June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

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  mass-media manipulation” before explicitly referring to the scholarly overem-phasis on literature by selected black male authors. She continues:

  [Richard Wright] has been presented as a solitary figure on the literary landscape of his period. But, right along with him, and six years his senior, there was Zora Neale Hurston. And the fact is that we almost lost Zora to the choose-between games played by Black Art . . . So we would do well to carefully reconsider these two, Hurston and Wright.22

  Jordan’s critical approach to black literary figures such as Hurston defined her classroom teaching style post-1974. She eagerly included the writings of understudied authors in her curriculum, debated with students the necessity of civil rights and fair representation, and challenged students to consider the multiple perspectives, or “realms of responsibility,”23 of historical oppression including enslavement, genocide, rape, and police brutality. Moreover, Jordan’s commitment to the students at Yale extended outside of the classroom: with students and participating faculty members, she co-founded and directed “The Yale Attica Defense Group” (1975), lectured at various student-sponsored events, and rallied against unjust conditions of people afflicted by war, abuse, and other acts of violence. She was, by any definition, an extraordinary teacher, activist, and humanitarian. Before joining the faculty as a visiting lecturer at Yale, Jordan’s visionary model of communal interaction had already begun. In this model, people supported and critiqued one another’s ideas and worked to create equitable living and learning conditions; her work as cofounder and director of the Afro-Americans Against the Famine in Africa (1973) serves as an example of this. Arriving at Yale, she had already established a “track record.”

  As discussed earlier, in the late 1960s at City College in New York City, Jordan rallied with students to support open admissions. She, along with other instructors, was responsible for the academic preparation of black and Puerto Rican students who may otherwise have been admitted to college on the sole basis of standardized tests scores.24 Next, at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut, Jordan directed the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK), a program that continues to provide assistance to students who need financial, academic, and counseling support. She also taught English and worked with the Upward Bound Program before leaving to teach literature and writing at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, New York in the early 1970s.

  Her teaching appointments, many of which appear to overlap in dates, are important because they inform her approach to rethinking the responsibilities of the poet as a revolutionary artist whose political involvements are overtly connected to larger educational and personal concerns.

  For instance, Jordan’s reading of “Getting Down to Get Over: Dedicated to My Mother” to a room of well over 500 black women at the National Gathering of Black Women Conference at Radcliffe College in 1973 was monumental in its politicization of the personal. In this case, the personal was the glamorization

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  of female identity. The poem, opening with a series of historical references to motherhood, such as “Momma,” “sista,” “mistress,” “woman,” “granny,”

  “nanny,” and “mammy,” chronicles the many travails, degradations, and demands placed upon the black woman who, at once, can have her hand on her hip

  sweat restin from

  the corn/bean/greens’ field25

  At the same time, according to Jordan’s poem, a black woman is often required to mediate the demands of the domestic sphere (the family and the household) and the outer world (the “bossman”):

  she fix the cufflinks

  on his Sunday shirt

  and fry some chicken

  bake some cake

  and tell the family

  “Never mind about the bossman”26

  Such mediation has political implications for how women are viewed in constructed narratives of national identity, citizenship, and belonging. Jordan’s reading of the poem signified that her voice would not be silenced in debates on the rights of women; it also intensified her commitment to fostering connections between the personal and political lives of historically underappreci-ated people, including her West Indian mother. Additionally, this commitment surfaced in Jordan’s desire to visit Cuba. In 1976, she applied to the Center for Cuban Studies located at 220 East 23rd Street in New York City, and by the early 1980s, the poet began recognizing, in her essays and teaching experiences, the efforts of “women” and “raced” revolutionaries in Cuba and Angola. As Jordan considered the value of international peace struggles and mended the divide between the political and personal aspects of her work, she came to view teaching as an outlet that would allow her to debate such significant issues to a large population of young students.

