June Jordan_Her Life and Letters
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June Jordan, our “people’s poet” and the world’s “universal poet,” died on June 14, 2002, but her memory, her legacy, and her writing are still with us.
Readers should turn to her poems and essays when they need to be encouraged to fight “the good fight” in support of the Beloved Community, when they need to be encouraged to write and speak out, or when they need direction.
Jordan was, as she called herself, a “dissident poet.”70 As discussed earlier, the poet discovered ways to establish connections between local and international issues. Jordan’s body of work signifies her ongoing effort to be knowledgeable about every aspect of humanity, however impossible an undertaking it may have been—from understanding that injustice is rampant throughout the world, to embracing a lifelong fight for freedom, and to calling herself a Palestinian. Whatever and whomever she was writing about, she drew attention
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June Jordan
This art piece was a part of the June Jordan Collaborative Community Project by Brett Cook-Dizney. It measures 8 feet by 18 feet and is made of spray enamel, acrylic on wood, as well as other miscellaneous submissions. It was a nonpermissional public work, displayed at 127th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, New York, from July 2002 to January 2003. By permission of Brett Cook-Dizney.
to the emotional, physical, and political spaces required for the survival of marginalized peoples everywhere. Her commitment to people in the United States, Nicaragua, Lebanon, South Africa, Israel, Bosnia, and to the People, in general, can be seen in her explorations of multicultural and multiracial identities, feminist politics, Third-World activism, power movements, and human persecutions.
Needless to say, Jordan’s dedication to humanity and to freedom has had positive, revolutionary effects on politics and civil rights and the individual lives of women, children, and men who are often categorized as disenfranchised: This is the promise
I am making it here on the road
of my country
I am raising my knife
to carve out the heart
of no shame
The very next move is not mine71
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Kissing God Goodbye
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Artist Mascha Oehlmann created this
large, outdoor mural of June Jordan,
which graces the side of the Bedford-
Stuyvesant Restoration Plaza Build-
ing, located at 1360 Fulton Street in
Brooklyn, New York. It measures 23
feet by 12 feet and was unveiled on
March 10, 2005, during the launch of
the “Heart and Soul of Bedford-
Stuyvesant” media campaign honoring
Brooklyn icons. Photograph taken by
Valerie Kinloch.
There are no holidays that honor Jordan, no annual gatherings of activists across the world to celebrate her life on the day of her birth, and no documented call to travel to Palestine and join forces with its people, as she did in the 1980s. There are few bookstores that carry more than one copy of her books at any one time, and yet she is one of the most published black American writers of all time, even in death.
There is now a physical monument, however temporary, to the life and work of June Jordan. Residents and community activists in Brooklyn honored this cultural warrior in March 2005 with the unveiling of a life-sized mural of the poet, which hangs from the Restoration Plaza Building located at 1360
Fulton Street in the poet’s former Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Let us remember June Jordan and honor her because:
Some of Us Did Not Die
We’re Still Here
I Guess It Was Our Destiny To Live
So Let’s get on with it!72
The poet never failed to “get on with it”73 when it came to her many literary pursuits. She published twenty-eight books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and contributed political writings to The Nation, the New York Times, The Progressive, and the Harvard Educational Review. Beginning with Who Look At Me (1969), Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (1970), Some Changes (1971), and
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New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1973), Jordan articulated her belief in the sanctity of human life by using writing to capture those intersections where politics and personal struggle coexist to fight against unlawful behavior. This latter point is evident in Jordan’s children’s and young-adult books His Own Where (1971) and Dry Victories (1972); in her plays In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth, produced at the Public Theatre in New York City (1979), and For the Arrow That Flies by Day, which received a staged reading at the Shakespeare Festival in New York City (1981); and in the poet’s musical collaborations with Torf, Reagon, and Adams. Indeed, the poet’s accomplishments were plentiful, even in her final days.
Jordan accumulated numerous awards for her writing and humanitarian work, though these cannot fully testify to the amount of time, energy, and dedication she devoted to her craft. During the last ten years of her life, Jordan received the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991), the Ground Breakers–Dream Makers Award from the San Francisco Women’s Foundation (1994), The American Institute of Architecture Award for a joint proposal for the African Burial Ground Project in New York City, the Lila Wallace Writers Award from Reader’s Digest (1995), and the Critics Award and Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Arts Festival for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (1995). In 1998, the poet received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Black Writers’ Conference and was presented with the Students’ Choice Louise Patterson African American Award for outstanding black faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Just before her death, Jordan was honored with the Poets & Writers Writer for Writers’
Award (2002) and with the Women Who Dared Award from the National Black Women’s Health Project. I would be remiss not to mention that Jordan’s face has even appeared on a postage stamp in Uganda.
