in other words, the republican public masculine authority.
Feminist theorist, Drucilla Cornell (1950- ), indicates that
whatever is referred to as feminine is banned from the public
35
sphere, which highlights how the feminine has thus become the
guarding angel of discourses of US democracy (218). In this
regard, theorists foreground the feminist discourse as significantly
fundamental to renew the possibilities of the democratic contract
as the issue of democracy can perfectly be examined through
feminism. Feminist thinkers mainly focus on the relations between
the private, the political, and the public and withdraw from the
political and cultural processes of the masculine society to fall in
the formalism of the feminist literary community.
Third-wave feminism has emerged as a social movement
that has overhauled the late twentieth century with its emphasis
on democratic cultures. It explores the problematic shift from
feminism to democracy, taking into consideration both the
rejection of the politics of resentment and the debates about
“power” and “victim” feminism (Marsh 6). Most female poets,
including Jordan, are concerned with the conflict between a
feminist and a democratic identity in an endeavour to form a new
poetic language for being public. This underlines how the gender
theory examines the socio-political implications behind
democracy, which foregrounds feminist identity as a societal
construct.
Debates in democratic theory and third-wave feminism help
investigate the way contemporary women poets negotiate the
complexities of being public and how they are engaged with the
heterogeneous social forms of poetry in addition to their suggested
new possibilities for public culture. Although women poets
examine the complex relationship between the private and the
public as normative conventions of US democracy, “their writing
and its cultural structures” attempt to find out alternatives for them
(Marsh 10). Jordan, for example, recasts some of the established
narratives for feminist poetics in her search for freedom.
36
Unlike second-wave feminism, third-wave feminist
movement is a radical anti-foundationalism that aims at
deconstructing all the terms and aims of the second-wave
feminism and constructing new meanings essential for the desires
and strategies of third-wave feminists. Literature can mold new
political possibilities for gender relations by making women of
different backgrounds share a sense of communality/community
and have the same identity at a time when difference dominates
in contemporary feminism. In light of this, the following sections
discuss Jordan as a third-wave, anti-foundationalist feminist.
Women poets have significantly contributed to modernist
and late modernist experimental traditions, which resulted in
particularly different and “increasingly expansive” literarypolitical vocabulary insofar as the visual, the aural, the crossmedia and performed poem have become clearer ever since
(Marsh 15). Debates also rose on the private, the political and the
public and their new meaning as the “literalism of identiterian
critiques” has been abandoned and the “constitutive rather than
the descriptive role of discourse” has become partially accepted
(15). Feminist critics have given more energy to the democratic
public subject in the post-feminist future overcoming existing
divisions within feminism.
It has become evident that one of the basic tasks of thirdwave feminism is to create a strong public discourse capable of
finding a remedy and reforming the inequality deeply implanted
in the contaminated formative discourses.
1.3 Jordan’s Gendered-Democratic Poetic Space
This part sheds light on Jordan’s complementary critiques of
the narrative of US democratic culture as well as examines her
complex modeling of a literary counter-public. It also highlights
Jordan’s attempts to create new forms of a democratic public to
demolish the political theorist Wendy Brown’s (1955- ) concept
37
of the “plastic cage” of institutionalized discourse and the
impossible goal of freedom, and reflects Jordan’s antifoundationalism in suggesting new models of a gendered
democratic space. Jordan’s poetry investigates the
“discontinuities between the varied spaces of the public available
to the African-American woman poet and gestures towards the
possibility of alternatives” (Kinloch and Grebowicz 16). Thus,
her poems offer a reinterpretation of the radical antifoundationalist critiques and multiculturalism liberal notions
leading to the emergence of third-wave feminism.
Contemporary poet Kathleen Fraser (1935- ) mentions
that poets of the second-wave feminist movement were attached
to various post Second World War poetic movements, which
highlights how their discourse served the status quo. She argues
that the second-wave feminist movement did not trigger
women’s full self-expressions against oppression and
marginalization neither in the poetic language they used nor in
their artistic style. However, women’s poetry that emerged in the
late 1970s and continued throughout the 1980s shows that
women poets were able to overcome the “double-bind” of
aesthetic and social exclusion (31). This approach gives privilege
to the female writing, like Jordan’s, striving to overcome the
inequalities legitimized by the separation between the public and
the private. There were no longer any distinctions between the
public and the private and the vocabulary has become neither
static nor identitarian. However, the literary vocabulary used to
represent the self was limited to forge an elusive unity of the
public and private. Poets also tried to fight against the divided
voice and to consolidate the tension between the “personal ‘real’
self” and the “strong poetic ‘fantasy’ self” that the androcentric
literary culture insisted upon for the woman writer (Ostriker 80).
Jordan’s poetry has no determinate meaning towards the
public though she tries to reformulate its boundaries in her attempt
38
to create her own alternative model for a gendered-democratic
poetics. Jordan’s model questions the limits of its discursive
grounding and does not accept identity or the personal private as a
basis for politics and remains completely focused on the social
realities. When Jordan refers to the failed promises of US
democracy, she turns to the largely disenfranchised global
community characterized by inequality and exclusion. She realizes
that identity cannot be a sufficient basis for politics. Jordan
attempts to achieve an alternative by choosing the words that can
show the difference between the common identities through which
social and political realities are examined. Such individual
identity, which would offer alternative realities in terms of
language and thought, is deemed an endeavour to create an ethical
language for individuality. It becomes evident in Jordan’s poetry
that social reality shapes the poet’s identity and it is through this
identity that reality is deconstructed and offered alternatives.
Jordan struggles for freedom though she knows that its
institutionalized assumptions are inevitable for its realization,
taking into consideration identity and power. Such knowledge on
Jordan’s part questions the “relations between democracy,
gender, and poetics that strives for a literary counter-public
whose efficacy derives from its incorporation, rather than its
exclusion, of difference, of the economic, of the irrational”
(Marsh 35). It is ultimately important to note that this attention to
the public sphere’s broad implications matches the theory of
feminist democracy, illustrated by Fraser, which suggests one
kind of possibility of a democratic model of feminist poetics (35-
36). Thus, it becomes clear that with Jordan a gendered
democratic poetic space is taking place.
39
1.4 Fake Democratic Existence and Racial and Sexual
Discrimination
1.4.1 Building black identity and cultural nationalism
Jordan urges the blacks to establish a common culture by
studying Black English and calls on the whites to give up on the
idea that the Negro is the construct of racist white America. She
encourages silent minorities to get together and “transform a
‘tree’ that has never really been planted or a movement that has
not been fully actualized, into a discourse on a rhetoric of rights
for disenfranchised people” (Kinloch 73). In her 1964 essay,
“Letter to Michael,” Jordan described the 1964 Harlem Riots to
her husband and spoke of the police violence that shocked the
black community, forcing it to realize that it is a minority. She
criticized the police absurdities and violence that made the
African-American community acknowledge that their suffering is
real and provoked them to end their silence and protest against
the immorality of their victimizers. Jordan employs a personal
letter to serve a public purpose. She advocates the idea of an
individual voice speaking from an African-American perspective
rather than speaking on behalf of all African Americans.
