June Jordan_Her Life and Letters

by Valerie Kinloch

  Instead, Haruko/Love Poems looks back to include love poems selected by writers Adrienne Rich and Sara Miles from Jordan’s other collections dated 1970–1991.

  In a 1994 interview with writer Peter Erickson, Jordan answers the question

  “Do you see the Haruko poems as a new development in your work?” by saying: “Yeah, because that’s a whole series of poems that document the trajectory of a love affair with one person as against a miscellany of poems about

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  miscellaneous people.”97 The poems in Haruko have a “transcultural or cross-cultural identity”98 that display an urgency for human interaction, understanding and acceptance, and the human ability to “call things right or wrong”99 when they are unjust, harmful, or inhumane. Jordan’s love poems express her sexual freedom as connected to love and politics, and as directly related to her other freedoms: the right to be herself, black and female, woman, activist, bisexual, writer, lover, intellectual, mother, friend, warrior, supporter of Palestinian rights, advocate against ethnic cleansing, rape, and genocide. From her poetry collections Haruko/Love Poems, Living Room, Kissing God Goodbye, and Things That I Do in the Dark to her essay collections Affirmative Acts: Political Essays, Technical Difficulties, Moving Towards Home, On Call, and Civil Wars to her Poetry for the People blueprint to her children and young-adult novels to everything she created and participated in: June Jordan combined the power of political action with revolutionary art and love to advocate a concept of universal justice in a beloved community. Her actions, both as a writer and an activist, are as important today as they were when she emerged as an artist, thinker, and educator in New York City during the 1960s.

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  S E V E N

  Kissing God Goodbye

  “Woe is me. I could start fighting instead./But no, I am the victim. I am already dead.”1

  One of June Jordan’s intimate friends and literary companions, E.

  Ethelbert Miller, describes Jordan as “one of the most important writers to come through the last several years. She was someone who had a broad and inclusive vision that many did not quite understand.”2 In one way, Miller’s sentiments relate to the scores of political essays, articles, poems, and young-adult literature written by Jordan in the last thirty-seven years. In another way, his assertions speak to Jordan’s vision of family, community, and politics that was always at the center of her work. One cannot deny that Jordan’s early writing was greatly influenced by the lessons afforded by her West Indian parents—a father who taught Jordan how to experience the beauty of literature and a mother who taught her biblical stories and childhood rhymes. The poet’s approach to familial encounters and struggles extended into her myriad love relationships as indicated by her numerous love poems and letters, most of which are published and the rest of which are housed in library collections, including the Givens Collection of African American Literature at the University of Minnesota3 and The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

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  Jordan’s inclusive vision, often in the tradition of Walt Whitman as well as Langston Hughes and others, allowed her to discuss matters about which people were—and are—often silent: bisexuality, love, rape, police brutality, the Gulf War, the Bombing of Baghdad, and Propositions 207 and 227 in California. For Miller, this intellectual versatility of topics makes Jordan an important writer, one who should be remembered. He states: “We cannot find another African American women writer with as many books of essays on a wide variety of topics . . . who can write about Whitman and Wheatley . . .

  other than June Jordan. She wrote about everything that mattered.”4

  In her later years, particularly from the period between 1992 and 2002, Jordan would take up the task of writing “about everything that mattered”5 to her by turning attention toward her battle with breast cancer. In a 1994 interview with writer Peter Erickson, Jordan openly admitted her emotionally draining experience fighting breast cancer and her involvement with breast cancer awareness campaigns: “I’m going to do a benefit for the Women’s Resource Center here in Berkeley, and for that event I will write something that I hope I can present without breaking down.”6 June Jordan, having exhibited strength and passion throughout her tumultuous life, remained strong during her ten-year battle against breast cancer.

  It is this strength and the poet’s undying commitment to literary and political matters that I discuss in this closing chapter. If Miller is correct in his description of Jordan as a dedicated writer “on a wide variety of topics,” then an examination of the things most important to her—in the midst of a life altering battle with cancer—deserves recognition. I open this chapter by first presenting a narrative description of Jordan’s travails upon discovering her cancer, the measures that she underwent, and the end of her life, honored by memorial ceremonies and published editorials that announced her death.

  Then, I discuss the body of work she produced during her final years, supporting my long-standing claim that Jordan was a warrior who refused to be defeated or silenced, even by illness, and perhaps not even by death itself.

  Because of her resolve to fight against systemic injustices, including breast cancer, her literary and political contributions continue to affect multitudes. For this reason, I end by offering sentiments expressed by the poet in published writings that echo her belief in “the good fight” for human rights. June Jordan’s life and work must be remembered, honored, studied, and critiqued.

