June Jordan_Her Life and Letters
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While she wrote political essays for the magazine, Jordan continued to produce essays against war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Fully aligning herself with the struggles of the Palestinian people in the 1980s with the reading of her poem “Moving Towards Home” (eventually translated into Arabic) only heightened her commitment to historically underrepresented people throughout the world. Jordan strongly supported the fights against rape; breast cancer; South African apartheid; the Gulf War; the Bombing of Baghdad; U.S. policies supporting the Taliban; the violence perpetuated against the Sandinistas of Nicaragua and against gays and lesbians; and every other conceivable hatred and real oppression in the world. The poet was elated by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton; however, her elation quickly disappeared with Clinton’s silence at the realities of rape: “And here are more than 20,000 mostly Muslim women systematically suffering gang rape around the clock in the former Yugoslavia.
And here is nobody powerful in this country, from President Clinton up or down, opening his—or her—mouth.”64 Jordan was also angry with American leadership for ignoring the evil of ethnic cleansing throughout the world: “And I do not and I will not forgive the elected leadership of my country for its iner-tia and its silence and, therefore, its complicity with the evil of so-called ethnic cleansing.”65 After the Rodney King trial, Jordan expressed dismay over the freeing of the police officers accused of beating King almost to unconsciousness (see Jordan’s essay “The Truth of Rodney King”).
On the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, Jordan expressed her anger over how the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee interrogated Hill, practically
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accusing her of lying about sexual harassment charges against Thomas (see Jordan’s essay “Can I Get a Witness?”). She expressed more anger about these hearings because of “those brothers who disappeared when a black woman rose up to tell the truth.”66 After the September 11th attacks in 2001, Jordan indicated the need for Americans, in collaboration with the rest of the world, to put forth efforts of equality, justice, and democracy in fighting against hatred.67 On every political topic deemed important, she wrote as if she would never write again. She poured her anger, love, and fear into her well-researched essays, poems, and speeches. The poet employed an available language of democracy to reach and to move the masses into action. Language, for Jordan, always has been the common currency of communication and activism.
Jordan was determined to be honest with her language and tell the truth, even when it hurt. In 1986, she wrote about when she was raped, the first time by a white man who had “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.”68 During that period of her life, Jordan was working on her art and living single-handedly in a “rented, pseudo-Walden Pond” home on Long Island.69 After being raped, she realized that there is no true human autonomy, and that one’s safety, happiness, and democratic right to exist can be jeopardized at any time. Instead of adopting a passive voice that claims rape (“I was raped”), Jordan quickly learned the value of using an active voice (“He raped me”), in order to reclaim power. She writes,
“For rape to occur, somebody real has to rape somebody else, equally real.
Rape presupposes a rapist and his victim. The victim must learn to make language tell her own truth: He raped me.”70 She reiterates her belief that honest language must tell the stories of the people—those who continue to be disenfranchised, abused, silenced, and raped by political systems.
In 1996, ten years after the first rape, Jordan writes about a second rape, this time by a black man who, allegedly, was a local political leader. While Jordan does not identify the person by name, she does write that “he was, in fact, head of the local NAACP./And I’d met him at a bar when a community/(I thought) of my friends from a writers’/colony went out.”71 Given Jordan’s burgeoning commitment to freedom of expression, civil liberties, and the liberation of people, particularly in black communities, it is ironic that a black political leader raped her. His act of human degradation intensified Jordan’s anger toward systems of violence and the catalysts behind such acts, particularly as these things transgress racial boundaries and loyalties. Jordan continues the poem by writing the following:
He had introduced himself to us and to me . . .
he’d invited all of us to his house . . .
when I arrived, I discovered
my community had disappeared . . .
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I said good night and started toward
the door,
and that’s when this friendly, head of the
local NAACP Black man
raped me.72
Jordan draws parallels between the first and the second rape in order to com-paratively describe them as “violent domination,” violations of “boundaries,”
and sodomizing acts—physical acts that Jordan does not admit to ever having prosecuted.73 Instead of remaining a victim, she turned to language and the act of writing to establish larger parallels between rape and state violence. To do this, the poet posits a relationship of violence between the powerful—the state—and the powerless—women, children, and people of color.74
In “Notes Toward a Model of Resistance,” she observes that “According to the New York Times of November 17, 1996 . . . Marine Corps drill instructors still led training runs with chants like: ‘One, two, three, four. Every day we pray for war. Five, six, seven, eight. Rape. Kill. Mutilate.’”75 Here, Jordan highlights how the safety and protection of women are under fire: how the military and “the powerful” encourage such chanting and attitudes toward women and the act of rape as if these things are justifiably normal. “Notes Toward a Model of Resistance” discusses rape, victims and perpetuators, as a way to make a larger point about national protection in the form of U.S. citizenship and political asylum for women seeking safety from gender-based persecution. Jordan writes, “I don’t think you can ever completely/‘recover’ from rape;” yet serious efforts at protecting girls and women from rape and other “universal threats”
must be made by conscious citizens and governmental bodies, including military units.76 Jordan believed that rape is a reality that deserves international attention, and in the late 1980s she publicized the crime by writing several poems on the subject, such as “Rape is Not a Poem.” Here, she declares, 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 power77
In her poem “Case in Point,” Jordan writes more explicitly about the experience of rape:
Today is 2 weeks after the fact
of that man straddling
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his knees either side of my chest
his hairy arm and powerful left hand
forcing my arms and my hands over my head78
Around the same time, she wrote the poem “Moving Towards Home” for the 1982 humanitarian relief benefit in Lebanon. In the poem, Jordan offers yet another, albeit different, perspective on rape:
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor . . .
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
“to purify” a people
those who dare
“to exterminate”
a people79
This poem highlights one of Jordan’s biggest challenges: to make the unspeakable speakable, something she does by talking about how the nurse was raped by a tyrannical regime even as she, ironically, tried to heal sick and wounded patients. With this poem, Jordan gives voice to what the unspeakable—rape and murder—has done and how she has to use her available language in order to get closer to the process of becoming free. This would allow her to join with other people in an attempt to move toward home by muddying racial and religious categories: “I was born a Black woman/and now/I am become a Palestinian.”80
Jordan’s poems make known her connection to a Beloved Community rooted in political action and concern. Simultaneously, her poems stress the point that people who have been raped, tormented, or brutalized must not passively accept the names and labels given to them. This latter idea is seen in her assertion that “I was raped” should become “he raped me” and “he is a rapist.”
Jordan’s writings on rape and state violence are attached to her works on the violence of war and the abuse of power, as exemplified in her poem “War and Memory” and her essays “South Africa: Bringing it All Back Home” and “The Big-Time Coward.” Taken together, such works encourage giving voice to voicelessness and publicly mobilizing against acts of sexual abuse, political persecution, and state-sanctioned violence. For Jordan, rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are intolerable acts linked by intentional and inexcusable violence.
The poet’s examination of rape occurred through various critical lenses, including feminist, internationalist, and anti-imperialist perspectives. She even analyzed the platform of the “Women in Black” in Jerusalem, a coalition of Palestinian and Jewish Israeli women who joined together in 1988 to fight systematic forms of violence.81
In the same spirit, she examined the efforts for peace and justice by Jewish Americans seeking to stop Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. All
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such examinations for Jordan reiterate that rape is a symptom of a universal dilemma in which human and civil rights are too often threatened by national policies and political structures used to reinforce the status quo at any cost. On this latter point and in relation to her own rapes, Jordan reveals the following to writer-journalist Jill Nelson in a 1994 interview for Quarterly Black Review of Books:
I have been raped myself, twice. I happen to think rape is 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.82
Jordan clearly noted that the media avoid certain issues, including racism, patriarchy, diversity, sexism, and sexuality, and she refused to remain quiet. She was convinced that with language one could expose the dangers of silence pervasive in various factions of society; her decision to talk and write about being raped reveals a larger commitment to universal justice. This idea, in many ways, is connected to writer R. D. Laing’s assertion on the nature of human experience. In Politics of Experience, which was one of Jordan’s favorite texts, Laing writes, “for the experience of the other is not evident to me, as it is not and never can be an experience of mine.” Laing continues, “I cannot avoid trying to understand your experience, because although I do not experience your experience, which is invisible to me . . . yet I experience you as experiencing.”83
Jordan sought to understand other people’s experiences by “experiencing” how people are connected to the larger trajectory of humanity, an idea that surfaced in her open declarations, via writings, interviews, and poetry readings, of her own bisexuality.
During her interview with Jill Nelson, Jordan was asked about her writings on bisexuality. She responded: “I’m not going to make a choice, I’m not going to say I’m this or I’m not that. I’m gonna say I’m bisexual, which means moment by moment.” Elaborating on her point of not making a choice, Jordan articulates her devotion to freedom and how “sexuality is perhaps the last place we have to go with freedom, and maybe that’s why we’re getting there so slowly.” The slow progress of talking about sexuality and freedom attests to a longtime American resistance to talking about an identity that does not include the threat of violence or the ability to talk about identity without fear of violent retribution for doing so. 84 From the 1960s on, especially after her divorce from Michael Meyer, Jordan spoke frequently about sexuality. In one of her popular essays, she describes a time in the 1960s when she met and became intimate lovers with a beautiful black woman from Mississippi. In a different essay, she describes a time when she met a black male activist who confessed that he was longing to make love with her, even while he was rallying black parents in New Jersey into political action, though Jordan believed he instead should have been focused on his activist agenda.
