June Jordan_Her Life and Letters Read online

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  that the murdering/masterminds threw up to stop/the comings of/Black Love.”1 Jordan asserts this message in her “Poem: On the Black Family”: we came

  we came and we come in a glory of darkness

  around the true reasons for sharing

  our dark and our beautiful

  name

  that we give to our dark and our beautiful

  daughters and sons

  who must make the same struggle

  to love

  and must win2

  June Jordan used every available resource to fight for the rights of her constituency, from writing political essays and poems to teaching at public institutions, always insisting on the legitimacy of black “love” and cultural forms.

  Jordan was full of rage at the conditions that threatened the lives of people of color relegated to substandard living conditions; she channeled her anger, her rage, into meaningful political writing, speeches, and teachings. Jordan never stopped interrogating the harsh life lessons afforded to her by her father, the death of her mother, or the lessons in activism learned from Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer. Jordan was determined to learn from her past, familial and historical, as she, along with other activists, forged into political action communities joined by a common good: justice. This ideal of the common good surfaced in many of Jordan’s writings and activities during the late 1960s and the mid-1970s.

  For example, some of Jordan’s political writings were published in Chrysalis, a quarterly publication that began its operations in February 1977

  and was wholly devoted to feminist perspectives about the experiences of women.3 The magazine was successfully controversial in its publication of writings on female erotica, sexual identities and experiences, and on the politics of the feminist movement in America. June Jordan, along with various other writers and poets such as Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Marge Piercy, Jodi Braxton, Sara Miles, and Honor Moore, viewed the magazine as an outlet for the dissemination of information about the contemporary feminist cultural critique and identity politics. Lorde, who was poetry editor of the quarterly and who did not feel she owed anything to Jordan, did support Jordan’s literary pursuits. In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, biographer Alexis DeVeaux writes that Lorde “admired her as a poet, having met Jordan when the two were teaching in the SEEK program at City College during the sixties.”4 Although Lorde and Jordan were never intimate friends, they were former university colleagues and important literary figures who valued writing as a powerful medium for explorations into feminist thought and

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  political discourse. Writing for Chrysalis was one way for Jordan to publicly engage issues of justice, freedom, national representation, and women’s rights during the 1970s.

  In her drive to complicate the homogeneity, or one-sidedness, of American political values along lines of national representation and belonging, Jordan joined groups that rallied for change through action. From her “Freedom Rides”

  to Mississippi in the 1960s, her Chrysalis writings and crowded classrooms in the 1970s, to the packed cafés and community spaces that sponsored her poetry readings in the 1980s—including the Donnell Library and the Studio Museum of Harlem—Jordan displayed political commitment and an activist spirit.

  The poet protested and picketed at every possible opportunity, and she also stood with her students at rallies. Jordan spoke against scientist William Shockley’s research that supported the notion of black inferiority and urged minority women’s sterilization.5 She challenged former senator Daniel Moynihan’s report that alleged an increase in black out-of-wedlock births and suggested a connection between unemployment rates and the absence of black husbands and fathers. She crafted a poem “Memo to Daniel Pretty Moynihan,”

  in response to Moynihan’s claim. In the poetic memo, Jordan writes: You done what you done

  I do what I can

  Don’t you liberate me

  from my female black pathology

  I been working off my knees

  I been drinking what I please6

  To close, Jordan offers Moynihan some advice: “Clean your own house, baby-face.”7 Instead of accepting the findings of Moynihan as evidence of the inferior status of black people, which Jordan vehemently refuted, she makes an authoritative assertion: “I got a [sic] idea something’s wrong/with you.”8

  “Memo to Daniel Pretty Moynihan” is another example of how Jordan’s writings continually resist injustice even when she stood alone.

  Jordan’s political resistances and outspoken poetic voice are directly connected to her teaching, writing, and activism of the 1970s and 1980s. In her essay “Thinking About My Poetry, 1977,” Jordan writes about her decision, near the end of the 1960s, to work “for the achievement of a collective voice . . . to speak as a community to a community, that to do otherwise was not easily defensible, nor useful, and would be, in any case, at variance with clarified political values I held as my own.”9 Jordan wanted to speak to and for black communities, a desire that stemmed from her active involvement in the revitalization of black communities in both New York and Mississippi. Her political beliefs reinforced her desire to be part of a serious collective, or a politically conscious community; nevertheless, she soon realized how limiting her