  In California in early 1992, June Jordan’s doctor and friend, Dr. Allen Steinbach, informed her that she had breast cancer. Only a few years earlier, the poet was considering breast implants, thinking that they would make her

  “more desirable, or irresistible, or, anyway, secure, in what was a consum-mately crazed and volatile love affair.”7 Her potential surgeon required a mammogram before any work could be done. A mammogram would determine the healthiness of her breasts; it would be the final and most important step to take before surgery. Instead, this mammogram led to the discovery of her breast

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  cancer and the necessity of a partial mastectomy. Having survived so much already, Jordan became a survivor once again:

  And so I became one of the millions of American women who must redefine courage and who must redefine the meaning of heroic friendship if we will survive./And my son and my lover and my friends gathered around like Dare Devils daring themselves and their devotion and their walking of my dog and their changing of the dressing. . . . And it was not easy. And it was not brief. And it is not over.8

  Every year the reported number of breast cancer cases increases for American women, and as Jordan writes, the amount of money allocated for research on breast cancer—for early detection and the dissemination of information to the general public—decreases. Every hour of every day to every month of every year, the number of women dying of breast cancer increases substantially.

  While awareness of breast cancer has increased, there is still no public outcry for major, longitudinal studies of breast cancer and for finding a cure.

  Nevertheless, Jordan admitted that she was “happy beyond belief” when she joined with others who were searching for ways “to end the disease of breast cancer and the disease of race hatred and the disease of misogyny.”9

  Upon the discovery of her cancer, Jordan phoned her cousin, Valerie Orridge, to tell her the news: “And when June called me hysterical that she had breast cancer, I started having panic attacks. . . . I said, June, you are going
to have to come back to New York.”10 Orridge, still a practicing nurse and healthcare educator, wanted Jordan to move back to the City and into her Harlem home; that way, Orridge would be able “to take [Jordan] to Sloan-Kettering”11

  for treatment. Jordan refused, declaring that she would seek help from the University of California and would rely on the scholarship of friends Alice Walker and Angela Davis, “who were doing some research about the treatment, the best treatment for breast cancer.”12 Despite the pleas from her cousin to return to New York, Jordan decided to remain among her friends and colleagues in California; she soon underwent a biopsy at Alta Bates Hospital.

  After the biopsy, Dr. Steinbach informed Jordan that the location of the cancer was her right breast. Before this, Jordan did not know much about breast cancer. After being diagnosed by Dr. Steinbach, she actively pursued research to determine its causes, effects, and known treatments—anything and everything that she could learn about breast cancer, she did. Her research led her to dismal statistics: from “Every year there are 183,000 cases of breast cancer reported” to “According to the San Francisco’s Department of Health, 6 women die from breast cancer every hour, 144 women die from breast cancer every day” to “25 percent of all the women diagnosed with breast cancer in any given year will die within five years.”13

  Jordan attempted to make sense of her diagnosis. She gathered statistics and continued her research, all the while baffled that there was seemingly no mass movement in this country to fight breast cancer. Her life had changed forever.

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  In her 1996 Keynote for the Mayor’s Summit on Breast Cancer, San Francisco, California, Jordan delivered her speech “Besting a Worst Case Scenario.” In it, she recounts being told that she had cancer. Even more painfully, she writes,

  “So when I received the written report of the biopsy performed on my right breast from the hospital I noticed that the malignancy had been attributed to my left breast./And I thought that was a major, unpardonable mistake. And I still think so.”14

  Soon thereafter, a partial mastectomy was performed to remove the malignancy and the lymph nodes, and to determine whether or not there was cancer elsewhere in her body.15 But Jordan did not confront breast cancer alone—she had the support of a community of loving colleagues and friends, including: The Women’s Cancer Resource Center of Berkeley and the National Black Women’s Health Network and Dr. Craig Henderson and Dr. Susan Love and Dr.

  Denise Rogers and Christopher and Angela and Adrienne and Dianne and Stephanie and Martha and Haruko and Amy and Sara and Pratibha and Lauren and Roberta and Camille and my colleagues and students at school and the neighbors next door and Amigo, the Airedale who lives with me.16

  They all worked together to encourage Jordan to fight the disease, and to live to tell about it. She took on this charge and lived for a decade after being diagnosed with cancer, telling others about her struggles and rallying for increased governmental funding of breast cancer research. She committed herself to winning the battle and reclaiming her life. In “Besting a Worst Case Scenario,”

  Jordan writes the following:

  Prior to the mastectomy procedure, which my next oncologist urged me to agree to, I was told that if I had the procedure I would have an 80 percent chance of surviving more than five years. A mastectomy would secure those 80 percent odds in my favor.17

  However, the procedure did not secure Jordan’s 80 percent chance of survival.

