June Jordan_Her Life and Letters
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This particular CD is a striking compilation of more than seventy spoken-word poems. Set against the vibrancy of the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and hip-hop culture, it contains works by poets and writers Al Young, Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, E. Ethelbert Miller, Gil Scott-Heron, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Wole Soyinka, and many others. Jordan reads her very popular poem “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.”
Then, on Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape by Me’Shell NdegéOcello, released in 2002 by Maverick Records, Jordan once again reads “In Memoriam: Martin Luther King, Jr.” The poet’s voice is clear, crisp, and tender, and her words are as powerful as the memory of King’s activist work: we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more51
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In 1992, the French Institute Alliance released a two-disc recording titled The Academy of American Poets: Marilyn Hacker and June Jordan with
“Introductions” by Jordan’s friend, the poet Jan Heller Levi. The recording features readings by the two extraordinary artists and longtime friends, Hacker and Jordan, on topics ranging from love and sex to politics and human rights.
Jordan reads some of her most powerful poems, including “Case in Point,” “A Poem About Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters,” “From The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem # one,” and “Poem About My Rights.” As discussed in previous chapters, the widely anthologized “Poem About My Rights”
asserts Jordan’s frustration with racial discrimination by establishing obvious connections between personal aspects of human life and political struggles that require human defiance—a statement that the poet articulated even more clearly in writings published during her last years. The poem insists, 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 self
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind52
The poetic manner in which Jordan talks about her identities can be connected to the stories of her childhood in New York City as detailed in her memoir Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, a book so popular that it was released as an audio-book by Recorded Books in 2001 (read by actress/performer Robin Miles).
Jordan’s involvement with various music projects can be traced to her early experience with theater and film work in addition to her own musical talent on the piano. In the mid-1980s, she wrote the libretto and lyrics for Bang Bang Uber Alles, a full-length opera created by Jordan and Torf. Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater in New York City, and Leonard Bernstein, American music composer and conductor, encouraged Jordan and Torf to extend their early collaborative work into a fully developed story, and the result became Bang Bang Uber Alles. In a 1985 interview published in HOT
WIRE: A Journal of Women’s Music and Culture, Jordan and Torf explain their thinking behind the piece. On the meaning of the work’s title, Jordan says, “It refers to the violence hanging over, hovering above and penetrating into all of our lives.” She continues by stating, “‘Uber Alles’ is part of a phrase made infa-mous by Adolph Hitler at his mammoth over rallies. ‘Uber alles’ means ‘over all’ or everywhere. Hence, ‘Bang Bang Uber Alles.’”53
The opera involves a group of young, multiracial actors, singers, and dancers who come together on stage to express contempt for the Ku Klux Klan. In her “Alternative Commencement Address at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1987,” Jordan describes the intentions of the opera in detail, citing the various questions that it explores: “Can importantly different people—Black and
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white and gay and straight and romantically rivalrous and Latino and Jewish and poor and Ivy League somehow coalesce, despite their differences, and then, together, confront a common enemy?”54 The cast members and director demonstrate how people from different backgrounds and experiences can unite to respond to the hatred, violence, and elitist mindset of the KKK. Torf informs me of aspects of the political landscape in America when she, Jordan, and the cast members committed themselves to stage the production. In 1984
in Concord, California—a town in the San Francisco Bay Area—“a beautiful, young, black, gay student artist was found hanging from a tree near the BART
subway station, and it was rumored that the KKK was seen in the area.” Torf continues by remarking that around the same time “Jesse Jackson was running for President and Ronald Reagon was dismantling federal programs meant to help ‘poor’ and ‘underserved’ people; Reagan was also invading Grenada.” In 1985, according to Torf, there were “no obvious connections being made in New York City with Reagan’s war policies, Jackson’s presidential campaign, and the fact that the state of Connecticut was home to many KKKs.”55 A public response of outrage was needed; Torf and Jordan took up the challenge of producing one.
In 1985, Bang Bang Uber Alles premiered off-Broadway, funded by the Women’s Project at the American Place Theater. On June 14, 1986, it was produced at Seven Stages Theater in Atlanta, Georgia. During the third performance of Bang Bang Uber Alles in Atlanta, the KKK threatened to disrupt it.
Jordan writes of the KKK-initiated activity, which had been the first of its kind in Atlanta in thirty years: “In full Klan regalia, ranging from black satin robes and headdress to Marine combat outfits to white silk sheets, several carloads of Klansmen got out of their cars and began their attempt to shut down Bang Bang Uber Alles.”56 Disputing rallies broke out between members of the KKK
on one side and cast members of the documentary and residents from the local neighborhood on the other. According to Torf, “Cast members and the band faced the KKK outside of the theater”57 before returning inside to perform the documentary that night and all of the other nights of its five-week scheduled run. Bang Bang Uber Alles went on to receive glowing reviews.