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  beliefs were for what she sought to accomplish as an activist, an artist, and a black woman living in America. Entering the 1970s, she reexamined her beliefs and concluded that she was, in fact, just an “ordinary” person whose desires “toward a collective voice” were “conceitful.” Jordan writes: I came to know the idea of myself as ordinary. As I came to know other poets as friends . . . it did seem to me that we were all of us working on the same poem of a life of perpetual, difficult birth and that, therefore, I should trust myself in this way: that if I could truthfully attend to my own perpetual birth . . . that then I could hope to count upon myself to be serving a positive and collective function, without pretending to be more than the one Black woman poet I am, as a matter of fact.10

  While this particular passage demonstrates Jordan’s poetic and individual growths, it also shows her personal struggles with the politics of community and with the idea of being “ordinary,” which she was not. Throughout the poet’s life, she affiliated herself with multiple communities, whether civil rights activists, academic groups, poetry collectives, or a cadre of personal friends and activists including, among others, Malcolm X, Terri Bush, Angela Davis, Alexis De Veaux, James Farmer, Laura Flanders, Sara Miles, E. Ethelbert Miller, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, Ntozake Shange, Adrienne Torf, and Alice Walker. Jordan embraced ideas of radicalism not readily accepted by U.S.

  conservatives. She envisioned, and sought to create, a United States governed by diversity, multiculturalism, multilingualism, justice, and sexual freedom; her desire to help create communities that work for justice parallels her discovery of herself as an “ordinary” person, poet, and teacher. In this way, Jordan can be considered a daughter of Walt Whitman, the father of American poetry and one of her literary models. Whitman’s experiences as a Civil War nurse compelled him to poetically document what he viewed as the spirit of America: the strength of the common man against the backdrop of war, suffering, death, and the making of a new, and hopefully different, self and country.

  In “Song of Myself,” Whitman confronts themes that Jordan addresses over a century later in her collection of poetry Moving Towards Home. Whitman considers an understanding of self as a spiritual entity existing as a signifier of both the individual and the universe. In other words, as Whitman debated ways to nurture the individual (mind and art), he considered the relationship of self to others, mainly comm
unity. Jordan contemplates this point in her aforementioned essay, “Thinking About My Poetry, 1977.” Whitman, in “Song of Myself,” declares:

  Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

  You shall possess the good of the earth and sun....

  there are millions of suns left,

  You shall no longer take things at second or third hand....

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  nor look through the eyes of the dead....nor feed

  on the specters in books,

  You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

  You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.11

  In these lines, Whitman’s voice, full of wisdom, song, and figurative speech, adopts “oracular qualities”12 supported by the repetition of “You shall” and the invitation for readers to “listen to all sides.” Jordan, like many other poets, emulated and utilized many of Whitman’s literary techniques, as is evident in her “Poem About My Rights,” “Something Like a Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley,” and in her essay “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us.” These writings and Jordan’s claim of her ordinariness expose a Whitmanesque wisdom, a “Song,” that seeks to distinguish the individual from the world and that then attempts to nourish the connection and responsibility the individual has to the world—to the universe, to nature, to ideas, and to communities. Jordan was never ordinary, a point that becomes obvious as one investigates how she located lessons learned from Whitman inside her own writing and teaching so as to “serve a positive and collective function.”13

  This point can be further debated by examining aspects of Jordan’s professional life. Just before joining the faculty at City College, Jordan worked as a research associate and writer for the Technical Housing Department of Mobilization for Youth in New York City (1965–1966). Attorney and judge, Dorothy Kenyon (1888–1972), founded Mobilization for Youth, a social program that provided legal services and counseling assistance for young and poor people, and advocated for civil rights legislation, women’s rights, and other forms of social and political reform. Kenyon also fought for equitable housing laws, minimum wage legislation, and the establishment of public relief funds for those in need. As a research associate and writer for Kenyon’s Mobilization for Youth organization, Jordan came into contact with many people whom she later described as serious allies, or “multitudes working together, around the world, if radical and positive change can be forced upon the heinous status quo I despise in all its overwhelming power.”14 Working for many progressive causes, people came together to organize for the issues to which they were committed.

  During this time, Jordan’s affiliations with Mobilization for Youth and with other allies led her into the company of professor and civil rights activist, Frances Fox Piven, who was also a research associate for the organization.