In her essay, “Nobody Mean More to Me” (1988), Jordan
declares that having the black people living in the American
society resembles living in a house where every mirror reflects
the face of someone who does not belong there and the way
he/she walks or talks seems wrong. A reason for this is that the
house, or America, shelters people who are hostile to black
people. She writes that one becomes mature in a social body that
does not tolerate his/her attempt to be different and forces
him/her to become “clones of those who are neither our mothers
nor our fathers” (160). She adds that the term Black English is
not a linguistic threat, but rather it refers to a community of
blacks that is marginalized from the social and political spheres
40
of the American society, thus, its culture, language and
everything else that signals its difference and intelligence are
becoming extinct.
In addition, Jordan embodies the ideals and principles of the
Black Arts Movement. The black artists who supported the black
cultural traditions and artistic innovations in the black
community include Poet-critics Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Harold
Cruse, Nikki Giovanni, Ron Karenga, Askia Muhammad, Larry
Neal, and Sonia Sanchez. The aim of these writers is to create the
black aesthetic, namely the existence of a powerful artistic and
culture-based political collective that strives to reform current
understandings of beauty and privilege, culture and power, and
the philosophical principles of a black genius, or imagination, as
related to black life, politics, and work through art (Kinloch 76).
To affirm such aesthetic, black musicians, dancers, writers,
filmmakers, poets, educators, dramatists, and even working-class
labourers antagonized all the oppressive conditions they
witnessed in America as represented in US imperialism, police
violence, and other practices of racism against the blacks, in an
attempt to achieve social reform.
Jordan attempts to bridge the gap between the old
generation and the new generation of black poets by focusing on
issues such as racism, classism, and sexism in both the literary
and critical mainstream and the civil rights efforts in America.
Though the work and principles of the Black Arts Movement
have a great impact on Jordan’s art and politics, she does not take
any of this movement’s poets as her mentor, but rather develops
a voice of her own. Her writings mainly discuss black social and
political concerns and she affects “a transition in the way that the
black intellectual functions in American culture” (MacPhail 58).
She is committed to civil rights, political opportunities, quality
education, and better housing conditions for black people. She
criticizes the works, philosophical teachings, and the political
41
disposition of Martin Luther King (1929-1968), the Civil Rights
Movement, and Malcolm X (1925-1965) and Black Power
Movement. During the Civil Rights Era, Jordan rejected King’s
ideals or belief in nonviolence, benevolent love, integration, and
the “Beloved Community” insofar as the blacks are obliged to
stand up to segregation and all acts of violence. Jordan, thus,
strongly believes that violence cannot be met with love and the
white contempt must not be tolerated.
Jordan questions the validity of the political movements and
their leaders. She seeks a politically committed international
human rights movement that can represent the various
experiences of women, men, and children with the aim of
internationalizing “the black protest movement in its inclusivity”
(Kinloch 85). In Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines
of America (1981), Jordan expounds the lack of black leadership,
King’s assassination, and the black peoples’ uprising in Miami.
She suggests that black leadership, even during the 1980s, was
“dangerous and tired” because of the increasing violent acts
against people of colour. She thus claims, “Where is justice?
Where is love? Where is leadership? Who is to be turned to for
guidance? Who will stand up and lead the demonstrations,
protests, and movements of resistance that once shaped black life
in America? Is leadership really “dangerous and tired?” (37).
The mid- and late 1960s witnessed a drastic transformation
in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. The AfricanAmerican social movements of the 1960s focused on black
identity rather than the white victimization of blacks and hence
there was a move towards cultural nationalism. Such movements
developed from the “peaceful protests” that King called for to the
“cultural nationalism” that was supported by the true
revolutionary Malcolm X (MacPhail 59). This transformation is
reflected in the rhetorical strategies of writers who influenced
Jordan, such as Baraka.
42
Jordan embraces the forceful strategies of Malcolm X and
admires his magnificent oratorical skills and heated speeches,
calling for social action and black cultural awareness. Though at
the beginning she was only concerned with opposing the denial
of black people’s civil rights, she was later seeking justice for all
people treated unjustly whether in America or elsewhere. Hence,
her activist and political efforts developed from focusing merely
on the civil rights of black people to an international context.
Similarly, Malcolm X aspires to expand the civil rights
movement into a human rights movement; hence
internationalizing “the black freedom struggle” (Kinloch 80).
It is thus evident that Jordan’s political experiences of the
1960s and 1970s were remarkably influenced, on the one hand,
by the legacies of King, whom she perceives as a hero despite
contradicting his nonviolent attitude at the beginning, and
Malcolm X, who helped her foresee a new, different America,
where equal rights prevail and there is no violence or hate. Their
influence can still be traced in her poetry during the 1980s. After
both leaders’ assassinations, Jordan began to perceive the
struggle for black people’s liberation in light of other
international civil rights struggles. Her enthusiastic involvement
in political movements makes her believe that the lives of the
blacks will be improved if people keep on marching,
demonstrating and protesting to call for change. Therefore,
Jordan’s poems and political essays became more intense and full
of rage, as they discuss power and empowerment, pride, survival
as well as social and political advancement for the black
community.
1.4.2 Jordan’s political activism and calling for democracy
As a political activist, Jordan advocates that no single issue
could be separated from the rest. She helps minorities, who may
speak different languages, practice different religions and have
43
different histories, to see themselves as connected to all the
struggles for freedom in all places around the world. Jordan took
part in a core Freedom ride, witnessed and reported on the
Harlem Riots of 1964 and strongly insisted that one must resist
any kind of injustice. She was involved in the 1960s Black Power
Movement and her work as a political activist is indebted to this
movement. She is “one of the fiercest and most compassionate
voices of the twentieth century” (Pe´rez 326). In Civil Wars,
Jordan illustrates the intersection of private and public reality,
which she explores through blending personal reflection with the
political analysis of such topics as freedom and civil rights to
rally people into action.
The American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892), who
enabled Jordan to recognize the relation between America’s
failed promise of democracy and the alternative possibilities that
poetry offers (Marsh 25), has a major influence upon her. She
strongly believes that Whitman is the aesthetic voice of all
people, the same role she assumes in her poetry. Whitman’s
“aesthetic democracy” dedicates the autopoetic dimensions of
political life. He believes that “popular attachment to democracy
requires an aesthetic component” and attempts to depict the
needed “reconfiguration of popular sensibility through a poetic
depiction of the people as themselves a sublimely poetic, worldmaking power” (Frank 402). Whitman seeks political
regeneration in everyday citizenship poetics and ordinary life
democratic potentials.