Then in 1991, Jordan participated in the 52-minute documentary A Place of Rage, with Angela Davis and Alice Walker. The documentary, by British filmmaker and one of Jordan’s good friends, Pratibha Parmer, offers insight into the role of black female activists, including Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks, in the context of monumental rights movements in the United States such as the Black Power, feminist, civil rights, and 1970s gay and lesbian rights movements. The film opens with an image of the Brooklyn Bridge and then moves into vivid flashes of black people within New York City neighborhoods before turning to a confident Jordan sitting in front of the camera. She begins by discussing the organizing efforts of countless black people who were determined to change biased institutions and policies. She comments, “They changed because we made them change.”
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The film supports this statement, as Angela Davis and Alice Walker highlight black people’s experiences with unconstitutional housing laws, unemployment, segregated schooling, and inadequate governmental representation. Jordan stresses the importance of coalition building during the 1960s, a time in which she felt a part of a national community of black people living in communities such as Watts, California; Birmingham, Alabama; Harlem, New York; and Jackson, Mississippi. She describes such a community as “a stunning concept”
for a people who had “suffered a common set of restrictions in a hostile white country.” The realization that “we could do something about it, and we did”
spurred all three activists—Jordan, Davis, and Walker—to commit
their lives to social activism, political protests, engaged teaching, and radical self-expression in creative art forms.58
In 2003, a dozen years after Jordan’s work with Parmer on A Place of Rage, director Peter Sellars, whom Jordan had collaborated with on the 1995 opera I Was Looking At The Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky, created a powerful political translation of Antonin Artaud’s text For an End to the Judgment of God, and paired it with Jordan’s epic poem “Kissing God Goodbye.” In this staged performance, delivered as a mock U.S. Department of War press conference, a male performer assumes the dramatic role of a Pentagon official who offers a briefing on the government’s progress on the war on terrorism, particularly in Afghanistan. The play uses Artaud’s “radio play” as its main text. In response to Artaud’s words is Jordan’s lengthy poem, which, in part, reads: The emperor of poverty
The czar of suffering
The wizard of disease
The joker of morality
The pioneer of slavery . . .
That’s the guy?
You mean to tell me on the 12th day or the 13th
that the Lord
which is to say some wiseass
got more muscle than he
reasonably
can control or figure out/some
accidental hard disc
thunderbolt/some
big mouth
woman-hating/super
heterosexist heterosexual
kind of a guy guy
he decided who could live and who would die?59
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Together, For an End to the Judgment of God and “Kissing God Goodbye” offer startling commentary on the possibility that a redefined twenty-first century could embody “passion,” “clarity,” and “love,” without the control of “the emperor of poverty” or “the czar of suffering.”60 In fact, this new twenty-first century could represent a time of freedom and equality for its courageous people who come to resist the “big mouth/woman-hating/super/heterosexist heterosexual.”61 Similar points that advocate social justice and political resistance are articulated in many other poems and essays by Jordan. Additionally, the poet’s lifelong opposition to systemic control and unjust political struggles, as alluded to in the poem, are rooted in her early protests against colonialism. Her support of Agostinho Neto, the first president of the People’s Republic of Angola, in the mid-1970s attests to this fact, for Jordan attempted to bring attention to the poetry, political work, and health-care advocacy efforts of Neto.
While the poet’s focus on Neto’s work seems far-fetched given the geographic distances that existed between the two, Jordan’s commitment to social change and her resistance to colonialism through poetic and political endeav-ors warrant this connection. In her essay “Angola: Victory and Promise,”
Jordan writes of Angola, a place that she describes as “nine times larger than New York State, or three times the size of California, with a population of approximately six million.”62 This wealthy African nation has a history of resistance to colonialism and Portuguese rule. Past efforts to rebuild and reconstruct Angola’s political and economic persecutions have “led . . . to the appointment of Angolan women to some of the highest governmental responsibilities . . . which became a critical aspect of the revolution when Angolan women shouldered their rifles and went to war, side by side with Angolan men.”63 Agostinho Neto, having been imprisoned, exiled, and threatened by Portuguese officials, became head of the revolution in Angola and “Honorary President of the MPLA [Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola]
directly following his 1960 imprisonment.”64 Neto, according to Jordan, is an unrelenting political poet determined to secure the freedom of the people, especially women, in Angola. Like Jordan, he did not separate his poetry from his politics and his revolutionary fights for freedom against colonialism and, like Jordan, Neto valued the voices and participation of women in the politics of nation building.