The poet’s contributions to literature, education, politics, and activism are phenomenal. Jordan’s essays and poems tell many stories that indicate her perpetual search for universal freedom, love, and equality as they connect to a politics of inclusion for marginalized people. Amazingly, the poet continued this search even as she battled breast cancer during her last ten years, an act of heroism that redefines human strength, endurance, and political commitment.
For these reasons, June Millicent Jordan (1936–2002) must be remembered, read, and her work studied. Without a doubt, her sentiments from Things That I Do in the Dark should be taken to heart as we continue the “good fight,”
always in love with the promise of a better day:
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?74
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Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. June Jordan, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2000), 260.
SOLDIER: A POET’S CHILDHOOD
1. Jordan, Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America (New York: Touchstone, 1981), xx.
2. Sara Miles, “Directed by Desire,” in Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan, eds. Valerie Kinloch and Margret Grebowicz, 265 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).
3. Ibid., 265.
4. Jordan, Soldier, 25.
5. Robert A. Hill and Barbara Bair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, repr. ed.
(California: University of California Press, 1987), 184.
6. Ibid., 184–185.
7. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (New York & London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1927
). Johnson first published this book anonymously in 1912.
8. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 560.
9. Ibid.
10. June Jordan, Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 1977), 20.
11. Jordan, Soldier, 4. See also Jordan’s essay “For My American Family” in June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2002), 141.
12. Valerie Orridge, interview by author, December 14, 2005.
13. Ibid.
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Notes
14. Ibid. Orridge informs me that her grandmother, Mrs. Marie Taylor, was “livid”
that her youngest daughter went away to school only to return pregnant: “After my mother went to Hunter and she met my father, she became pregnant. And my grandmother was livid—‘after having come from Jamaica and so poor . . . working and struggling to give you a better life . . . you [Lynne] come home pregnant.’ . . . And so she married my father. My father was a very good man; he was a kind man . . . a gentle-man.” Orridge goes on to tell me, “After three or four years of that [marriage], she
[Lynne] left him.” Lynne then retreated, temporarily, to the Jordan’s household to ask Mildred to care for young Valerie.
15. Orridge, interview by author.
16. Jordan, Soldier, 15.
17. Jordan, Soldier, 135, original spacing.
18. Jordan, Soldier, 136.
19. Jordan, Soldier, 136–137.
20. Emphasis added.
21. Audre Lorde, Zami, Sister Outsider, Undersong (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1982), 41.
22. June Jordan, Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991–1997 (New York: Anchor Books/Random House, 1997), 27.
23. Orridge, interview by author.
24. Jordan, Soldier, 6.
25. Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die, 141.
26. For a detailed and descriptive discussion of Jordan’s childhood with Granville Ivanhoe Jordan and Mildred Maude Fisher, please see Jordan, Soldier.
27. June Jordan, interview by David Barsamian, “Childhood Memories: An Interview with June Jordan,” March, 2000, http://www.zmag.org/Zmag/articles/mar01
barsamian.htm.
28. Orridge, interview by author.
29. Jordan, interview by David Barsamian, “Childhood Memories.”
30. Orridge, interview by author.
31. Orridge, interview by author.
32. Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die, 139.
33. United States Constitution, art. 18, sec. 1, http://www.house.gov/Constitution/
Constitution.html.
34. Paul Laurence Dunbar, Selected Works, Unabridged (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1997), 66.
35. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), 1751.
36. Jordan, Soldier, 19.
37. Ibid., 161.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 176.
40. Orridge, interview by author.
41. Orridge, interview by author. Orridge tells me, “June admired my mother because
. . . she was a principal. She [Lynne] had been a teacher, became an assistant principal, and then became a school principal.”
42. Orridge, interview by author.
43. Jordan, Soldier, 134.
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44. Orridge, interview by author.
45. Jordan, Civil Wars, 98.
46. June Jordan, On Call: Political Essays (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 51.
47. Alexis De Veaux, “Creating Soul Food: June Jordan,” Essence Magazine, April 11, 1981, 82, 143.
48. Orridge, interview by author.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. De Veaux, “Creating Soul Food,” 145.
52. Jordan, Civil Wars, 16.
53. Jordan, On Call: Political Essays, 54.
54. Jordan, “Foreword,” in Civil Wars, 1.
WHO LOOK AT ME
1. Jordan, “Foreword,” in Civil Wars, 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Orridge, interview by author.
4. Ibid.
5. Around the time Jordan was writing her children’s and young-adult novels, and shortly after her text, Who Look at Me (1969), was published, other important works by black women writers were being released: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975), and the reprinted edition of Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1970). These women, and many before them, used their writings to demonstrate that black women could exist as “revolutionary” artists and could offer a theory of black female creativity as connected to politics and identity.