In her attempt to have a US that accepts diversity;
multiculturalism; multilingualism; justice; and social, political and
sexual freedom, Jordan is considered an apprentice of Whitman.
In his poem, “Song of Myself” (1855), Whitman addresses themes
that Jordan tackles in her collection of poetry Moving Towards
Home (1989). In this poem, Whitman advocates comprehending
the self as a spiritual entity that signifies both the individual and
44
the universe. He, therefore, searches for ways to nurture man’s
mind and to build a strong relationship between the self and others
or the surrounding community.
Jordan’s poetry depicts the relationship between politics and
representation and seeks to understand how the public sphere she
is struggling for is formed. She fully understands that the
democratic project requires rethinking of the tensions between
identity and difference:
[r]ather than simply assuming the coincidence of “poem” and
“political action” Jordan interrogates the potentially uneven
match between her writing’s insistent re-signification of the
frames of representation and the more literal economic and
pragmatic influences that controlled the thresholds for public
participation. (Marsh 26)
Jordan advocates a pluralistic approach to poetry in her
essay “For the Sake of a People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the
Rest of Us” (1980), where she antagonizes censorship and
silencing minority voices in American literature. Whitman’s
influence and literary techniques are also evident in Jordan’s
“Poem About My Rights.” Her writings show a “Whitmanesque
wisdom” and as Kinloch argues they are like the melody that
rearranges the connection between man and the universe as well
as the obligations man has to the world. Jordan thus employs the
lessons learned from Whitman to “serve a positive and collective
function” (Kinloch 53).
Jordan’s political activism and poetic visions are of utmost
significance in a time of war resistance and the dream to achieve
social justice, particularly after September 11 events and the
continuous “War on / of Terror,” where poets were required to
take part in enlightening the people and confront all forms of
violence prevalent in every aspect of human life. In Some of Us
Did Not Die (2002), Jordan illustrates that fighting for equality
and against violence never stops. She fought energetically for
universal peace as she says,
45
ONCE THROUGH the fires of September 11, it’s not easy to
remember or O recognize any power we continue to possess.
Understandably we shrivel and retreat into stricken
consequences of that catastrophe.
But we have choices, and capitulation is only one of them.
I am always hoping to do better than to collaborate with
whatever or whomever it is that means me no good.
For me, it’s a mind game with everything at stake….
Luckily, there are limitless, new ways to engage our tender, and
possible responsibilities, obligations that our actual continuing
coexistence here, in these United States and here, in our world,
require. (8)
These lines epitomize Jordan’s activist efforts and political
stance in the last thirty-five years of her life. She is totally
devoted to creating “new ways to engage people in a discourse of
difference that would rebuild a world that embraces all
perspectives, including women’s and children’s” (Kinloch 59).
She thus introduces readers to the fact that the American life is
threatened by social negligence, economic despair, and civil
unrest.
2. Jordan’s Gendered-Democratic Poetics and
Minority Rights
From the mid-1970s, Jordan began to bring international
issues to her poetry and to domestic audience. She identifies with
the causes of the misrepresented, silenced and marginalized
people, since she believes that they share her needs and
experiences as an African-American woman living in the US
(MacPhail 67). She started to address the issues of discrimination
in terms of race and gender in addition to other political issues.
Her writings speak for groups or individuals who were intimidated
or marginalized to speak their own voice. She antagonized racism
in the US, war in Vietnam and colonialism in Africa, which urged
people to speak truth to power. Further, in the 1980s and 1990s,
46
themes of discrimination, equality as well as social and economic
inequality were still the focal point of her writings. Jordan
addresses issues such as religious intolerance, global poverty,
minority rights and America’s foreign policy in countries such as
Nicaragua and the Persian Gulf. She also discusses the ArabAmerican response to the situation in Palestine.
Furthermore, Jordan’s collection of essays Technical
Difficulties (1993) discusses the causes of the silenced and the
marginalized. In these essays, Jordan uses her voice as an
individual voice among many other voices that are fighting to
gain power in the public forum. In this regard, Jordan’s political
writings are deemed “honest attempts to grab and redirect power”
and her political essays in Technical Difficulties are
“iconoclastic” as she links domestic to international political
issues (MacPhail 67).
2.1 Building Black Identity and Cultural Nationalism
Jordan perceives that the past is essential to both the present
and the future because having a better future depends upon healing
the wounds and correcting the wrong doings of the past and the
present. In her poem “Calling on All Silent Minorities,” Jordan
adopts some of Baraka’s rhetorical strategies and responds to his
poem “SOS” to awake and build the black community:
HEY
C'MON
COME OUT
WHEREVER YOU ARE
WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN' EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET (Directed by Desire 1-9)
47
Here Jordan attempts to imitate Baraka in creating a
community that only exists as a future projection and to give
voice to a silent audience by the act of naming it. The audience
Jordan addresses is highlighted by the pronoun “We” that
involves the speaker who is black and thus one may think that
she addresses a black audience. However, the title clearly
illustrates that Jordan is neither interested in colour or in race nor
in the exclusion of any minority and that she urges all minorities
to speak out and indulge in the serious game of making their
voices heard to build the community. This is foregrounded in her
choice of the preposition “OUT,” not “in” to grab the attention of
her listeners to themselves as one coherent entity. Thus, like
Baraka, she is committed to the idea of building a community by
instilling its virtues in its audience.
Many incidents have contributed to Jordan’s realization of
her minority status. “Who Look at Me” (1969) gives a series of
visual images of African Americans in one long poem where
Jordan says:
Who would paint a people
black or white?
*
For my own I have held
where nothing showed me how
where finally I left alone
to trace another destination
*
A white stare splits the air
by blindness on the subway
in department stores
The Elevator
(that unswerving ride
where man ignores the brother
48
by his side) …
*
Is that how we look to you
a partial nothing clearly real? (Directed by Desire 1-20)
The poem depicts the Harlem riots that were provoked by a
white policeman’s shooting of a fifteen-year-old black male. This
was an area where gunfire could be heard everywhere even
among the masses of black people who gathered to eulogize the
dead boy. Young people were ready to confront police officers
and were determined not to keep silent of the violence committed
against them by their own protectors. Events culminated in
several rounds of gunfire, throwing grenade, verbal and physical
abuse, and various causalities among innocent people. These
riots urged Jordan to march in demonstrations and write poems
seeking the rights of innocent civilians.
The poem seeks to reflect the interdependencies between
social integration and visual and literary representation. This is
manifested in the opening question: “Who would paint a people
black or white?” The poem also tackles the modernist crisis in
representation by depicting the “white stare” violence that “splits
the air” with its blindness. In the poem, Jordan foregrounds the
difference between the creation of image and ordinary
representations. For instance, in the excerpt quoted above, Jordan
refers to Charles Alston’s painting Manchild, which draws the
image of a black figure, adopting the cubist style in painting.