  From 1978 to 1982, Jordan taught at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook as an associate professor of English. She also worked with students outside of the classroom by initiating an antiapartheid group and spearheading teach-ins on South Africa before and after being promoted to full professor in 1982. While still on faculty at Stony Brook, in 1983 Jordan was a Visiting Mentor Poet for the Loft Mentor Series in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then from 1986 to 1989 she was the director of Stony Brook’s Poetry Center and Creative Writing Program. Her tenure there was met with several national awards. In 1979, while Jordan was a Yaddo Fellow27, she wrote The Issue, a full-length, two-act play “about freedom, police violence, and Black

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  life.”28 It was performed in the 1980s and directed by close friend and playwright Ntozake Shange. Shortly thereafter, in 1982, Jordan received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and a few years later, in 1985, the poet was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, an Award in Contemporary Arts from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and, in 1987, she became a MacDowell Colony Fellow.29

  Between 1980 and 2002, Jordan was a visiting poet, artist-in-residence, and playwright at several institutions and organizations, including Macalester College (1980), the New Dramatists in New York City (1987–1988), the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association (1988), Swarthmore College (2001), University of Pennsylvania (2001), and New York University (2002). In 1976, she was one of two Reid Lecturers at Barnard College in New York City,30 and in 1986, she served as the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. During the summer of 1988, Jordan was a visiting professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 1978, she became a member of the Board of Directors for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, a New York-based organization that the poet had worked with in the late 1960s. Then in 1986, Jordan became a member of the Board of Governors for the New York State Foundation for the Arts.

  The poet returned to teach at the University of California at Berkeley from 1989 to 2001. During this time, she served as a Professor of Afro-American Studies and Women’s Studies, and she founded and directed the Poetry for the People Collective, an educational program with a large student and faculty following. As I will discuss in a later chapter, the Poetry for the People Collective continues to enable emerging poets to lead workshop on their writings, participate in political readings and academic events, and work with other students, some prison inmates, and service organizations in and around the San Francisco Bay area.

  In June 2002, the world lost June Jordan when she succumbed to breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California. Whole communities of writers and activists mourned her death. In the same year, Jordan’s book Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan, was released after much antic-ipation. Bookstores across America were receiving phone call
s from eager supporters of Jordan’s work. After e-mail reminders for the publication of Some of Us Did Not Die were sent out, university students in Texas, New York, and California bought, read, and discussed the book. They read the published reviews and concluded that Jordan, once again, had restored the public’s faith in the good fight for justice in a world of homelessness, injustice, and war.

  She encouraged readers to believe in their own strength and in the strength of the collective forces working for human justice throughout the world. In this book, Jordan adamantly insists that the protesting, picketing, and fighting for equality and against violence are never over. The poet died writing and

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  fighting energetically, and campaigning for universal peace, as witnessed in the opening passages of Some of Us Did Not Die. The poet begins: ONCE THROUGH the fires of September 11, it’s not easy to remember or 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.31

  This passage summarizes Jordan’s political stance and activist efforts during the last thirty-five years of her life. She participated in a perpetual search for

  “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.

  But before her teaching appointments, numerous publications, and awards, Jordan experienced personal conflict, especially in her divorce from Michael Meyer in 1965 and her mother’s death the following year. Following these events, the poet embarked on trips to Mississippi and forged a professional and personal relationship with Mrs. Hamer. By 1974, she had buried her father, Granville, in Jamaica to the dismay of family members who still insist that he wanted to be buried next to his wife in a New Jersey cemetery.32

  Jordan’s commitment to freedom may well have come from her acceptance of what she once referred to as “the responsibility that love implies,”33

  and from her desire to make a fair playing field for people like her mother and father, both intelligent workers who idolized American democracy without receiving its full benefits. Or maybe Jordan’s devotion came from her experience as a single mother solely responsible for her growing son. Either way, her involvement in these activities proved transformational for both herself and those around her.

  In working to unite communities, Jordan learned that it was important to identify both allies and enemies in the rally for freedom and peace. In a published interview with writer Karla Hammond (1981), Jordan discusses her involvement within overlapping communities of struggle by addressing this responsibility:

  It is impossible to be inside the struggle that concerns and governs all of our lives—whether we recognize that to be true or not—unless you recognize that you have an adversary and you undertake, in the most direct and effective way

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  possible, to address that adversary—either to conquer him or her through persuasion or to eliminate that adversary.34

  Here, Jordan refers to the overt violence of domination and the passive violence of subservient living conditions for all women and children, and especially for women and children of color. Contextually, such violence threatens the lives of people through channels of war, genocide, poverty, and inequitable educational opportunities and living spaces. Jordan wrote of such conditions in her many published collections of poetry and essays, including Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, Some Changes, New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry, Passion: New Poems, and Living Room.

  Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (1970), dedicated to Jordan’s parents, is a collection of poems by young and established black writers, ranging from unknown poets like Vanessa Howard and Phillip Solomon to established writers like Jean Toomer, Gwendolyn Brooks, and LeRoi Jones (hereafter referred to as Amiri Baraka) among others. In this text, Jordan honors the literary voices of young black children alongside widely published professional adults.

