The author of 26
books of poetry, essays and children’s stories, June Jordan wrote and spoke out
on every major political battle of the past half century¾from apartheid and the
US-sponsored war in Nicaragua
to the Harlem riots, gay rights, nuclear proliferation,
and Rodney King. She often traveled¾to Palestine,
Nicaragua, Kosovo,
South Africa, Ireland,
Los Angeles, Mississippi¾to
smell the air, speak with the people and take her own measure of events. The moral vision she elaborated, startling in
its breadth and lyricism, moved her audiences and, quite intentionally, alarmed
her allies and enemies alike. Her work remains
a legacy from which organized labor¾stymied by narrow views of its interests and hobbled by
insularity and defensiveness ¾ could draw inspiration.
Jordan
came of age as a poet during the black arts movement of the 1960s and 70s. Among the first generation of prominent black
women writers, she was a contemporary of Toni Morrison, Nikki Giovanni, Alice
Walker, Audre Lord, and Sonia Sanchez, among
others. She took seriously her role in
opening new ground for younger politically engaged writers. A self-proclaimed descendant of Walt Whitman,
she heralded a poetry steeped in “domesticities such as disco, Las Vegas,
McDonalds, and forty dollar running shoes”1,
accessible and intimate in its use of language, and concerned with “the
conflicts between the hungry and the fat, the wasteful, the bullies.”2
Born in Harlem,
and raised in the Bedford Suyvesant section of
Brooklyn, Jordan was the working-class daughter of Jamaican immigrants¾a
night shift postal worker and a nurse¾ who managed to send their
only child to a private high school in Massachusetts and then to Barnard
College. She married a white student
from Columbia University
active in anti-McCarthy causes. They had
a son and divorced some years later. In
her memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, she
describes her father’s zealousness about her education, enforcing long hours of
reading and study the moment she entered primary school. He was a driven and violent man who beat her
often. She learned to fight back, and
kept a knife under her pillow to guard against his nighttime attacks. Her mother committed suicide in the 1960s. In her writing she struggles to understand
the social roots of her parents’ desperation.
Her multiple
identities¾Black
mother of a biracial child, working class student at elite schools, bisexual,
poet¾kept
her from easy assumptions. She opposed Israel’s
military support for Botha’s apartheid regime, and
its wars against the Palestian people, and also
wrote, “Are you hunting for Jews? You’re
looking for me!”3 When black public opinion coalesced to defend
or explain O.J. Simpson, Jordan,
in her regular column for The
Progressive, attacked him and the power money wields in U.S.
justice system. In another essay for the
Progressive, Jordan
juggles the same issues of race, gender and class, differently aligned in the
case of Mike Tyson. She describes Tyson’s
barren, impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood, devoid of
trees, fresh produce, even laundromats, a short bus
ride from where she herself grew up.
Viewing Tyson as a modern-day Bigger Thomas whose crimes emanate from
and bespeak a larger social atrocity, she writes:
I am Black.
And Mike Tyson is Black. And
neither one of us was ever supposed
to win at anything more than a fight
between the two of us. . . .
Do I believe he is guilty of rape?
Yes I do.
And what would I propose as appropriate punishment?
Whatever will force him to fear the
justice of exact retribution, . . .
And do I therefore rejoice in the
jury’s finding?
I do not.
Well, would I like to see Mike Tyson
a free man again?
He never was free!4
Her writing keeps a number of balls
in the air. She does this with such
moral rigor and grace that the labor movement¾still so dominated by a
view that characterizes concerns about “identity” as distractions, at best¾would
do well to study her work and take more than a page from it.
She upheld a
vision of a new society of extreme diversity, radically egalitarian, based on
love¾not
unlike Goldman, King and others¾long absent from labor’s parlance. She writes in a poem entitled Easter Comes to the East Coast addressed
to then-President Reagan:
This
ain’ no coalition
This
ain’ no spirit no muscle no body to stop the bullets
We
not serious
NO
NO NO NO
NO
And
I ain’ never heard about El
Salvador;
I
ain’ never seen the children sliced
and
slaughtered at Sumpul Riverside
And
I ain’ never heard about Atlanta;
I
ain’ never seen the children strangled in the woods
I
ain’ never seen the marines state troopers or the
police
out
here killing people
And
I ain’ never heard about no rage no tears
no
developing
rebellion
I
ain’ never felt no love enough to fight what’s
hateful
to
my love
NO
NO NO NO
NO
This
is just a fantasy.
We
just kidding around.
You
watch!5
The narrow limits of labor’s moral
concern contributes to its persistent depiction as a special interest group,
and partially explains why its leaders must now search for many of their
activist members in temples and churches.
Those places of worship, incidentally, often transmit moral vision
through a language steeped in poetry.
Labor’s halting
moral articulation surfaces daily, as in the recent comments of a progressive
labor leader to a group of student activists in New York. “If you want to do good, be a priest or a
social worker¾not
a trade unionist,” he exhorted them, “Unions are about getting power, not about
doing good.” Jordan
would have asked, “Why choose between reaching for power and doing good?”
Whether she writes
of Lebanon, Guatemala,
or Grand Forks, Jordan’s
political outrage emanates from a profound, even sensual compassion. In a lyricism stunning in its musicality and
devastating in its effect, she speaks of:
the grace of a boy removing
a white mask he makes beautiful . .
.
in part we grew
grandmother husband son
together when the laborblinding day was done
in part we grew
as we were meant to grow
ourselves
with kings and queens no whiteman knew . . .
I trust you will remember how we
tried to love
above the pocket deadly need to
please
and how so many of us died there
on our knees . . .6
Hers is a political poetry that
delineates human aspirations and love, however fragile or threatened.
I met June Jordan
in 1980 when I was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook, where she taught for over a decade. She was one of those rare, inspired teachers
able to alter or crystallize the worldviews and life ambitions of her
students. During the 80s, Jordan
spearheaded teach-ins on South Africa
and sparked a campus-based, student-lead anti-apartheid group.
Influential in my
decision to become a poet, Jordan made unusual efforts to promote my work¾and
that of may other students. Upon my
graduation, she told me of a poetry reading that she had been asked to give but
couldn’t. She recommended to the
organizers that I take her place on the program. They invited me. I agreed, and on the night of my performance,
she showed up, after all, with flowers, cheering vociferously. We stayed in close touch for many years. Despite her teaching, prolific writing and a
busy national and international speaking schedule, she regularly took time to
provide me with editorial comments on my poetry, and maintained a lively
correspondence that carried me through young adulthood.
For this reason, I
was not surprised to discover that, as Professor of African Studies at UC
Berkeley, she had created the Poetry for the People project. This innovative project, involving hundreds
of her students, enabled young poets to become workshop leaders for other
students, and to get poetry readings and workshops in to the surrounding
communities, on the airwaves and into print.
The project generated, among other events, a teach-in on the Persian
Gulf War and a student anthology entitled Poetry
for the People in a Time of War. Jordan’s
book, Poetry for the People: A
Revolutionary Blueprint, describes this far-flung, democratic experiment
and provides a how-to for starting new projects of its type.
On June 14, 2002, June Jordan died after
a decade-long fight with breast cancer.
In the title essay of her final book Some
of Us Did Not Die, penned in the aftermath of September 11th,
she ponders the responsibilities of those who survive devastation. “To live,” she writes “means you owe
something big to those whose lives have been taken away from them.”7
It is with this charge that she lived her own life, and for those of us
who hold out for power and a deepened
humanity, Jordan has left us many young people anxious to share the work as
well as a body of writing to challenge and incite us as we go.