Such style of paintings highlights ambiguity in its
representation/mimeticism of reality, which is clearly reflected in
Jordan’s rhetorical question “is that how we look to you / a
partial nothing clearly real.” Another painting, which Jordan
refers to in the same poem, is The Slave Market (1866), which
she depicts twice. She refers to the painting as a whole before she
starts to foreground the intricate patterns of a poor child, who is
pulled by the hair from his own mother by a man who looks like
49
a slave trader. The lexical she employs as in “(slavery:) the
insolence” (148) suggests rage and contempt.
In an essay in The Progressive, Jordan combines the issues of
race, gender, and class to discuss the case of Mike Tyson, the
American professional boxer. On Tyson’s experience, Jordan
writes “Requiem for the Champ” (1992) where she links Tyson to
her Brooklyn neighborhood that is barren and devoid of trees and
claims that the violent lifestyle and the economic and spiritual
poverty of the society surrounding him led him to the violent act
of raping a woman. She explains that the issue of Tyson emanates
from a larger social “atrocity” (Finn 124). Jordan believes that the
Brooklyn community, the US economic system and herself are
responsible for what Tyson committed. She elaborates that her
culture must recognize the black man for other things than
committed violence. She thus highlights, “I am Black. And Mike
Tyson is Black. And neither one of us was ever supposed to win at
anything more than a fight between the two of us” (Some of Us
86):
Do I believe he is guilty of rape?
Yes I do.
And what would I propose as appropriate punishment?
Whatever will force him to fear the justice of exact retribution, …
And do I therefore rejoice in the jury’s
finding?
I do not
Well, would I like to see Mike Tyson a
free man again?
He never was free! (85-86)
Thus, it is clear that Jordan blames the community as well as
the economic structure for Tyson’s violent attitude as a black man.
She seeks the advancement, pride and empowerment of the black
community.
50
2.2 Patriarchal Behaviour and Disempowerment of Black
Women
In 1978, Jordan wrote, “As a black woman, as a black
feminist I exist, simultaneously as a part of the powerless and as
a part of the majority peoples of the world” (Ransby, “June
Jordan…”). As a feminist, she is considered a courageous,
rebellious and compassionate poet, who cares for all humanity.
On Aug. 9, 1987, Jordan read the poem “Poem for South-African
Women” at the United Nations to commemorate the 40,000
women and children, who gathered, 22 years earlier, in the heart
of South Africa apartheid capital to defy the “brutal and
dehumanizing institution that divided their country” (Walrond
30). The poem praises their courage and sacrifice and indicates
the African-American struggle for justice, equality and liberation
at a time of political unrest. Jordan does not want to wait for a
messiah-like figure to pave the way towards salvation, but rather
perceives the change to be within the people’s potential to
impose social and political transformation. She says:
And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the one we have been waiting for
(Directed by Desire 29-35).
Jordan here refers to the South African women living under
the apartheid, oppressive regime and fully believing that they are
the ones who can free themselves rather than wait for their own
demise. Those women and children, enduring painful experiences
and living under restrictions of all kinds, understand that only the
oppressed can free themselves and that they must take part in
forging a new road towards their freedom and not to wait for
outsiders to help in their liberation.
51
Throughout her life, Jordan was keen on making the black
community appreciate the black experience and the black culture,
particularly that of black women, which is manifested in her
collection, Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980 (1980). “Poem About
My Rights” delineates her rage and disappointment at both racial
and sexual discrimination. It opens with feelings of anger arising
from her perceived “status as a woman alone in the evening”:
Even tonight and I need to take a walk and clear
my head about this poem about why I can’t
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening/
alone on the streets/alone not being the point
(Directed by Desire 1-6)
In this poem, Jordan does not care about being single.
Rather she cares about the fact that many women and particular
groups of people or countries have become known as the “Other”
in the narratives of national identity. This is deemed a setback for
the narrative of survival for people of colour, sense of belonging,
and the myth of the American dream. She adds:
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
myself
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind (77-82)
Jordan’s frustration becomes apparent as she establishes
connections between personal aspects of human life and political
struggles that humans should defy. She then acknowledges her
ability to defend herself if necessary:
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life (109-114)
52
Jordan finally resists labels of “wrong” and substitutes
political action with her own naming and freedom of choice.
Similar to her politically charged poems, in “Poem About
My Rights” Jordan entices readers to ponder on the intensity of
her argument and to fight against the restrictions patriarchy
imposes on the female body. She wants action to be taken
otherwise all theorizing about the injustices practiced against
disenfranchised people is of no avail. The poem reflects the
inability of women “to think in solitude, to be mesmerized by the
silence of the night, and to embrace her skin, her identifying
qualities, the way she desires to” (Kinloch 69) since she cannot
do what she pleases to do with her body without facing the threat
of physical rape and systemic violence.
In this context, “Poem About My Rights” discusses the
violence that hinders peoples’ and countries’ democratic
existence and impedes strengthening mutual choices and
relationships between them. The poem derives its power from the
sociopolitical connections Jordan establishes among
womanhood, sexism, rape, politics, history, geography,
economics, and identity to criticize abuses of power. On a larger
scale, Jordan criticizes the inability of the black male leadership
to stand up to its rhetoric and its disempowering of women. She
believes that black women are disempowered by race.
Jordan believes that war is not merely a conflict between
nations. The way she comprehends warfare reflects women’s
concept of war as represented by the feminist critic Jean Bethke
Elshtain (1941-2013) who claims that women are enthusiastically
patriotic and possess a kind of necessary maturity, which is vital
to successful combat (xi-xii). Jordan explains in “Rape Is Not a
Poem” and “Case in Point” that involvement of US troops in the
Gulf War is not because of the newspaper stories of Iraqi
soldiers’ rape of Kuwaiti women since she believes that foreign
53
policy can never depend on moral principles and that the
American life has become warfare against women who have
become fearful of physical abuse and rape. In these two poems,
Jordan shows the connection between war and rape.
In her essay, “Notes Toward a Model of Resistance,” Jordan
emphasizes the notion of resistance and fighting against any form
of domination such as sexual assault and acts of violence that
stalk women on a daily basis. She writes about herself being
raped twice (Some of Us 50-51). She reveals this fact in a 1994
interview with journalist Jill Nelson when she says:
I have been raped myself, twice. I happen to think rape as one of
the most heinous things that can happen to anyone. But there’s a
victimization of people that is systematic….the media do not
want to deal with that, they want to ignore the causative context
that determines our lives, sometimes for great unhappiness and
tragedy. (50)
This reflects her commitment towards universal justice as
one of the issues she believes Media evade, such as racism,
patriarchy, diversity, and sexism: “I had been unable to find
within myself the righteous certainty that resistance requires, the
righteous certainty that would explode my paralysis and bring me
to an ‘over my dead body’ determination to stop his violence stop
his violation of everything that I am” (Some of Us 51). Jordan’s
“righteous certainty” or “righteous rage” is different from the
“masculinist and exclusivist edges of black-nationalist poetics”
(172) that deny the female and non-black contributions to the
struggle for justice and attribute them to the black male power.