  With similar political missions, it was natural that Frances Fox Piven and June Jordan became good friends. Piven was interested in rehabilitating urban communities, often called “ghettos,” and in rallying political action by working-class people within U.S. cities as a way of fighting for housing rights, homelessness, starvation, reform, and community development. Jordan was more interested in examining the effectiveness of integration; she wrote that

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  Piven, “a white intellectual, [needed to] to mind her own damn business” insofar as urban restoration was concerned.15 In the final essay collected in Civil Wars: Observations From the Front Lines of America, Jordan writes of what she considered to be essential in the rehabilitation, or revitalization, of black communities: “And I was advocating a push for integration because I thought that, otherwise, you might achieve better housing for Black families but you would still lack supporting community services such as reliable garbage collection, police protection, and ambulance response.”16 While Jordan and Piven’s differences over community restoration issues and politics did not initially end their growing friendship, it did cause Jordan to become silent on issues of personal importance, from religion to sexuality. Eventually, their disagreements on interpretations of gay rights and civil rights strengthened.

  For example, when Piven and Jordan discussed “the impending referendum in California” that would support the firing of “a teacher who expressed the opinion that sexual preference was not the business of the state,” Piven argued that it was about gay rights while Jordan counterargued that it was about civil rights.17 They also disagreed over issues of sexuality: Jordan informs Civil Wars readers that Piven considered the poet’s “loving a woman” as “deviant behavior” that was a distraction from the more important work of “radical humanitarian concern.”18 Their differences did not stop there; other debatable topics included Hasidim, Zionism, Palestine, human rights, and violence.

  Piven and Jordan’s conflicting positions led to the end, however temporarily, of their friendship.

  At the insistence of her son, Christopher David Meyer, who was a student and a literacy tutor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts19 at the time, Jordan read with excitement the 1978 publication of Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward. The book examines four prominent protest movements in the history of the 20th century: the mobilization of unemployed people during the Great Depression; the workers’ movement and industrial strikes of the Great Depression; the movement for Civil Rights; and the movement for Welfare Rights. At the center of the book is the question of representation and benefits: how have poor people been affected and influenced by their participation in the politics of the American system? Impressed by Piven and Cloward’s groundbreaking research and argument, Jordan decided to call Piven, her old adversary. This served as the beginning of a new relationship, one marked by the development of strategies to eliminate unfair living conditions and to unite the people in a shared struggle for change.

  Shortly after her newfound friendship with Piven and her involvement with the Technical Housing Department of Mobilization for Youth in the mid-to-late-1960s, Jordan entered the 1970s and 1980s influencing communities of learners as an instructor of English Literature and Composition at several educational institutions, including City College, City University of New York (CUNY), Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence, and Yale. As she worked with college-aged

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  students, she realized that there were many more allies than enemies campaigning for universal justice, love, literacy initiatives, democracy, and quality health care. Upon discovering allies, Jordan also discovered something about the politics of academic institutions.

  As a visiting lecturer in the Departments of English and Afro-American Studies at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (1974–1975), she noticed the obvious disparities between female and male professors of the same rank. Male professors were paid substantially higher than female professors and there was a particular unvoiced, but noticeable code of appearance for female professors that reinforced gender differences and power dynamics. This experience helped to revive Jordan’s consciousness of inequality and of the need to question systematic structures that support the relegation of women to levels allegedly unfit for men.

  Teaching at Yale also encouraged Jordan to reflect on her life, work, and time with Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer in the Mississippi Delta and on her burgeoning commitment to Black Nationalism. Jordan considered the value of her presence during the 1970s Open Admissions Policy at City College and on her status as a divorced black mother raising a biracial, bicultural son in New York City. What was happening? What was going on with the necessary work of the Civil Rights Movement and of the Women’s
Rights Movement insofar as advancement, particularly at the institutional level, was concerned? For Jordan, what was going on did not adequately address the gender differences and power dynamics at institutions like Yale, which was an unsettling point for her.

  Even so, Jordan was not content without critiquing the disparities between, for example, female and male professors, and black and white students. She turned her classrooms into spaces where critical analysis informed critical thinking, reading, and writing skills just as much as they informed elements of American literature and history, theories of race, and questions of social responsibility. According to Jordan, this time was both special and significant because at Yale, she “encountered every traditional orthodoxy imaginable” and was thrilled that “the hallowed halls [would] echo to the fact of a woman, a Black woman, passing through!”20

  In her writing immediately prior to her Yale experience, Jordan tells readers that her friend and the well-known author, Alice Walker, introduced her to folklorist and novelist, Zora Neale Hurston, and to Hurston’s text Their Eyes Were Watching God.21 Jordan became fascinated with Hurston’s writing style, voice, and plot development; she eventually decided, as other scholars at Yale had already done, to include the text in her university courses. Jordan contributes to the longstanding argument for the study of black authors such as Hurston by insisting against the manipulative ways black male and female authors are pitted against one another, and by focusing on the dangers of ignoring the literary contributions of black women writers. On the value of black literature, Jordan writes that “we have lost many jewels to the glare of white,