Jordan shares with Neto a political commitment to poetry. She believed poetry is an act of political activism that allows truths to be told even when they appear too difficult to confront. Jordan used poetry to speak the truth about children’s rights, black women and health-care issues, poverty, segregation, rape, cancer, homophobia, foreign policy, violence, apartheid, sexism, and war. She fearlessly exposed her own vulnerabilities through writing, believing that such exposure could motivate others in their search for strength.
A moving example of this practice can be found in her essay “Many Rivers to Cross,” which documents the poet’s trials with unemployment, divorce, single
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parenting, her mother’s death, her absence from her mother’s funeral, and her personal promise “never to be late again.”65
Even in death, Jordan belongs to the people and to the universal fight for human freedom: her life and work exemplify the voice of a woman unmoved by censorship. In the 1980s, the New York Times refused to ever again print Jordan’s work; her New York City publisher vowed to let her books go out of print; and one of her literary agents removed her from the client list, mainly due to her increasing focus on Palestine. Nevertheless, Jordan continued to write, publish, and speak out no matter the consequences. During a rally in California against the first Gulf War, Jordan proposed that the U.S. government reallocate some of the $56 billion dollars used to fund the war to pay for public resources in Oakland, California. For one billion dollars a day across a span of seven days, the government could pay for educational facilities, highly equipped and staffed health clinics, hospitals, drug rehabilitation centers, and affordable housing. She repeated such sentiments during a public rally in California held shortly after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.
This unconventional feminist writer—a woman who rejects traditional feminist theory and practice—not only protested the Gulf War but proposed ways to rebuild a country devastated by the September 11th attacks, while simultaneously rejecting all U.S. social, economic, and political policies that disrupt people’s civil rights. Through an antiwar, antihate, antihomophobic stance, Jordan insisted on creating and sustaining a Beloved Community that holds at its center the civil liberties, freedoms, and the true voices of the people.
Jordan’s commitment extended to a focus on the universal endangerment of women. Whether she was writing about the adventures of the fictional young Kimako in the children’s story Kimako’s Story or dedicating poetry to the memory of the real-life woman, Kimako Baraka, in the poem “3 for Kimako,”
Jordan always found a way to bridge divisions between the realities of girls and women. Whether she was reflecting on her New York City childhood in Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood or documenting painful episodes from the life of young Valerie—“See Valerie afraid,” “Valerie does not play,” “Nobody really likes Valerie,” or “Valerie thinks . . . her mother may strangle her”—Jordan insisted on the safety and unconditional love of young women.66
This insistence on physical protection is linked to Jordan’s demand for quality educational resources and instruction for women and girls, a message her own cousin, Valerie Orridge, believes in.67 In the “Introduction” to Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan, the poet asserts a voice of concern and offers a critique of the educational opportunities afforded to females. Jordan writes,
Education is denied to most female human beings on the planet. And even if you disregard the significance of that for girls and women, you just might, nevertheless, begin to care about the documented correlations between illiterate female populations and the impoverishments, the barbaric hardship of every
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society maintaining and/or imposing such an unequal, such a literally suffocat-in
g status quo.68
Jordan advocated fighting against the “status quo”69 because she believed that the relationship between universal illiteracy and poverty is reflected in the public’s understanding that the roles of girls and women are determined by societies’ political structures, which are oftentimes dominated by traditional gender and class standards. Jordan called for ongoing resistance to patriarchal systems by insisting on female-led coalitions and campaigns. In 1993, the poet advanced this point well in her essay “I Am Seeking an Attitude,” in which she provides statistics on the women affected by rape, ethnic cleansing, genocidal war, and a violence of silence. Then, in 1996, Jordan argued for increased attention to violence perpetuated against women in the essay “A Model of Resistance.” Jordan condemned rape and violence of all forms. Furthermore, she found female illiteracy and poverty inhumane and intolerable in any society. She believed that the formation and livelihood of a community depends on the integration of women into every aspect of society, from education to government and beyond.
The written word, as represented in Jordan’s volumes of poetry and essays, published speeches, recordings, and interview transcripts, attests to the need for more coalitions—a fact that lives on even after her death. Jordan’s writing will live beyond us all, reaching generations of people in countless countries who, like her, seek to change the world through activism and poetry. Having been translated into different languages, including Japanese, Arabic, French, Spanish, German, and Swedish, and having traveled around the globe from Nicaragua to Palestine, Jordan’s poetry jumps off of the page that is intended to contain it. Her words confront readers and either captivate their hearts or upset their political views. The poet did not merely state, “I oppose colonialism in South Africa,” “I stand against the war in Vietnam and all other wars that kill thousands upon thousands of people,” or “I detest racism and homophobia.” She campaigned against these things, often at the risk of losing her job, her relationships with friends and lovers, and always at the expense of her own inner being.