She advocates a “nationalist will-to-power” and sympathizes
with the voiceless and the powerless in a style that is deemed an
“exhortation to the voiceless and a cry of outrage against those
who silence voices with their force” (172), particularly women’s
voice.
54
In “Rape Is Not a Poem,” Jordan talks about being raped for
a first time in 1986 by a white man who, she says, “overpowered
the supposed protection of my privacy, he had violated the
boundaries of my single self. He had acted as though nothing
mattered so much as his certainly brute impulse” (Technical
Difficulties 14). Jordan opens the poem with reference to a
beautiful garden that had been full of life, colours and sweet
sensations before it was destroyed:
One day she saw them coming into the garden
where the flowers live …
they stamped upon and tore apart
the garden
just because (they said)
those flowers?
They were asking for it (Directed by Desire 1-12)
She refers to “they” to indicate those who destroyed the
garden and its flowers as if they have deprived it of its virginal
charm. Jordan calls this violation “rape” and she obviously refers
to being raped herself:
I let him into the house to say hello …
“Well, I guess I’ll be heading out, again,”
he said.
“Okay,” I answered and, “Take care,” I said.
“I’m gonna do just that,” he said.
“No!” I said: “No! Please don’t. Please” (13-25)
The rapist left his victim defenseless and full of hatred
towards men. It is this time when Jordan realized that there is no
human autonomy and that one’s safety can be jeopardized at any
time. However, Jordan uses language to regain her right and
power and instead of using the passive voice “I was raped,” she
uses the active voice “He raped me” (Some of Us 50) in an
attempt to emphasize that language is the right tool to tell the truth
about people who are abused and silenced by political regimes.
55
The poem goes on to describe the gender-based persecution
and the society that gives men the upper hand and degrades
women:
And considering your contempt
And considering my hatred consequent to that
And considering the history
that leads us to this dismal place where (your arm
raised
and my eyes
lowered)
there is nothing left but the drippings
of power (33-41)
In the last two lines of the poem, it becomes clear that
Jordan antagonizes the society that looks upon rape as something
natural or justifiably normal: “Is this what you call / Only
natural” (44-45) and that she hates that the female body is chosen
for violent domination.
In “Case in Point,” Jordan gives a powerful critique of
masculine uses of power in the black community. The poem
begins with “a friend of mine” who tells the speaker that “there is
no silence peculiar / to the female” (Directed by Desire 1, 5-6).
The speaker turns to narrate her second rape in 1996 by a
“blackman actually / head of the local NAACP” (13-14). The
NAACP is the “National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.” It is ironical that this local national leader, who
is supposed to protect the rights of coloured people, is the one who
violates them. Jordan’s anger is intensified by this act of human
degradation, complete violence and violation of a female privacy.
Today is 2 weeks after the fact
of that man straddling
his knees either side of my chest
his hairy arm and powerful left hand
forcing my arms and my hands over my head
flat to the pillow while he rammed
what he described as his quote big dick
unquote into my mouth
56
and shouted out: “D’ya want to swallow
my big dick; well do ya?”
He was being rhetorical
My silence was peculiar
to the female. (15-27)
In this poem, the man’s question is “rhetorical” as he
assumes that he already knows the answer since he is powerful
enough to form an answer without getting his addressee’s
consent. This is similar to “From the Talking Back of Miss
Valentine Jones: Poem # One” (1976) where powerful male
speakers assume that they know what black women would say
and hence there becomes no need for any kind of dialogue, be it
political, social, or even personal. Jordan, instead of remaining a
victim after the two raping incidents, finds a resort in writing and
turning a personal issue into a public one. She compares between
rape and state violence, and consequently, “posits a relationship
of violence between the powerful – the state – and the powerless
– women, children, and people of colour” (Kinloch 138).
In the long dramatic monologue “Miss Valentine Jones,”
Jordan protests against the assumption that black women have no
voice and are completely ignored by black men, even the Black
Arts Movement poets. Jordan highlights the liberations needed
for the blacks in this poem. The title plays a major role in
dedicating the rhetorical context of this poem, which is a part of a
longer poem and is the first in a series of similar monologues.
The title indicates the speaker, Valentine, informing the reader
that it is an individual voice that speaks out for many other
voices. Jordan makes Valentine criticize the naming strategies of
“bodacious Blackm[e]n”:
and the very next bodacious Blackman
call me queen
because my life ain’ shit
because (in any case) he ain’ been here to share it
with me
(dish for dish and do for do and
57
dream for dream)
I’m gone scream him out my house
because what I wanted was
to braid my hair/bathe and bedeck my
self so fully because
what I wanted was
your love
not pity (Directed by Desire 71-85)
According to critic Scott MacPhail, “The male ‘you’ of the
poem presumes that no ‘real Miss Black America’ has stood up,
and that his words are the ones that will help her stand up” (65).
Valentine names all the domestic routines that the bodacious
black man neither sees nor valorizes in response to the male
emptying up then filling in the notion of black womanhood. He
knows nothing about the real duties carried out by other black
women and consequently, they are not real. In addition to this
lack of love from the “bodacious Blackman” for the working
black woman, Jordan’s poem points to the larger, more systemic
failure by leaders of the Black movements to deconstruct images
of blackness portrayed in popular white culture. For Jordan, a
true black aesthetic could never really be actualized since some
of the 1960s and 1970s political leaders did not fully take into
consideration the voices and rights of black women and children.
In another poem, “Getting Down to Get Over: Dedicated to
my mother” (1972), Jordan pinpoints the difficulties of
feminizing the speaking voice. She seeks to voice and foster the
various meanings attributed to black femininity: “momma Black
/ Momma / / Black Woman / Black / Female Head of Household
/ Black Matriarchal Matriarchy / Black Statistical / Lowlife
Lowlevel Lowdown” (Directed by Desire 36-43). The poem
focuses on the unstable signifying ground of black femininity and
makes it clear in its linguistic assumptions. Having a list of single
words makes the structures of linguistic meaning and their
imagined voicing clear: “buck / jive / cold / strut / bop / split /
tight / loose / close / hot / / hot / hot (139-150).
