June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

  Jordan continues:

  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

  my self80

  She ends by resisting labels of “wrong,” and substitutes political action of her own naming and freedom of choice:

  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 life81

  In this poem, as in her other politically charged poetry and essays, Jordan challenges the reading and listening audience to contemplate the intensity of her argument and to contest the restrictions imposed on the female body by patriarchy. For Jordan, theorizing about the many injustices faced by groups of disenfranchised people was pointless if action did not follow.

  In relation to “Rape is Not a Poem,” Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights”

  focuses, in large degree, on the inability of any woman 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 because “I can’t do what I want/to do

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  with my own body,”82 without the impending danger of physical rape and systemic violence. This way, “Poem About My Rights” is also about the violence that prevents peoples and countries from existing democratically and that prevents choices and mutual relationships from being fostered across lines of difference,

  “which is exactly like South Africa/penetrating into Namibia penetrating into/Angola.”83

  According to E. Ethelbert Miller, Jordan’s poem denounces a public attitude toward women “not having the freedom of movement” in its articulation of a politics of inclusion that values the civil liberties of women.84 It is this framework of inclusion that creates the poem’s intimate quality. Its strength derives from how Jordan establishes sociopolitical connections among womanhood, sexism, rape, politics, geography, history, economics, and identity so as to critique abuses of power. Additionally, Jordan successfully makes the point that many countries and peoples, especially women and children of color, are prevented from experiencing life in a democratic world because they are considered “wrong” by operating power structures that are inscribed with patriarchal behaviors. “Poem About My Rights” deconstructs physical and geographical boundaries that threaten the existence of humanity by participating in a larger narrative of resistance, which includes critiques on gender identity, female safety, and political rights. In this way, the poem is reiterative of messages presented in Jordan’s “Rape is Not a Poem” and “To Free Nelson Mandela.”

  In the latter poem, published in Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems, Jordan declares the following:

  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?

  Every night Winnie Mandela85

  “To Free Nelson Mandela,” a poem that reads like a powerful ritualistic chant and that builds on Jordan’s theme of being “wrong” as presented in “Poem About My Rights,” uses repetition to assault dominant beliefs that “the twelve-year-old,” “the poet,” “the students,” and “the children” are undesirable and thus, not valuable. This message parallels the poem’s focus on apartheid, Mandela’s long imprisonment and subsequent freedom, and the strength of his wife and the community not to succumb to the atrocities and victimizations of a political system: “Every night Winnie Mandela/Every night the waters of the world/turn to the softly burning/light of the moon.”86 Jordan’s poem goes a step further to detail how injustices can result in the organization of communities that resist silence and dehumanizing acts. The poem concludes with a

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  memorialization by “the carpenters,” “the midwives,” “the miners,” “the dig-gers of the ditch,” and other community members87 for the murders of several South African activists in the township of Lingelihle. 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.

  The poet immersed herself in the experiences of people considered disenfranchised. The police murders in South Africa and the ensuing violence around the world—whether the murder of Victoria Mxenge (in “To Free Nelson Mandela”) or the violence in “Namibia,” “Angola,” or “Zimbabwe”

  (in “Poem About My Rights”)—were events that Jordan felt the need to write about, publicize, and share with others so as to provoke political activism, moving her anger into action.

  Furthermore, Jordan’s writings represent a desperation to know what is happening, to be in the world, and never to be late because other lives depend on the responsible presence of dedicated leaders. Clearly, this is but one of many messages in “Poem About My Rights” and “To Free Nelson Mandela,”

  poems that combine lyricism with narrative and free verse in a journalistic story form. These writings capture the intensity of lives destroyed by systematic racism, classism, and violence. They also capture the complicated nature of Jordan’s life in America: daughter of West Indian parents, mother of Christopher David Meyer, ex-wife of Michael Meyer, protégé of Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and lover of words, people, and activism. Such intricate detail was captured in “POEM: On the Black Family” and her series of “Roman Poems”

  published in New Days: Poems of Exile and Return; and in “Richard Wright Was Wrong,” “Brooklyn,” and “Poem for Nicaragua” collected in Living Room: New Poems. In “Poem for Nicaragua,” Jordan writes:

  So little I could hold the edges

  Of your earth inside my arms

  Your coffee skin the cotton stuff

  The rain makes small

  Your boundaries of sea and ocean slow

  or slow escape possession88

  In “If You Saw A Negro Lady,” published in Things That I Do in the Dark and in Naming Our Destiny, Jordan begins:

  If you saw a Negro lady

  sitting on a Tuesday

  near the whirl-sludge doors of

  Horn & Hardart on the main drag

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  of downtown Brooklyn . . .

  she would not understand

  with spine as straight and solid

  as her years of bending over floors

  allowed . . .

  would you turn her treat

  into surprise

  observing

  happy birthday89

  Although the two poems are for different occasions, they tell important stories: the first reflects on the poet’s experiences in Nicaragua, which she visited in 1983, and the latter observes a woman who, while not interacting with the narrator, informs spectators of life stories through her appearance. The poems also epitomize Jordan’s political engagements and commitments during the 1980s, a time that redefined how Jordan’s “commitment,” according to poet Marilyn Hacker, “is as seamlessly joined to her work as it is to her life.” Hacker continues by discussing the political poetry of Jordan by writing,

  [It] is, at its best, the opposite of polemic. It is not written with a preconceived, predigested agenda of ideas and images . . . the process of composition is, or reproduces, the process of discovering how events are connected, how oppressions are analogous, how lives interpenetrate.90

  Hacker’s sentiments show themselves in Jordan�
�s “Poem for Nicaragua,” “If You Saw a Negro Lady,” “Poem for Nelson Mandela,” and “Poem About My Rights,” all of which are political, personal, and controversial. The poems have as much to do with Jordan’s racial solidarity as with her lifelong concern for the universal protection of human life.

  Jordan wrote on controversial topics to increase attention on issues of the heart and the soul, and on freedom and civil rights. She was an outspoken political voice who used words to rally people into action. In her collections of poetry, in her published commentaries in The Progressive, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 6, and in her lyrical essays, Jordan’s words scream off of the page with a silent, palpable anger. This anger can be felt as one reads her poems, “Calling on All Silent Minorities,” “One Minus One Minus One,” or

  “War and Memory.” It is June Jordan’s anger over the absence of rights for disenfranchised people that motivated her to script such powerful poems, and it is this anger that allows others to continue in the Whitmanesque tradition of poetically documenting and organizing for change. This latter message comes through quite clearly in Jordan’s poem “Calling on All Silent Minorities:”

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  HEY

  C’MON

  COME OUT

  WHEREVER YOU ARE

  WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING

  AT THIS TREE

  AIN’ EVEN BEEN

  PLANTED

  YET91

  In response to Jordan’s plea for “silent minorities” to meet at an unplanted tree, I often wonder if “we” will ever gather together to make use of the poet’s message: to 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. As I read “Calling on All Silent Minorities,” I repeatedly hear, in the not so far distance, poet Amiri Baraka’s voice delivering his telegraphic message to black people—those who are conscious activists invested in the struggle for liberation—in the poem “SOS”:

  Calling black people

  Calling all black people, man woman child

  Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in

  Black people, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling You, calling all black people

  Calling all black people, come in, black people, come

  on in.92

  I also hear the magnificent, urgent, and demanding music of poet, Gil Scott-Heron, in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” particularly when he announces,

  You will not be able to stay home, brother.

  You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.

  You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,

  Skip out for beer during commercials,

  Because the revolution will not be televised.93

  The aforementioned poems, indicative of the importance of civil rights movements, are startling in their political directives for people to gather, take action, and insist on change. Jordan’s words, in particular, are even more necessary

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  today than they were in the 1960s, especially as debates continue to occur over language rights and censorship, education and access, corporate America and bankruptcy, foreign policy and war. Her perpetual search for community, fights for freedom, writings, teachings, and belief that “hatred kills people,”94 as addressed in more detail in the next chapter, serve as reminders that the right to live, love, and contribute to the welfare of society is contingent upon how people organize for change. “I’m not crazy,” wrote Jordan in Affirmative Acts: Political Essays. “I am seeking an attitude.”95

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  F O U R

  Moving Towards Home:

  Political Essays

  Prior to the 1980s, June Jordan was actively influenced by, and involved in, movements for and over rights: the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and movements against war. These are but a few of the many political causes that, in some way, influenced her art and politics. Even with her connection to these movements, Jordan never considered herself controversial, but rather an activist unwilling to contain her frustration and anger. Jordan’s unwillingness to suppress the feelings that made her a participant is a result of her honest confrontation with the past. She learned to recognize the struggles of her past: the challenges her immigrant parents faced in America; the violence perpetuated by her father; the difficulty of a 1950s interracial marriage; the physical abuse incurred by Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer during a freedom ride/voter registration campaign; and discriminatory practices encountered by countless men, women, and children of color everywhere. Her involvement was always grounded in her politics as much as in her art, for Jordan always believed that the two—politics and art—were inseparable and from this belief, revolutionary work resulted.