6. Jordan, Civil Wars, xvii.
7. Jordan, Things That I Do in the Dark, 2. It should be noted that “Who Look at Me?”
is a book-length poem published in 1968; the poem also appears as a part of a collection of other poems, as in the case of its inclusion in Jordan’s Things That I Do in the Dark and Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems.
8. In some of her writings, particularly in “One Way of Beginning This Book”
(Jordan, Civil Wars, 1981), Jordan refers to her friend Huck: “My friend Huck, who had dropped out of Barnard a couple of years before I did, came by, all the way from the Bronx where she lived, about once a month. These visits were exhausting. Huck was a genius of sorts; incapable of superficial anything. Hence, any discussion or narrative had to be pursued into the early hours of the morning or it would represent shoddy exploration” (Jordan, Civil Wars, xxiii–xxiv).
9. Jordan, Civil Wars, xxvii.
10. Jordan, Civil Wars, xxvii. I cite Jordan’s racial identification of Wiseman and Clarke because of the emphasis she places upon the political dynamics between the characters and the producer and director of the film: “the film ‘starred’ Black kids from the streets; it was the only feature film about what it means to be Black in a racist white country from 1954 to 1964 that I can recall”—and it was directed and produced by two white people who were not afraid to work with children of color in Harlem, New York.
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Notes
11. Jordan, Civil Wars, 4.
12. Jordan has written briefly on her encounters with Malcolm X in New York City during the early-to-mid-1960s. In 1965, Malcolm X was murdered at the Audubon Ballroom on upper Broadway in Washington Heights, New York. The ballroom is now the site of the Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center.
13. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), founded as the Committee of Racial Equality, was formed by a racially diverse group of students from the University of Chicago. James Farmer, a black student, and George Houser, a white student, became the organization’s primary leaders. CORE formed as an organized, nonviolent group in 1942 in many American cities, including New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.
The history of CORE is often divided into three periods: (1) 1942–1961—nonviolent organizing with the ultimate goal being integration of public spaces and institutions; most members were Northern and white; (2) 1961–1964—nonviolence and coercive force combined as people protested and demonstrated against violence and inequality; black and white members addressed issues of housing and voter registration for Black Americans; and (3) 1964—the rise in Black Power groups and community organizing for poor and working-class black people with most of CORE’s members being black.
For more information on the history and work of CORE, see http://www.tcnj.edu/~doshi2/.
14. Jordan refers to her friend, Dorothy Moscou, in “Letter to Michael (1964).” In her letter, Jordan alludes to a moment w
hen she turned her radio on and heard newscasters asking residents of Harlem to not resort to violent acts because of the murder of fifteen-year old Jimmy Powell by the police. Jordan writes that Moscou “came by, shared my dinner and accompanied me to the funeral establishment” to pay respects to Powell.
Upon arriving in Harlem, Jordan and Moscou were met with scores of police officers and protestors in the streets. For more information, see Jordan, Civil Wars, 17–18.
15. Jordan, Civil Wars, 19.
16. Jordan, Civil Wars, xvii.
17. Adrienne Torf, interview by author, October 24, 2005.
18. Jordan was never specific about why she was not able to financially and completely take care of her son. In some of her writings, including “Letter to Buckminster Fuller (1964),” Jordan writes: “Michael was gone. I worked. I studied architecture. . . .
I planned. I spent my life waiting. It was a gamble.” She goes on to admit, “Those days I didn’t eat. A few friends brought me cigarettes, Scotch, eggs, bread, and my mother gave me two or three dollars for gas. What I had left was my car: my tangible liberty was my car” (Jordan, Civil Wars, 23). This was a particularly difficult time for Jordan.
19. Jordan, Civil Wars, 24.
20. Ibid., 30.
21. Ibid., 38.
22. Before the Open Admissions Policy was passed at City College, the student population was predominately white. “Then, in 1969, riding the crest of the civil rights movement, a group of African American and Latino students shut down City College’s South Campus. They demanded that the college reflect the racial and ethnic composition of Harlem. After numerous tense meetings, New York City’s politicians agreed upon an open admissions policy that guaranteed every New York City high school graduate a place in CUNY.” This proved monumental because the open admissions policy at City College did not restrict students of color to two-year institutions, but made way for them to receive undergraduate degrees from a four-year, or “senior,” institution.