58
The listing of verbs in this part clearly reflects a sexualized,
racialized, and gendered movement. The contrast between
synonyms such as (“jive,” “strut,” and “bop”) and contrasts
(“tight” and “loose,” “hot and “cold”) adds to the poem’s
intensity. In addition to showing the tensions between speech and
writing as well as gender and race, the poem shows those
tensions between selection/metaphor and
combination/metonymy. Similar to Who Look at Me, the poem
shows that the existing models of oral, literary, and visual
representation are limited and seeks to expand its scope via other
alternatives. Hence, Jordan attempts to have more expansive
alternatives as opposed to politicized mimeticism.
Thus, it becomes obvious that through her poems about
black female rights, Jordan offers a model of resistance and
survival from all the incidents that bring fear and powerlessness
into a female life. She does not want “brute domination”
(Kinloch and Grebowicz 59) to become the norm according to
which females live and understand American citizenship. She
wants females to fight back.
2.3 Repercussions of Imperial Racism
Jordan sympathizes with all the marginalized in the world
and this is exemplified in supporting the Iraqis and the
Palestinians in the early 1980s and condemning the Israeli
invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In addition, towards the end of the
Persian Gulf War, she wrote her long poem, “The Bombing of
Baghdad,” where she strikes a comparison between bombing in
that war and the US persecution of American Indians or Native
Americans’ genocide. Jordan writes her war resistance poetry as
a community-building action, which foregrounds differences.
Her poems are thus motivated by specific events, and are
performed for and directed towards a particular audience.
59
In “The Bombing of Baghdad,” Jordan antagonizes war
makers and imperial racism that give justifications for the Gulf
War. It is based on the chant form that has become significant in
the late twentieth century poetry as well as African-American
cultural forms. This chant form helps Jordan clearly depict the
relentless bombing campaign that lasted for 42 days and the
human crisis resulting from the destruction. The poem alternates
as “elegy, protest, and alternative wire service” (Metres 174) and
moves the reader directly from the title of the poem to the heart
of battle:
began and did not terminate for 42 days
and 42 nights relentless minute after minute
more than 110,000 times
we bombed Iraq we bombed Baghdad
we bombed Basra/we bombed military
installations we bombed the National Museum
we bombed schools we bombed air raid
shelters we bombed water we bombed
electricity we bombed hospitals we
bombed streets we bombed highways
we bombed everything that moved/we
bombed Baghdad
a city of 5.5 million human beings (Directed by Desire 1-14)
Jordan’s delineation of the bombed targets and the suffering
civilians who endured the repercussions of war becomes like a
news story that is obviously ugly, truthful and uncensored. Her
word selection serves a dual purpose by referring to her national
community as well as the war devastated communities, which
share the same destruction and the same destiny either by having
the same passports, enduring the same taxes, or even watching
the CNN. Jordan’s usage of the pronoun “we” denies that there is
any difference between the protesters and the patriots and
provokes both of them to rebel. In terms of its communitybuilding function, “the poem acts as an admonishment to the
community – whether imagined nationally or ideologically”
(Metres 175).
60
The poem represents two other narratives along with the
bombing narrative: a personal lyric relating physical love and a
historical narrative narrating the death of Crazy Horse, the 19th c.
Native American war leader, and Custer’s benefits. The personal
lyric describes the priority and persistence of physical love: “The
bombing of Baghdad / did not obliterate the distance or the time /
between my body and the breath / of my beloved” (36-39) and the
fact that the American citizens were not exposed to physical war.
On the other hand, the historical narrative, pervading sections III
to VI, illustrates the connection between the “guts and gore of
manifest white destiny” (61) of Custer and US expansion and
Iraq’s bombing and expounds obvious, even treacherous,
opposition. Jordan compares Crazy Horse’s singing to “the
moaning of the Arab World” (43) and declares defiantly that “I am
cheering for the arrows / and the braves” (68-69) whose weapons
are obsolete and who are doomed. The poem explains the
genocidal inequality between the US and its enemies, whether
they are Native Americans or Iraqis, that manifests itself after ruin
and destruction have become a status quo.
In her poetry collection Living Room: New Poems 1980-
1984 (1985), Jordan conceives her inevitable role as a poet in a
time where media dominates. It includes politically motivated
poems that indicate her memorializing impulses. Jordan’s Living
Room poems give a vivid image of the victimization of the
Palestinians and the Lebanese during the Israeli invasion of
Beirut in 1982. This is because, Jordan, as an Afro-American
woman who witnessed the subordination of American blacks and
as a geographically and culturally distant observer of the
extermination of innocent civilians by American-made weapons,
could shape readers’ right perception of the genocide. Through
the poems on Sabra and Shatila, Jordan aspires to destabilize the
oppressive regimes and through her verbal images, she wishes to
“inform the totality of living” (Ali 592). The images of the two
61
camps of Sabra and Shatila represent Lebanon before and after
their invasion in 1982. Before 1982, they were “the zone of
hardihood, a sort of liminal space of hopeful waiting and
readiness to return to the homeland,” but after their devastation,
they became “the zone of the trace of last movements, a sort of
eschatological and conclusive space” (611).
Anxiety pervades in the tone of “The Cedar Trees of
Lebanon” (“CTL”), “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”
(“AAPL”), and “Moving towards Home” (“MTH”) as a result of
sympathizing with the catastrophic event of Sabra and Shatila
genocide that daily newspapers headlines shock readers with.
Jordan does not want the subjects of her poems to be long
forgotten, which is exactly the case with the media that begin by
describing the genocide in Sabra and Shatila as “abominable,”
before undermining its horrific outcome (Ali 591). Her poems, in
their representation of the genocide of Sabra and Shatila, would
rather eternalize the massacre’s horrible consequences on the
victimized Palestinians.
Jordan’s Sabra and Shatila poems are concerned spatially
with the spaces that have become congested with corpses, debris,
and shattered objects. They structurally represent the heinous
details of torture and destruction or what she calls the
“phosphorus events” (“CTL”17-18). In “AAPL,” Jordan refers to
the victims of US policy. Her language is the language of peace,
as manifested in the offering of the hand, and the language of
“negotiation.”
Poet-activists Sara Miles and Kathy Engel organized an
event in 1982 named after Jordan’s poem “MTH” benefiting
UNICEF’s humanitarian efforts in Lebanon and supporting the
worldwide efforts of mobilization. The event brought together
several Arab, American and Israeli poets who talked about the
harsh conditions and the suffering of the people in Lebanon as
62
well as the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila. In this
event, Jordan read “MTH” where she announced:
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. (Directed by Desire 72-78)
Jordan insists on the safe return “home” of displaced people
without grief or wailing and talks about the value of human lives.
She believes that the only way they can return home or
symbolically return to the promise of freedom, liberty and love is
by talking about home in public. By talking about home, Jordan
emphasizes the sense of belonging to a world of justice and
imagines a “Beloved Community” where people can enjoy
safety, comfort and free will and where violence no longer exists.
“MTH” illustrates three psychic states: in the first 52 lines,
the persona offers an all-encompassing visual net including
various acts of atrocities. In this state, the overwhelmed poetic
mind strives to assimilate the shock and indignation to bear such
barbarities. Jordan says:
…the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
…the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor (Directed by
Desire 4-6, 21-22).
In the second state (53-71), Jordan emphasizes the “need to
speak about living room” (54). In the last state (72-78), Jordan
represents the reconceived self that sensed the suffering endured
by the Sabra and Shatila victims.
Jordan’s deep sadness towards the massacre of Sabra and
Shatila is powerfully reflected in the syntactic parallelism she
63
employs in “MTH.” This is clearly seen in the phrase “nor do I
wish to speak,” which comes before every example of a brutal
act to indicate genocidal barbarism. In the second state, she uses
the phrase “I need to speak,” merely to portray simple aspects of
a moral world as in “the land is not bullied and beaten into / a
tombstone” and “children will grow without horror” (55-56, 60).
Consequently, the persona’s feelings reach the climax as the
reader approaches the finale of the poem: the wish of an ardent
moral soul to “make our [all of suffering humanity] way home”
(78). By this, Jordan attempts to represent the actual truth
through the speaker’s righteous anger towards the Israeli
practices and brutalities that are unopposed by its allies.
In “MTH,” the poetic voice speaks in the plural to
illuminate the scope of “proliferation of absences” (Ali 614)
unlike the paradigmatic female victim who speaks in the
singular: “who will bring me my loved one?” When the poetic
persona thoughtfully looks at the spacious, peaceful living room,
she assumes, “where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
/ for my loved ones,” and “where the men / of my family
between ages of six and sixty-five / are not / marched into a
roundup that leads to the grave”; and at the poem’s closure, she
asks “and where are my loved ones?” (66-67, 61-64, 77).
However, human absences are just one aspect of the oppressive
series of absences the paradigmatic victim encounters such as her
home or her living room, her homeland, and her political entity.
In “MTH,” the name “Abu Fadi” assumes semantic
significance since “Abu” means “father,” indicating a unique
Arabic naming system known as “Kunyah,” then the name of his
firstborn boy is added so that it can be used instead of his actual
name. Jordan may have used the etymology of the name to relate
it to moral desire. Fadi is a name that can be both a Muslim and a
Christian name, meaning a “redeemer,” one of Christ’s attributes.
Hence, the name Fadi also signifies a revered symbol to all
64
humanity, namely Christ. This can be understood by the lines:
“those [the people who refuse to be purified] are the ones from
whom we must redeem / the words of our beginning” (51-52).
These lines are a biblical allusion to the opening of the Gospel of
John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God” (1:1). The “Word,” referring to
Christ, indicates that the moral world and its truths have been
communicated to mankind.
Jordan’s combination of “photography, sound/radio,
journalistic text, and dissonant discourse in a dynamic interplay”
confers upon her poems a “filmlike audiovisual capacity” that
serves as a perfect representation of the complex socio-political
reality of her time (Ali 615). For instance, in “MTH,” Jordan’s
images are successively ordered in a “chain of [steadfast] kinetic
sequential climatic scenes” that resembles the making of a film
of violence (615). This is clearly reflected in the following lines:
the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyes
of his wife (10-14)
The same sequence of images is also reflected in the lines:
“the pounding on the / doors and / the breaking of windows and
the hauling of families into / the world of the dead” (27-30) and
“the bulldozer and the / red dirt / not quite covering all the arms
and legs” (31-33). Thus, it becomes clear that Jordan takes the
kinetics of images technique from films so as to give the reader a
spectatorial experience.
Thus, it becomes clearer that through her war-resistance
poetry, Jordan seeks to build the “Beloved Community” where
there are no differences between the people of the world. She
antagonizes war makers and imperial racism that justify the
brutal acts and atrocities endured by innocent civilians
everywhere. Jordan unifies all humanity in one public identity
65
that suffers the repercussions of war, genocide, etc. and provokes
the oppressed to rebel.
2.4 Political Rights and Fake Democratic Existence
Jordan strongly believes that poetry plays a significant role in
building the self, the community and a democratic state where
there is mutual trust between citizens of the same country. The US
politics has shaped Jordan’s idea of leadership as she is totally
convinced that the failed attempts of mobilization in underserved
communities are directly linked to the American Republicans’ and
Conservatives’ political agenda, particularly under the leadership
of President Ronald Reagan. Jordan is shocked at Reagan’s
controversial stance with regard to the people victimized by either
greed, oppression, or imperialism in light of the legacy he creates
for himself – that is called, the “Reagan Revolution.” Jordan wants
the leader to stop imposing new taxes for the sake of people’s
prosperity and she is amazed at leaders, pretending to call for a
world where there is no war, violence, or brutality, while they are
stockpiling nuclear weapons.
In her poem, “Easter Comes to the East Coast: 1981,”
Jordan addresses President Reagan and speaks about a world
where diversity and egalitarianism are present:
Don’ you worry about a thing
Mr. President and you too
Mr. Secretary of the State: Relax!
We not studying you guys:
NO NO NO NO NO!
This ain’ real
Ain’ nobody standing around
We not side by side
This ain’ no major league rally
We not holding hands again
We not some thousand varieties of one fist!
This ain’ no coalition
This ain’ no spirit no muscle no body to stop the bullets
We not serious (Directed by Desire 1-14)
66
The message Jordan delivers to the President and his cabinet
members reflects her stance towards the civil movements during
the 1980s as well as the labour movements that give advantage to
certain groups over others. Jordan negates aspects of history, as
she believes that nobody is watching, paying attention, or joining
hands, when, actually, people are watching and organizing, since
there is need to worry about the long-term implications of US
politics. The poem goes on:
NO NO NO NO NO!
And I ain’ never heard about El Salvador;
I ain’ never seen the children sliced
and slaughtered at the Sumpul Riverside
And I ain’ never heard about Atlanta;
I ain’ never seen the children strangled in the woods …
NO NO NO NO NO!
This is just a fantasy.
We just kidding around
You watch! (15-31)
Jordan wishes for a new world of diversity and
egalitarianism. She believes that the Americans are behind the
increased violence, not only on the national level, but also on the
world level, thanks to Reagan’s regime that insists on using
nuclear power and producing more fatal bombs.
Reagan assumed power in 1980 and remained in office till
1988. He was opposing the Soviet Union over issues of
communism. The Soviet Union was supporting Cuba in the
1980s, while the US government refused to support the Cuban
liberation. Further, the threat of nuclear war was still in the air
and Jordan was well aware of it. Jordan writes in her poem “A
Reagan Era Poem in Memory of Scarlet O’Hara, who said, in
Gone With the Wind, something like this:”
“As God is my witness, so help me God:
I’m going to live through this
And when it’s over
If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill,
I’ll never go hungry again.”
67
The poem says:
“Amen!” (Directed by Desire 1-7)
In another poem, “Where Are We and Whose Country Is
This, Anyway?” (1986), Jordan exclaims that America needs a
new president and opposition. She wants the new president to care
for Nicaragua’s Sandinistas (members of National Liberation
Front), all African peoples, and the American citizens. Therefore,
she wishes for a new political agenda for the democratic country
that does not accept ethnic cleansing or genocide. The same notion
is further highlighted in “INTIFADA INCANTATION: POEM #8
FOR b.b.L” (1997), where she writes:
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
GENOCIDE TO STOP
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE
ACTION AND REACTION
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC
OUT THE WINDOWS
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY
NOBODY COLD (Directed by Desire 1-9)
In this chant-like poem, Jordan engages in an uprising or
“Intifada,” a word that was coined after the Palestinian uprising
against the Israeli military rule in 1987. What Jordan antagonizes
is not only military oppression, but also all inhumane conditions
including “genocide,” “thirst,” and “cold” that jeopardize people’s
life worldwide. She calls for “action,” “reaction,” “music,” and
“love” instead. She wants to demolish all the boundaries that
foster human inequality, suffering, fear, and oppression. This
strengthens the idea of a “Beloved Community” where there are
no borders and where human rights prevail. She adds:
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED
JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED
BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR
…
I WANTED
68
NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR
KNEES! (10-20)
The poem reflects a “politics of rejection,” where all
attempts against the practices of oppression by the state are
overlooked (Kinloch 90). Throughout her life, Jordan aspires for
freedom and liberation. She does not wish to remain “inside the
big and messy and combustible haystack of these United States,
and the forecast is not good” (Technical Difficulties 93).
In another poem, “To Free Nelson Mandela,” from Naming
Our Destiny (1989), Jordan declares:
Have they killed the twelve-year-old-girl?
Have they hung the poet?
Have they shot down the students?
Have they splashed the clinic the house
and the faces of the children
with blood? (Directed by Desire 7-12)
This poem builds on the theme of being “wrong,” since the
poet employs repetition to attack dominant beliefs about the
undesirability and unworthiness of “the twelve year-old,” “the
poet,” “the students,” and “the children.” This notion goes in line
with the apartheid, Mandela’s imprisonment and the longawaited freedom, his strong wife and the community that refused
to succumb to the brutalities and atrocities of the ruling
government: “Every night Winnie Mandela / Every night the
waters of the world / turn to the softly burning / light of the
moon” (13-16). The poem continues to show that injustices can
lead to communities that reject silence and dehumanization.
Jordan concludes by having “the carpenters,” “the midwives,”
“the miners,” “street sweepers, “the diggers of the ditch,” (36-40)
and other community members memorialize the murder of South
African activists in the township of Lingelihle. Kinloch believes
that documenting this act of remembrance “speaks volumes to
Jordan’s attack on institutional silence through a politics of
inclusion that values and validates the multiple experiences of
people” (71).
69
Jordan becomes totally immersed in the experience of
disenfranchised people. The murders carried out by the police in
South Africa and the resultant violence around the world. For
instance, the murder of Victoria Mxenge in “To Free Nelson
Mandela” and the violence in “Namibia,” “Angola,” or
“Zimbabwe” in “Poem About My Rights” were events that
Jordan was desperately keen on writing about and share with
others to provoke political activism and encourage people to take
action. Both “To Free Nelson Mandela” and “Poem About My
Rights” reveal that people’s lives depend on the actions taken by
responsible, dedicated leaders. Both poems “combine lyricism
with narrative and free verse in a journalistic story form”
(Kinloch 71) and they capture the intensity of lives destroyed by
racism, violence, and classism. They reflect Jordan’s racial
solidarity and keenness on protecting human life.
Consequently, it becomes evident that Jordan calls for
freedom and liberation and that her poetry plays a major role in
building the self, the community and the democratic state where
human rights prevail. She severely antagonizes political leaders
who victimize people by greed, oppression or imperialism and
only care about compiling lethal weapons. Jordan dreams of
demolishing all the boundaries that foster human inequality,
suffering, oppression and fear.
3. Conclusion
In conclusion, Jordan approaches the African-American
causes in a way that best serves the African-American community
that is diverse, yet can be united in opposing the inequalities of
power resulting from race politics. She does not limit herself to the
model of a spokesperson and makes the Black Arts utopian vision
more attainable and pragmatic. Jordan obviously opposes racism,
sexism and oppression, as she fosters the notion that individual
creativity and honest discourse can lead to political change and
70
social renewal. Her poems remarkably manifest the AfricanAmerican experience and advocate self-determination and
political activism for the betterment of the community and the
oppressed all over the world. She is sincerely dedicated to human
rights on a global scale and political manifesto.
Jordan, in this respect, “employ[s] democratic and
uncensored language in order to convey,…, truths about race,
gender, sexuality, violence, war, and human rights” (Kinloch 1).
She describes the difficulty of living in America as a raced and
gendered person facing injustices and depicts the atrocities
inflicted upon people in different countries. Thus, she dedicates
her life to fight for freedom and justice for all humanity. Her
writings are “politically savvy and unconventional in its brutal
honesty” (2) since she deems it inevitable to fight for both
equality and freedom.
Jordan’s political and activist efforts show the brilliance of
such an American writer, not only as a black woman, but also as
a poet who cares for the humanitarian rights of peoples
throughout the world and who clearly has a defined purpose. She
utilizes both the written and spoken word to encourage return to
the basic elements of human rights including, “civil liberties, fair
treatment, education and literacy, and access to the political
process” and she endeavours to demolish political systems that
“challenge democratic order and perpetuate global injustice”
(Kinloch 92). In this context, Jordan proves to be a serious artist
and a revolutionary activist whose embracing of human rights are
truly reflected in her poetry and dedication to political and
activist work. Her poetry projects her total awareness of identity
politics where her personal involvement with the world
experiences found a real platform through the poems she writes
on the misery of the disenfranchised worldwide.
71
Jordan’s figurative images, powerful words, and democratic
language, which speak for many marginalized voices, convey
hope of liberation. Her language enables her to know her selfidentity as a revolutionary artist. She made political statements in
all the countries she travelled to; in all the rallies and
demonstrations she took part in; and in all the efforts to put an
end to the underrepresentation of black women, the unjust
treatment of black people, and the atrocities inflicted upon the
Lebanese and the Palestinians; and politicians’ imperialistic
agendas. Indeed, as a revolutionary writer, Jordan does not
tolerate violence and inequality and protests against the systems
she opposes on both the political and the personal levels.
72
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