  These voices of sophistication and talent demand fair representation in the national discourse of identity and rights; they refuse to be censored by the dominant political system and an indifferent mass media. Addressing this indifference, according to spoken-word poet and political activist Staceyann Chin, represents “courage and commitment to difficult truths.”35 In the “Foreword”

  to the revised edition of Soulscript (2004), Chin relates the importance of the collection to the courage of the Soulscript poets and to the powerful employment of words to document the “human struggle” for freedom. She states,

  “Soulscript is a toast to all the poems, novels, and essays that have stirred us toward action. It is a challenge to those of us left holding the torch of change, an invocation to disarm our own narrow agendas.” In closing, Chin asserts, “it is a mandate for all those living to put pen to paper and march the masses toward a more meaningful collage of life.”36 This collage, as echoed by Chin and lived by Jordan, must, by definition, include the voices of black writers.

  It is no surprise then, that beginning in the late 1960s Jordan became aware of the lack of attention given to black writers and their words. In the opening pages of the 1970 edition of Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, the poet writes of the importance of this anthology:

  The poetry of Afro-America appears as it was written: in tears, in rage, in hope, in sonnet, in blank/free verse, in overwhelming rhetorical scream. These poems redeem a hostile vocabulary; they witness, they create communion, and they contribute beauty to the long evening of their origins.37

  Soulscript also contributed to the already existing base of a developing community of black poets, and according to Jordan, “Coast to coast, on subways, in bedrooms, in kitchens, in weekend workshops, at parties—almost anywhere except the classroom, as a matter of fact—Afro-Americans are writing poetry.

  It’s happening now, and it’s wonderful, fine, and limitless, like love.”38 Black

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  people had been writing poetry for decades upon decades only to have their writing dismissed as uncritical, underdeveloped, and overly hostile in the eyes of many publishers and editors. In the face of this literary disenfranchisement, bookstores, homes, and community centers became communal sites of articulation where the words, thoughts, artistic creativities, experiences, and voices of black writers and thinkers flourished: “the cultivation of own voice became a workaday occupation, an unrelenting protest, and an ultimate social triumph.”39

  In the monumental publication of Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, Jordan demonstrated the power of community building, activism, and an articulate black voice. She sparked fire and excitement by challenging the silencing of black writers, activists, intellectuals, and children. Still fighting for children, she also challenged racist classroom conditions in which children of color were sometimes viewed with hostility and even contempt. Jordan underscored the urgency of representing black writers to students: “And when American classrooms switch from confrontation to communion, black poetry will happen in the schools as well.”40 The confrontation alluded to is one in which black writers, along with other raced writers, are marginalized in, or absent from, the literature curriculum
of public schools. Jordan continued to urge students, teachers, administrators, and parents to examine the complexities of this marginalization. For Jordan, the banning of her young-adult novel His Own Where, as well as the absence of progressive works by other raced writers, speaks to “the struggle to determine and then preserve a particular, human voice [which] is closely related to the historic struggling of black life in America.”41

  This “historic” struggle comes through vividly in the poems included in Soulscript. For example, in the poem “Reflections,” a young Vanessa Howard writes,

  If the world looked in a looking glass,

  It’d see back hate, it’d see back war and it’d see

  back sorrow,

  it’d see back fear.

  If the world looked in a looking glass, it’d run

  away with shame, and hide.42

  Connecting this poem with Michael Goode’s “April 4, 1968” and Linda Curry’s

  “death prosecuting” demonstrates the struggle to make sense of young and beautiful black lives prematurely and indelibly marked by racist contempt and hatred. Goode’s poem is a perfect example of this. Before referencing the life and assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., Goode writes,

  “war war/why do god’s children fight among each other/like animals.”43 Almost as if in response, Curry writes, “death prosecuting life born/freedom slave today tomorrow/yesterday day before/O what a life i have lived.”44 These poems by articulate young writers address issues of contemporary violence and

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  hatred just as much as they speak to historical struggles; they are both profound and timeless.

  What is even more powerful is that Jordan was aware of these youthful voices, embraced them, and included them among the voices of writers such as Langston Hughes, “The night is beautiful,/So the faces of my people;”45 Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We wear the mask that grins and lies,/It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes;”46 and Claude McKay, “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,/Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”47