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Jordan loved both women and men and did not need anyone’s approval about whom she could intimately interact with, care for, and love. Her identification with sexual freedom meant that she could fully embrace the various realities of her life without accepting a single, linear group identity of “black,”
“woman,” “bisexual,” or “activist.” In “A Politics of Sexuality,” Jordan confesses, “I am Black and I am female and I am a mother and I am bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an internationalist. And I mean to be fully and freely all that I am.”85
She made conscious attempts to be “all that I am” by joining forces with different movements for justice and by admonishing people who refused to support other efforts at attaining freedom championed by different groups. In particular, she refused to join any movement or organization that publicized their oppressions while ignoring the oppressions of others in society. She initially criticized the gay and lesbian rights movement in America for its self-centeredness, believing that the fight for the rights of gays and lesbians can never be “won without coalition support from Americans who are not gay and not lesbian and not bisexual.”86 It is not enough for a movement to campaign exclusively for their own rights at the neglect of those who are denied the same civil liberties. It should be noted that Jordan also criticized the Women’s Movement in America for its narrow visions and its exclusion of nonwhite women from a variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Jordan’s concern with movements that separated their particular oppressions from other oppressions rested in her belief that human life is sacred, and that all people are entitled to freedom, justice, equality, and sexual liberation without punishment.
In many ways, Jordan’s focus on sexuality is a focus, however incomplete, on issues of gender and power relationships and the larger human condition: When I say sexuality, I mean gender: I mean male subjugation of human beings because they are females. When I say sexuality, I mean heterosexual institutionalization of rights and privileges denied to homosexual men and women. When I say sexuality I mean gay or lesbian contempt for bisexual modes of human relationship.
The Politics of Sexuality therefore subsumes all of the different ways in which some of us seek to dictate to others of us what we should do, what we should desire, what we should dream about, and how we should behave our-selves, generally.87
The “politics of sexuality” undermines relationships among all sexual beings by encouraging men to suppress women and disregard children. To ignore the importance of women’s rights and gay and lesbian rights, according to Jordan, is to disband the coalitions that fight for all forms of human and racial equality, political freedom, and universal justice—points discussed earlier in this text. Jordan made the choice not to live as a singly labeled human being as defined by other people’s standards; she did not want to be shadowed by labels that did not, and could not, represent the fullness of who
she was and what she believed. She did not like “either/or” distinctions and tried not to use them
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herself; her affirmation of her own bisexuality demonstrated her quest to live and love not only with “a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial world view,”88 but a sexually liberated one as well.
In 1980, Beacon Press published Jordan’s collection of poetry Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980. The collection includes many different theme-based poems, including “Case in Point” (“there is no silence peculiar/to the female”),89 “Rape is Not a Poem” (“I let him into the house to say hello”),90 “A Short Note to My Very Critical and Well-Beloved Friends and Comrades”
(“Then they said I was too confusing altogether . . . /They said . . . /Are you straight/or are you gay”),91 and “Poem About My Rights” (“I have been raped/be-/cause I have been the wrong the wrong sex the wrong age/the wrong”).92 From being raped to being a sexual human in love with countless women and men, Jordan writes of how some see her and others similar to her as “wrong.” Yet this way of seeing does not limit how Jordan sees herself in relation to acts of peace, protection, and the right to be in love, which is similar to the Whitmanesque model of being a soldier and bearer of words that indicate truth about the human condition. Meanwhile, Jordan’s actions and accompanying poems in Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 are natural outcomes of the way her father, Granville, taught her literature and raised her to be his “son.”
In 1994, Serpent’s Tail publishers released Haruko/Love Poems: New and Selected Love Poems, a collection of poetry written about Jordan’s female friend and lover, “Haruko,” between 1991 and 1992. The collection is “dedicated to love”93 and includes a “Foreword” by poet Adrienne Rich. In the opening of the “Foreword,” Rich begins, “WHAT IS THIS thing called love, in the poems of June Jordan, artist, teacher, social critic, visionary of human solidarity?”94
This thing that Jordan writes of and willingly experiences—this love—can be partially described as her freedom to experience a serious connection with her lover. On a larger scale, this love relates to the rights of people to love and be loved by whomever shares a mutual attraction. Jordan’s Haruko poems, always political and, in this case, written in a delicate and tender voice of affection, make reference to both the joys and rejections, excitements and humiliations of love: “Then how should I/subsist/without the benediction of our bodies/intertwined/or why”95 or “I will love who loves me/I will love as much as I am loved/I will hate who hates me . . . /I will make myself a passionate and eager lover/in response to passionate and eager love.”96 While she provocatively admits a reciprocal relationship of loving and being loved in the latter poem, Jordan never really offers an answer to how and why she should subsist.