  Clearly, Jordan’s writing embodies the principles and ideals of the influen-tial Black Arts Movement, which is highly indicative of the connection between art and politics.1 Poet-critics Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Harold Cruse, Nikki Giovanni, Ron Karenga, Askia Muhammad, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez,

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  and notable others spearheaded a grassroots-turned-national collective of black artists who supported black cultural traditions and artistic innovations in the black community. These artists sought to affirm the black aesthetic: 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. To establish and affirm this aesthetic, groups of black people—musicians, dancers, poets, writers, filmmakers, dramatists, educators, working-class laborers—denounced what they saw as oppressive conditions in America: from U.S. imperialism, police violence, and black rejection from mainstream white publishing markets to apartheid. They marched in the streets, protested at rallies, publicly decried Eurocentric values, and, most importantly, created venues for the dissemination of scholarship on and by black people. Journals and magazines such as Soulbook, the Liberator, Black America, Black Dialogue, Journal of Black Poetry, and Black Theater flooded the streets and circuits of political action and social reform. Black visionary artists who sought an understanding of black people, cultures, politics, and communities supported the work of this cultural movement. Their work helped to establish a black aesthetic grounded in art and politics, words and actions—the fabrics of their poetry, the poetry of their lives.

  According to writer Addison Gayle, Jr. in the “Introduction” to writer-editor Woodie King, Jr.’s book The Forerunners: Black Poets in America (1975), the artists of the Black Arts Movement worked to create “a true racial poetry” that has at its center “the creation of a new people and a new nation and the destruction of images and symbols that enslave.” Gayle goes on to declare that the poets of the Black Arts Movement produced “a poetry that demands a revolution of the mind and spirit, that calls, with Baraka, for the greatest of man’s creations: ‘We want a Black poem. And a Black world/Let the World be a Black Poem.’”2 Gayle acknowledges an important idea in relation to the work of the Black Arts Movement: that the black aesthetic imagined by Baraka, Muhammad, and Neal, for example, is one that has as its basis the creation of

  “a true racial poetry” unencumbered by the vices and values of mainstream poetry and established by the artistic work and political principles of an older generation of black poets—from Wheatley, Hughes, and McKay to Hurston and Wright. For Gayle, “The perceptions of the younger poets, therefore, were sharpened by the works of their predecessors.” Gayle continues: These are t
he poets who came to prominence, mainly, after the Renaissance years, who bridged the gap between poets of the twenties and those of the sixties and seventies. They began the intensive questioning of the impossible dream, the final assault upon illusion that produced the confrontation with reality, the search for paradigms, images, metaphors, and symbols from the varied experiences of a people whose history stretches back beyond the Nile. With a few exceptions, they are the literary godparents of today’s black poets.3

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  Remembrance and acknowledgment of the work of previous generations of poets and writers played a central role during the Black Arts Movement. For example, writers Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, and others sought to “bridge the gap” between previous black writers and contemporary writers by investigating long-standing issues of classism, racism, and sexism in both the literary and critical mainstream and civil rights efforts in America. Their work contributes to how black artists and activists learn “to step outside the parochialism of the American society” at the same time that they discover “that to be a good poet as well as a relevant poet entails as great a concern for race as it does for the mastery of craft.”4

  As the cultural component of the Civil Rights Movement and the successor of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the Black Arts Movement stimulated black-owned businesses, including theater troupes, magazines, journals, bookstores, and publishing companies, as well as historically black colleges, universities, and communities of people who would later proclaim, “I’m black and I’m proud.” Likewise, Baraka’s founding of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BART/S) in March 1965 serves as a significant contribution to educational and artistic initiatives for black people.

  Such efforts support Baraka’s call for a poem and a world that is black, and for a black aesthetic that is a poem and a world (see Addison’s “Introduction”).

  Additionally, the creation of viable black businesses and educational programs during this time encouraged writers such as John Blassingame, Alex Haley, Ernest Gaines, June Jordan, Gerda Lerner, and Toni Morrison to produce literature that acknowledges the multiplicity of black identities and the richness of cultural practices that are connected to the history of slavery, segregation, and protests in this country. Blassingame’s anthology Slave Testimony (1977), Lerner’s edited volume Black Women in White America (1973), and Morrison’s editorial commitment to The Black Book (1974) represent increased attention to the significance of history, identity, art, and politics in black communities before, during, and after the Black Arts Movement.