  In fact, Jordan writes that after the surgery was completed, her high-profile San Francisco surgeon reduced her probability of survival for five years from 80

  percent to 40 percent, citing that “the mastectomy procedure had discovered that the malignancy had spread into the lymph nodes and there was, now, no way to track, . . . to locate, let alone eliminate, the dread interior dissemination of the disease.”18

  June Jordan’s “worst-case scenario” was staring her in the face: her chances of survival had substantially decreased after the mastectomy procedure; her surgeon had not told the nursing staff to periodically “empty the drain he had installed in the wound site;”19 and this same surgeon had gone on vacation. All this time, as Jordan lay in a hospital bed, “no one was checking the drain and letting out the blood, [and] the tissue of the wound site became perilously thin and unable to generate new cells.”20 No one could make a decision about what to do, and the surgeon was still on vacation. Some of Jordan’s friends came to

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  her assistance, and a decision was made to attend to the wound, but there was little that was dignified about this process. Later, Jordan informs readers about the tremendous amount of support given to her during this extremely difficult time:

  And I felt overwhelmed by the exhaustive, seamlessly graceful, and indispensa-ble caretaking. . . . How could I possibly have survived any of the ordeal of this fight, and how could I possibly hope to heal, and defeat this cancer, without the unstinting love given to me?21

  In her essays “Root Canal to the Future of Women,” “Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan: One Love,” “A Good Fight,” “Besting a Worst Case Scenario,”

  and in several poems, the poet writes about her breast cancer and indicates that “the prognosis is very bad, but I’m very well.”22 Jordan tells of the physical and emotional pain that resulted from her surgeries, medical procedures that Orridge describes as terribly “botched-up.”23 Jordan then explains how she could not use her right arm for months after the unchecked drain was left in the wound site. Unable to write, Jordan questioned whether or not she

  “would again ever be able to use and to move my right/arm/my right/hand/it was not clear for months if I would write again.”24 Nevertheless, she did write again, penning such important works as Affirmative Acts: Political Essays, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, Haruko/Love Poems, Kissing God Goodbye, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (a published libretto), and Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan.

  The collection Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan was released from Copper Canyon Press in September 2005, three years after the poet’s death. The 649-page volume includes a most powerful poem about the physical scar left on Jordan’s body as a result of surgery. In the poem “To Be Continued:” the poet writes, “The partial mastectomy took a long time to execute/And left a huge raggedy scar/Healing from that partial mastectomy took even longer.”25 Later in the same poem, Jordan openly admits: A wound fifty times more implacable and more intractable Than the psychological chasm produced by the healing process That was twice as enormously damaging as the surgery

  Which left a huge raggedy scar

  And so I go

  on26

  But neither breast cancer nor the reality of “a raggedy scar”27 can take Jordan away from the people. She lives among us all. Her literary, educational, and political gifts, her commitment to justice, her courage to love, and her attempts to defeat cancer should be honored and cherished.

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  Additionally, her struggle to survive breast cancer is demonstrative of her challenge to speak the unspeakable so as to “move towards home” and to arrive closer to a life of safety and freedom. This latter point is explored in detail in her “Poem at the End of the Third Year.” In part, Jordan writes: How we began

  a galaxy apart/me

  driving on this street

  to reach the hospital to take

  away one breast

  or more

  than that28

  Jordan’s battle with breast cancer and the ensuing pain, immobility, and physical and emotional scars relate to her other life struggles concerning family, love, violence, war, and demands for quality educational opportuniti
es for students of color. Such connections are important for Jordan to make and pro-nounce because they reiterate one of her most important beliefs: while not all struggles are one in the same, their interconnectedness is manifested in the need for people to collaborate against all forms of injustices, a collaboration that, for the poet, signifies a deeper understanding of life and the universal laws that govern both life and death. Jordan does not shy away from confronting the dilemmas of life—abuse, injustice, and death—nor does she shy away from addressing the quandaries of political struggle—censorship, abandonment, and death. She highlights these points in her work with students in Poetry for the People Collective, in her life-altering travels to Nicaragua and Lebanon, and in her final battle with breast cancer. Jordan was, according to Miller, a “visionary writer”29 whose works have significant implications for everyone concerned with the welfare of humanity, a concern that is as important in the poet’s death as it was in her life, which ended on June 14, 2002.

  June Jordan’s last breath of air occurred on a calm June day in her home on Carlotta Avenue in Berkeley, California at the age of 65. As her fight with breast cancer came to a gradual end, Jordan was surrounded by close friends and loved ones. Poet Sara Miles describes Jordan’s intimate departure as a “coming back.” In “Directed by Desire,” her personal tribute to Jordan, Miles writes of the poet’s life commitment to always return to the people who mattered the most to her: