June JordanI was looking at the Ceiling and Then I saw the Sky
Inscribed and signed by June Jordan. Fine book in a near fine dustjacket. Signed first edition
June Millicent Jordan was a Jamaican American, bisexual poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.
Born: July 9, 1936, Harlem, New York, NY
Died: June 14, 2002, Berkeley, CA
One of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed Jamaican American writers of her generation, poet, playwright and essayist June Jordan was known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Over a career that produced twenty-seven volumes of poems, essays, libretti, and work for children, Jordan engaged the fundamental struggles of her era: for civil rights, women's rights, and sexual freedom. A prolific writer across genres, Jordan's poetry is known for its immediacy and accessibility as well as its interest in identity and the representation of personal, lived experience—her poetry is often deeply autobiographical. Jordan's work also frequently imagines a radical, globalized notion of solidarity amongst the world's marginalized and oppressed. In volumes like Some Changes (1971), Living Room (1985) and Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997 (1997), Jordan uses conversational, often vernacular English to address topics ranging from family, bisexuality, political oppression, racial identity and racial inequality, and memory. Regarded as one of the key figures in the mid-century American social, political and artistic milieu, Jordan also taught at many of the country's most prestigious universities including Yale, State University of New York-Stony Brook, and the University of California-Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People. Her honors and awards included fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award.
Born July 9, 1936, in Harlem, New York, Jordan had a difficult childhood and an especially fraught relationship with her father. Her parents were both Jamaican immigrants and, she recalled in Civil Wars: Selected Essays, 1963-80 (1981), “for a long while during childhood I was relatively small, short, and, in some other ways, a target for bully abuse. In fact, my father was the first regular bully in my life.” But Jordan also has positive memories of her childhood and it was during her early years that she began to write. Though becoming a poet “did not compute” for her parents, they did send the teen-aged Jordan to prep schools where she was the only Black student. Her teachers encouraged her interest in poetry, but did not introduce her to the work of any Black poets. After high school Jordan enrolled in Barnard College in New York City. Though she enjoyed some of her classes and admired many of the people she met, she felt fundamentally at odds with the predominately White, male curriculum and left Barnard to study at the University of Chicago, prior to returning to Barnard to finish her BA degree.
In 1955, Jordan married Michael Meyer, a White Columbia University student. Interracial marriages faced considerable opposition at the time, and Jordan and her husband divorced after ten and a half years, leaving Jordan to support their son. At about the same time, Jordan's career began to take off. First working in film, Jordan explored the impact of environment and architecture on the lives of low-income Black families, working with the architect Buckminster Fuller. In 1966 she began teaching at the City College of the City University of New York, and in 1969 she published her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me. Aimed at young readers, the book was originally a project of Langston Hughes. In a vernacular voice, Who Look at Me describes several paintings of Black Americans, prints of which are included in the book. Jordan felt strongly about the use of Black English, seeing it as a way to keep Black community and culture alive. She encouraged her young students to write in that idiom through her writing workshops for Black and Puerto Rican children. With Terri Bush, she edited a collection of her young pupils' writings, The Voice of the Children; she also edited the enormously popular and influential Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (1970; reprinted 2004).
Jordan's concern for children remained central to her work. Her 1971 novel for young adults, His Own Where, also written in Black English, explores Jordan's interests in environmental design. Sixteen-year-old Buddy, and his younger girlfriend, Angela, try to create a world of their own in an abandoned house near a cemetery. Jordan explained her feelings about the book to De Veaux: “Buddy acts, he moves. He is the man I believe in, the man who will come to lead his people into a new community.” Jordan's other work for young people includes Dry Victories (1972), New Life: New Room (1975), and Kimako's Story (1981), inspired by the young daughter of Jordan's friend, fellow writer Alice Walker.
Although Jordan had not written specifically for young readers since Kimako's Story, she explores her own formative years in Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2000). Jordan's searing description of learning to be a “good little soldier” under the severe tutelage of her father who drove her to be strong and smart, to appreciate beauty, but often at the cost of a beating, is told in the voice of a child. Jordan explained her goal for the book in an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth of NewsHour: “I wanted to honor my father, first of all, and secondly, I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative, and to see that there's a complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for, let alone encourage, and to understand that this is an okay story…a story, I think, with a happy outcome.” Jordan further commented in an Essence interview: “My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.” Booklist critic Stephanie Zvirin observed that Soldier, written “in the flowing language of a prose poem” is “a haunting coming-of-age memoir.”
Throughout her long career, Jordan gained renown as both an essayist and political writer, penning a regular column for the Progressive. In Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002), published the same year of the author's death from breast cancer, Jordan presents thirty-two previously published essays as well as eight new tracts. The essays examine a wide range of topics, from sexism, racism, and Black English to trips the author made to various places, the decline of the U.S. educational system, and the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote, “Some of the stronger pieces here…address the vast complex of injustice that is contemporary American life.” An edition of Jordan's collected poems was also published posthumously. That volume, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005), includes various poems published from 1969 through 2001, many of which discuss her battle with cancer. Janet St. John, writing in Booklist, declared the book “a must-read for those wanting to learn and be transformed by Jordan's opinions and impressions.” Other posthumous volumes include We're On: A June Jordan Reader (2017).
In an obituary for the San Francisco Chronicle, Annie Nakao wrote that the author “left a mountain of literary and political works.” Nakao added: “As I discovered soon enough when I picked up a June Jordan work, its contents could shout, caress, enrage. The thing it never did was leave you unengaged.” In an article of appreciation in the Los Angeles Times following the author's death, Lynell George explained how the author “spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didn't show.” George further stated that throughout her life the author “continued to publish across the map, swinging form to form as the occasion or topic demanded. Through poetry, essays, plays, journalism, even children's literature, she engaged such topics as race, class, sexuality, capitalism, single motherhood and liberation struggles around the globe.” However, Jordan perhaps understood her own legacy best. In an interview with Alternative Radio before her death, Jordan was asked about the role of the poet in society. Jordan replied: “The role of the poet, beginning with my own childhood experience, is to deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words.” She continued: “Always to be as honest as possible and to be as careful about the trust invested in you as you possibly can. Then the task of a poet of color, a black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks…I have to get myself together and figure out an angle, a perspective, that is an offering, that other folks can use to pick themselves up, to rally and to continue or, even better, to jump higher, to reach more extensively in solidarity with even more varieties of people to accomplish something. I feel that it's a spirit task.”
June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Jamaican American, bisexual poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation.[1][2]
Jordan was passionate about using Black English in her writing and poetry, teaching others to treat it as its own language and an important outlet for expressing Black culture.[3]
Jordan was inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument in 2019.
Contents
1Early life
2Personal life
3Career
4Literary topics and influence
5Contributions to feminist theory
5.1"Report from the Bahamas"
5.1.1Privilege
5.1.2Concepts of race, class, and gender
5.1.3Common identity vs. individual identity
6Death and legacy
7Honors and awards
8Reception
9Bibliography
10References
11External links
Early life
Jordan was born in 1936 in Harlem, New York, as the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan.[4] Her father was a postal worker for the USPS and her mother was a part-time nurse.[5] When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, New York.[4] Jordan credits her father with passing on his love of literature, and she began writing her own poetry at the age of seven.
Jordan describes the complexities of her early childhood in her 2000 memoir, Soldier: A Poets Childhood. She explores her complicated relationship with her father, who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but who would also beat her for the slightest misstep and call her "damn black devil child".[6] In her 1986 essay "For My American Family", Jordan explores the many conflicts in growing up as the child of Jamaican immigrant parents, whose visions of their daughters future far exceeded the urban ghettos of her present.[7] Jordans mother died by suicide, as is mentioned in On Call: Political Essays.[8] Jordan recalls her father telling her: "There was a war against colored people, I had to become a soldier."[6]
After attending Brooklyns Midwood High School for a year,[4] Jordan enrolled in Northfield Mount Hermon School, an elite preparatory school in New England.[9] Throughout her education, Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe"[10] by attending predominantly white schools; however, she was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953, Jordan graduated from high school and enrolled at Barnard College in New York City.[1]
Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her 1981 book Civil Wars, writing:
No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force. Nothing that I learned, here, lessened my feeling of pain or confusion and bitterness as related to my origins: my street, my family, my friends. Nothing showed me how I might try to alter the political and economic realities underlying our Black condition in white America.[11]
Due to this disconnect with the predominantly male, white curriculum, Jordan left Barnard without graduating. June Jordan emerged as a poet and political activist when black female authors were beginning to be heard.[12]
Personal life
At Barnard College, Jordan met Columbia University student Michael Meyer, whom she married in 1955.[1] She subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago,[1] where she pursued graduate studies in anthropology. She also enrolled at the university but soon returned to Barnard, where she remained until 1957. In 1958, Jordan gave birth to the couples only child, Christopher David Meyer.[1] The couple divorced in 1965, and Jordan raised her son alone.[1]
After the Harlem Riots of 1964, Jordan found that she was starting to hate all white people.[1] She wrote:[1]
... it came to me that this condition, if it lasted, would mean that I had lost the point: not to resemble my enemies, not to dwarf my world, not to lose my willingness and ability to love.
— June Jordan, ISBN 0195156773[full citation needed]
From that time on, Jordan wrote with love.[1] She also identified as bisexual in her writing, which she refused to deny, even when this status was stigmatized.[1][13]
Career
Jordans first published book, Who Look at Me (1969), was a collection of poems for children. It was followed by 27 more books in her lifetime, and one (Some of Us Did Not Die: Collected and New Essays) of which was in press when she died. Two more have been published posthumously: Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and the 1970 poetry collection SoulScript, edited by Jordan, has been reissued.
She was also an essayist, columnist for The Progressive, novelist, biographer, and librettist for the musical/opera I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams and produced by Peter Sellars. When asked about the writing process for the libretto of the opera, Jordan said:
The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks, I mean, thats all I did. I didnt do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribners has published now.[14]
Jordan began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 she taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. She became the director of The Poetry Center at SUNY at Stony Brook and was an English professor there from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 she was a full professor in the departments of English, Womens Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jordan was known as "the Poet of the People".[15] At Berkeley, she founded the "Poetry for the People" program in 1991. Its aim was to inspire and empower students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. Reflecting on how she began with the concept of the program, Jordan said:
I did not wake up one morning ablaze with a coherent vision of Poetry for the People! The natural intermingling of my ideas and my observations as an educator, a poet, and the African-American daughter of poorly documented immigrants did not lead me to any limiting ideological perspectives or resolve. Poetry for the People is the arduous and happy outcome of practical, day-by-day, classroom failure and success.[16]
Jordan composed three guideline points that embodied the program, which was published with a set of her students writings in 1995, entitled June Jordans Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.[16] She was not only a political activist and a poet, but she wrote childrens books as well.[17]
Literary topics and influence
Jordan felt strongly about using Black English as a legitimate expression of her culture, and she encouraged young black writers to use that idiom in their writing. She continued to influence young writers with her own published poetry, such as her collections, Dry Victories (1972), New Life (1975), and Kimakos Story (1981).[18]
Jordan was dedicated to respecting Black English (AAVE) and its usage (Jordan 1). In her piece "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,"[19] Jordan criticizes the worlds quickness to degrade the usage of Black English, or any other form considered less than "standard". She denounced "white English" as standard English, saying that in stark contrast to other countries, where students are allowed to learn in their tribal language, "compulsory education in America compels accommodation to exclusively White forms of English. White English, in America, is Standard English." "Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan" opens On Call (1985), a collection of her essays.
Jordan tells the story of working with her students to see the structure that exists within Black English, and respect it as its own language rather than a broken version of another language. Black English was spoken by most of the African-American students in her classes but was never understood as its own language. She presented it to them for the first time in a professional setting where they ordinarily expected work in English to be structured by "white standards." From this lesson, the students created guidelines for Black English.
Jordans commitment to preserve Black English was evident in her work. She wrote: "There are three qualities of Black English— the presence of life, voice, and clarity—that intensify to a distinctive Black value system that we became excited about and self-consciously tried to maintain."[20]
In addition to her writing for young writers and children, Jordan dealt with complex issues in the political arena. She engaged topics "like race, class, sexuality, capitalism, single motherhood, and liberation struggles across the globe." [18] Passionate about feminist and Black issues, Jordan "spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didnt show." [18] Her poetry, essays, plays, journalism, and childrens literature integrated these issues with her own experience, offering commentary that was both insightful and instructive.
When asked about the role of the poet in society in an interview before her death, Jordan replied: ?The role of the poet, beginning with my own childhood experience, is to deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words."[18]
Contributions to feminist theory
"Report from the Bahamas"
In her 1982 classic personal essay "Report from the Bahamas", Jordan reflects on her travel experiences, various interactions, and encounters while in The Bahamas. Writing in narrative form, she discusses both the possibilities and difficulties of coalition and self-identification on the basis of race, class, and gender identity. Although not widely recognized when first published in 1982, this essay has become central in the United States to womens and gender studies, sociology, and anthropology. Jordan reveals several issues as well as important terms regarding race, class, and gender identity.
Privilege
Jordan repeatedly grapples with the issue of privilege in both her poems and essays, emphasizing the term when discussing issues of race, class, and gender identity. She refuses to privilege oppressors who are similar to or more like certain people than other oppressors might be. She says that there should be no thought of privilege because all oppression and oppressors should be viewed at an equal standpoint.
Concepts of race, class, and gender
"[In Report from the Bahamas] Jordan describes the challenges of translating languages of gender, sexuality, and blackness across diasporic space, through the story of a brief vacation in the Bahamas."[21] Vacationing in the Bahamas, Jordan finds that the shared oppression under race, class, and/or gender is not a sufficient basis for solidarity. She notes:
"These factors of race and class and gender absolutely collapse.. .whenever you try to use them as automatic concepts of connection." They may serve well as indicators of commonly felt conflict, but as elements of connection they seem about as reliable as precipitation probability for the day after the night before the day.
As Jordan reflects on her interactions with a series of black Bahamian women, from the hotel maid "Olive" to the old women street sellers hawking trinkets, she writes:
I notice the fixed relations between these other Black women and myself. They sell and I buy or I dont. They risk not eating. I risk going broke on my first vacation afternoon. We are not particularly women anymore; we are parties to a transaction designed to set us against each other. (41)
Interspersing reflections of her trip with examples her role as a teacher advising students, Jordan details how her own expectations are constantly surprised. For instance, she recounts how an Irish woman graduate student with a Bobby Sands bumper sticker on her car provided much needed assistance to a South African student who was suffering from domestic violence. Such compassion was at odds with Jordans experience in her neighborhood of being terrorized by ethnic Irish teenagers hurling racial epithets.
Jordans concluding lines emphasize the imperative to forge connection actively rather than assuming it on the basis of shared histories:
I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us ... I must make the connection real between me and these strangers everywhere before those other clouds unify this ragged bunch of us, too late.[22]
Common identity vs. individual identity
Jordan explores that, as human beings, we possess two very contrasting identities. The first identity is the common identity, which is the one that has been imposed on us[22] by a long history of societal standards, controlling images, pressure, a variety of stereotypes, and stratification. The second is the individual identity that we have chosen[22] once we are given the chance and feel are ready to expose our true selves.
Death and legacy
Jordan died of breast cancer at her home in Berkeley, California, on June 14, 2002, aged 65.[1] Shortly before her death, she completed Some of Us Did Not Die, her seventh collection of political essays (and 27th book). It was published posthumously. In it she describes how her early marriage to a white student while at Barnard College immersed her in the racial turmoil of America in the 1950s, and set her on the path of social activism.[23]
In 2004, the June Jordan School for Equity (formerly known as the Small School for Equity) in San Francisco was named after her by its first ninth grade class. They selected her through a democratic process of research, debate, and voting.[24] A conference room was named for her in the University of California, Berkeleys Eshleman Hall, which is used by the Associated Students of the University of California.[citation needed]
In June 2019, Jordan was one of the inaugural fifty American "pioneers, trailblazers, and heroes" inducted on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor within the Stonewall National Monument (SNM) in New York City's Stonewall Inn.[25][26] The SNM is the first U.S. national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history,[27] and the wall's unveiling was timed to take place during the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.[28]
Honors and awards
Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969–70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. She also won the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998, as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Womans Foundation in 1994.
She was included in Whos Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellors Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).[29]
In 2005, Directed by Desire: Collected Poems, a posthumous collection of her work, had to compete (and won) in the category "Lesbian Poetry" at the Lambda Literary Awards, even though Jordan identified as bisexual. However, BiNet USA led the bisexual community in a multi-year campaign eventually resulting in the addition of a Bisexual category, starting with the 2006 Awards.
Reception
Author Toni Morrison commented:
In political journalism that cuts like razors in essays that blast the darkness of confusion with relentless light; in poetry that looks as closely into lilac buds as into deaths mouth ... [Jordan] has comforted, explained, described, wrestled with, taught and made us laugh out loud before we wept ... I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.[30]
Poet Adrienne Rich noted:
Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival—of the body, and mind, and the heart.[30]
Alice Walker stated:
Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all of us. She is the universal poet.[30]
Thulani Davis wrote:
In a borough that has landmarks for the writers Thomas Wolfe, W. H. Auden, and Henry Miller, to name just three, there ought to be a street in Bed-Stuy called June Jordan Place, and maybe a plaque reading, A Poet and Soldier for Humanity Was Born Here.[31]
Bibliography
Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969, OCLC 22828
Soulscript (editor), Doubleday, 1970, OCLC 492067711
The Voice of the Children, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970 (co-editor), OCLC 109494
Some Changes, Dutton, 1971, OCLC 133482
His Own Where. Feminist Press. 2010. ISBN 978-1-55861-658-5.
Dry Victories, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, ISBN 978-0-03-086023-2
Fannie Lou Hamer, Crowell, 1972, ISBN 978-0-690-28893-3
New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, Emerson Hall, 1974, ISBN 978-0-87829-055-0
New Life, Crowell, 1975, ISBN 978-0-690-00211-9
Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poems, 1954–1977, Random House, 1977, ISBN 978-0-394-40937-5
Passion, Beacon Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0-8070-3218-3
Kimakos Story, Houghton Mifflin, 1981, ISBN 978-0-395-31604-7
Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981, ISBN 978-0-8070-3232-9; Civil Wars. Simon and Schuster. 1995. ISBN 978-0-684-81404-9.
Living Room: New Poems, Thunders Mouth Press, 1985, ISBN 978-0-938410-26-3
On Call: Political Essays, South End Press, 1985, ISBN 978-0-89608-268-7
Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems, Virago, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85381-042-8
Moving Towards Home, Virago, 1989, ISBN 978-1-85381-043-5
Naming Our Destiny, Thunders Mouth Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-938410-84-3
Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon Books, 1992, ISBN 978-0-679-40625-9
Technical Difficulties: New Political Essays
Haruko: Love Poems, High Risk Books, 1994, ISBN 978-1-85242-323-0
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, Scribner, 1995
June Jordans Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. Taylor & Francis. 1995. ISBN 978-0-415-91168-9.
Kissing God Goodbye, Anchor Books, 1997, ISBN 978-0-385-49032-0
Affirmative Acts: Political Essays, Anchor Books, 1998, ISBN 9780385492256
Soldier: A Poets Childhood. Basic Civitas Books. 2001. ISBN 978-0-465-03682-0. June Jordan.
Some of Us Did Not Die. Basic Civitas Books. 2003. ISBN 978-0-465-03693-6.
Soulscript: A Collection of Classic African American Poetry. Random House Digital, Inc. 2004. ISBN 978-0-7679-1846-6. (editor, reprint)
Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005) (edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles), ISBN 978-1-55659-228-7
Jordan, June (1939-2002)
In both her poetry and her essays, June Jordan called for the rejection of stereotypical views of bisexuality, and she associated sexual independence with political commitment.
Born on July 9, 1936, in Harlem to Jamaican immigrants, June Jordan grew up in Brooklyns Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Her childhood in one of the largest black urban areas in the country, coupled with her three high school years at a predominantly white preparatory school, gave Jordan an early understanding of racial conflicts.
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She attended Barnard College, where she met and married Michael Meyer, a white Columbia University student who shared her political beliefs. Divorced after eleven years, Jordan continued studying architectural design and working as a free-lance political journalist to support herself and her son.
Her broad-based inclusive politics were significantly influenced by her work in 1964 with visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, her mothers suicide in 1966, her meetings with Fannie Lou Hamer in 1969, and her travels to Nicaragua in the 1980s.
She began her teaching career in 1967 at the City College of New York and also taught at Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence, and Yale; in 1989, she became a professor of African-American studies at University of California, Berkeley, and began writing a political column for The Progressive magazine. She has received a number of awards and fellowships, including a Rockefeller Grant, the Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award.
Although primarily known for her poetry, Jordan wrote essays, plays, novels, and musicals. The title of her 1989 collection of new and previously published poems, Naming Our Destiny, succinctly describes her ethical vision, as well as a central theme in her work: the importance of individual and collective self-determination.
This dual emphasis on personal and communal autonomy, coupled with the belief that her own self-determination entails recognizing and affirming the interconnections between herself and apparently dissimilar peoples, gives Jordans work an aggressive optimism and a diversity that grow increasingly complex in her later writings.
Throughout her work, she explored multiple personal, national, and international issues, including her relationships with female and male lovers, homophobia, Black English, racial violence in Atlanta, South African apartheid, and the Palestinian crisis.
Given the opposition bisexuals have received from both heterosexual and lesbian and gay communities, Jordans willingness to identify herself openly as bisexual established an extremely important precedent. Her most radical statement can be found in "A New Politics of Sexuality" (in Technical Difficulties, 1993), where she calls for a "new, bisexual politics of sexuality."
In addition to rejecting the stereotypical views of bisexuals, she associates sexual independence with political commitment and maintains that homophobia and heterosexism do not represent "special interest" concerns or secondary forms of oppression less important than racism or sexism. Indeed, she suggests that sexual oppression is perhaps the most deeply seated form of human conflict.
Jordan enacted her bisexual politics in "A Short Note to My Very Critical Friends and Well-Beloved Comrades," "Meta-Rhetoric," "Poem for Buddy," and other poems in Naming Our Destiny, where she rejected restrictive labels and exclusionary political positions based on sexuality, color, class, or nationality.
On June 14, 2002, June Jordan died of breast cancer.
June Jordan, who came of age as a poet when the voices of black female writers were just beginning to be heard, died on June 14 at her home in Berkeley, Calif.
She was 65. The cause was breast cancer, which she fought for a decade, said Adrienne Torff, a friend.
Like the careers of Audre Lord and Alice Walker, Ms. Jordans was forged by the black arts movement of the 60s and 70s. Her poetry was imbued with advocacy for the poor, for women and the disenfranchised.
In an interview yesterday, Ms. Walker, a close friend, called the small, elegant but tough Ms. Jordan, unwillingly nonviolent. In Poem About Police Violence, she wrote about the so-called accidental death of a black man in police custody: Tell me something/ what you think would happen if/ everytime they kill a black boy/ then we kill a cop/ everytime they kill a black man/ then we kill a cop/ you think the accident rate would lower/ subsequently?
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Still, Ms. Jordan could be a poet of great delicacy, as in On a New Years Eve, in which she describes watching a lover sleep: and/ as I watch your arm/ your/ brown arm/ just/ before it moves/ I know/ all things are dear/ that disappear/ all things are dear/ that disappear.
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She was the author or editor of 28 books, essays and novels for children and the libretto for the 1995 opera by John Adams I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.
She was also a teacher. At the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a professor of African-American Studies, she founded Poetry for the People, which trains undergraduates to take poetry to community groups as a form of political empowerment.
Ms. Jordan was born in Harlem, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, a postal clerk, and Mildred, a nurse. Ms. Jordans mother was deeply depressed and eventually committed suicide.
Her father had wanted a boy and referred to her as he. In Soldier: A Poets Childhood (Basic Civitas Books, 1999) she described being brutally beaten by him: Like a growling beast, the roll-away mahogany doors rumble open, and the light snaps on and a fist smashes into the side of my head and I am screaming awake: Daddy! What did I do?! Yet her father helped forge her identity as a writer, she said, giving her books by Paul Lawrence Dunbar and forcing her to memorize Shakespeare.
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In a radio interview two years ago, Ms. Jordan appeared to have come to terms with her father. She said: He didnt know what to do to try to provide against the failure of his only child in this new land. I think that probably contributed to the violence of his frustration. But that he loved me and thought me capable of anything and everything there was never any doubt.
After the family moved to Brooklyn, Ms. Jordan became the only black student at Midwood High School. Later, she won a scholarship to the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts, now the coeducational Northfield-Mount Hermon School.
After Northfield she attended Barnard College in New York City where she met Michael Meyer, a white student. The couple married and had a son, Christopher, who lives in Montana.
In her book of essays, Civil Wars (Scribners, 1996), Ms. Jordan wrote of the difficulties of an interracial marriage. In 1966 the couple divorced. She raised her son largely on her own, struggling to eke out a living as a freelance journalist. She was a researcher and writer for Mobilization for Youth in New York, and in 1967 she got a teaching job at City College. Two years later she published a childrens book, Who Look at Me?
To the end, she remained involved in politics. In September Basic Civitas books is scheduled to publish Some of Us Did Not Die, which contains essays on Israel, Islam and O. J. Simpson. The books title is from a poem she read last year in a speech at Barnard. She spoke of her battle with breast cancer and about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which she said proved the need for a secular democracy that protects the rights of male/ female/Jew/ Gentile/ Muslim.
She read from a poem in which she imagined her dying body and a predatory hawk gliding overhead: He makes that dive/ to savage/ me/ and inches/ from the blood flood lusty/ beak/ I roll away/ I speak/ I laugh out loud/ Not yet/ big bird of prey/ not yet.
Correction: June 20, 2002
An obituary on Tuesday about the poet June Jordan misspelled the middle name of an author whose books she credited with having helped forge her identity as a writer. He was Paul Laurence Dunbar, not Lawrence.
Correction: June 27, 2002
An obituary of the poet June Jordan on June 18 misspelled the surname of a poet whose career, like Ms. Jordans, was forged by the black arts movement of the 60s and 70s. She was Audre Lorde, not Lord.
“I still do not recognize a necessary conflict between the sonnet and the bow and arrow,” wrote June Jordan in 1986, “I do not accept that immersion into our collective quest for things beautiful will cripple our own ability to honor the right of all human beings to survive.” Through a dazzling range of poems, essays, articles, lectures, speeches, and reviews, June Jordan stands at the interstice of beauty and politics. Her work demonstrates a rare and unceasing commitment to the realization of social justice, political equality, and to the unseen possibilities of true human coalitions across race, sex, and class. Currently a professor of African American studies at The University of California at Berkeley and a regular columnist for The Progressive, Jordan is the award-winning author of 21 books, including 1992's collection of essays Technical Difficulties (Vintage) and the recently published book of poems Haruko Love Poems (Serpent's Tail/High Risk). Poetry for the People, a book project with her students, will be published by Routledge this fall. Always urgent, inspiring, and demanding, Jordan's work has left its indelible mark everywhere from Essence to The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and from theater stages to the floors of the United Nations and the United States Congress. But sitting in her light-filled living room in Berkeley, Jordan was most eager to discuss her libretto for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (Scribner's), an experimental contemporary opera created in collaboration with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars. Featuring sets painted by California graffiti artists and music by a jazz, funk, and rock fusion ensemble, the story in songs of this “earthquake-romance” centers on the young lives of men and women in Los Angeles struggling to find and articulate love in the midst of moral and physical devastation, tragedy, and upheaval. Like all of her work, the opera strives to bear witness to the human ability to survive nightmares of injustice and embrace visions of a more hopeful future.
Josh Kun Why did you choose to set the opera in Los Angeles?
June Jordan It's the most heterogeneous city in the United States and demographically probably represents the forecast for the country. That's why. Folks will work it out in the context of that extreme diversity, or we won't.
JK Your opera dealt with young people within a context that is fairly uncharacteristic these days, in that it was hopeful. It was not drenched in cynicism or nihilism—or any of the other phrases that get hammered down our throats in both the academic and popular presses. Was that a conscious move?
JJ Absolutely. That's one of the reasons I was excited to take this on, because I saw it as an opportunity to present Americans under 25 years old through a completely different prism, one which is realistically hopeful.
JK As opposed to?
JJ Well, when people use the word hopeful often the next word behind that is idiotic.
JK Or utopian.
JJ Or utopian, naive, mistaken. This opera is realistic and hopeful. Yeah, both. (pause) My take is based on my actual experience at UC Berkeley, so you can't argue with me about this. I know that there are all these different components embodied by all of us, and I also know the tremendous positive possibilities of people working together. I've spoken with reporters and so on who patronize me, and I think: you can go ahead and patronize all you want, you don't know what you're talking about. It's in my face, my life, my ears—every day. I've been teaching here for five years. And my course, Poetry for the People is, if you will, a laboratory and the results are in. It works and it's people under 25 who are making it work.
JK Let me ask you about the process the three of you went through to put the opera together. Did you write the libretto first?
JJ The composer, John [Adams], said he needed to have the whole libretto before he could begin, so I just sat down last spring and wrote it in six weeks I mean, that's all I did. I didn't do laundry, anything. I put myself into it 100 percent. What I gave to John and Peter [Sellars] is basically what Scribner's has published now.
JK Did writing with the knowledge that it was going to be sung stretch or change the writing process for you?
JJ Yeah. I wrote everything with the determination to rhyme as much as possible and to have many rhythmical attributes, loading every line and every stanza to facilitate the transliteration of the work into music. John asked me to tape most of it, which I did, so he could hear how I intended it to sound. We had a couple of conversations trying to figure out a common language for his music and my music, so to speak, so that he could move it from words into his vocabulary. I think we partly succeeded. What is very striking about this piece is that the words are clear throughout. Peter has been fastidious about insisting on enunciation and John took painstaking care in protecting the clarity of the words and verse.
JK That's a lucky situation.
JJ Yeah! From what I understand sometimes people don't speak to each other after all this.
Jordan_01.jpg
The cast of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, composed by John Adams, libretto by June Jordan and directed by Peter Sellars. Photos © 1995 by Ken Freidman, courtesy of Lincoln Center.
JK How did you come up with the characters? Were you trying to stick within types or were you trying to disrupt the representations of those types?
JJ I wanted to have a cast representative of the people who live in LA, the people that I teach and work with here at UC Berkeley. I came up with all the characters except for Tiffany, the crime television reporter—she was Peter's brainstorm. I don't watch television, so I didn't know such a thing as crime-as-news existed. I was incredulous when he told me about it. He gave me a list of programs to watch and I was like, “Oh, my God!” And together, Peter and I figured out the Asian-American character, Rick. Actually, I was trying to have everyone in the cast be equal.
JK Equal as far as actual lines?
JJ Yeah. How many times you get a solo, how many times you get to the center stage.
JK The ultimate egalitarian opera?
JJ I was really trying very hard. (laughter) It's an all-star cast. The first character I was hot about was David, the black Baptist preacher, ‘cause I thought that was such obvious, dramatic material. To start the piece with a gospel praise song about a girl who, “like to make me lose my religion!” You think you know who this person is and then you realize you don't, and that's true for all the characters. Rick is so eloquent in the courtroom, but then one-to-one the guy can't talk. I made a deliberate effort to dislodge people from their familiar habits of expectation about other folks they don't really know.
JK One of the things I found so striking about the opera is that it deals with various kinds of earthquakes—both actual and concrete as well as symbolic and metaphorical—I was wondering what it is, for you, about the concept of an earthquake that is so attractive or seductive to work within? In your essay, “Unrecorded Agonies,” you write about the feelings of being unsettled and how this can be a productive space.
JJ Actually, I had just arrived in California when the Loma Prieta took place and it was because I saw how most people responded to it that I decided to stay. People were completely humane and the volunteers were fabulous. That had a profound effect upon me. Secondly, my idea of romance is that it's like an earthquake. From the very beginning I didn't call it an opera, I called it an “earthquake-romance.” After I finished Act One, I asked Peter if he could do an earthquake onstage and he said, “Absolutely!” So I said, “Here we go!” And then I had huge problems figuring out how to get from Act One to Act Two; I was stumbling around. Peter came up from L.A. and we were brainstorming and on the counter I had a very beautiful edition of the Koran that someone had sent to me. So Peter pulled it out and came to the section towards the end about the earthquake. It says that when an earthquake occurs, every atom of evil will be known and every atom of good will be known. And we thought, “That's it!” Now I knew what I was going to aim for; a kind of denudation would take place between and among people, that a natural catastrophe would coerce or make possible. I felt very solid about having an earthquake. But I didn't want it to be a cheap shot or a deus-ex-machina, or to be melodramatic. When Peter found that in the Koran, I thought: This is something that folks have recognized forever, that possibility of coming clean in a disaster.
JK I was re-reading the libretto this morning, that lyric, “Sometimes the news ain't something that you choose.” At that point I thought of the opera as a blues response to the earthquake and the romance of contemporary life—getting the news that you don't choose and enduring it, transcending it.
JJ Yeah, you're onto something there. I've been saying it another way, and I hope folks will notice that although everybody is beleaguered, nobody gives up on the love. So, as far as I'm concerned, it's a good news piece. But it's a lot of good news coming out of a lot of bad news.
JK I went back and looked at your essay, “Where Is the Love?” where you write about the ability to love yourself as the necessary precursor to loving another, and to forging alliances and coalitions across race, gender, and class through that love. How did you see love operating in this piece?
JJ I thought of it as what Leila describes, in the opera: “Everybody wants to be somebody's straight up number one.” It's sexual, it's exclusive, but it doesn't mean the closing off of the rest of the world. It's a happy starting place. It's a huge excitement, not ho-hum. To be very excited about somebody else and have that somebody else be very excited about you, is very wonderful. This is the way to go, and that's what I mean by love. I don't mean anything other than that.
JK Another earthquake.
JJ Yeah. It's coming out of yourself, really. It's a deeply appreciative and enthusiastic awareness of somebody else. I mean, in general. It's what we're living for and that's what I'm fighting for. I think of myself as a political person doing whatever I do, but basically what I aim for is to make love a reasonable possibility. ‘Cause if things are really horrifying all the time, I don't think it is a reasonable possibility. If we're living in a climate of awesome cruelty exercised by folks who have power over us, it can happen, but I don't think it becomes reasonable. But it's that possibility that makes living worthwhile. My commitment to love is not an alternative to my political commitments. It's the same thing. Except in this piece I was able to concentrate overwhelmingly on the lyrical side of the quest between two people, again and again.
JK Yet it's a quest that's linked together by an overt political backdrop. All of your characters had to overcome tremendous odds to articulate many different things, political or otherwise, but the one thing that was struggling to become possible was the articulation of love. It was a moving ending.
JJ Oh yeah? Good, I'm glad. Peter says he thinks of it as a kind of Shakespearean epilogue. When I finished Act Two, Peter flew up and the next morning we read it together. We just wept. I said, “Do you think it's too sad?” And Peter said, “No, it's truthful.” So I'm relieved that when you see it on stage, at least at this point, we'll see how it evolves, indeed it is very moving and disturbing. If people are devastated, that's not the intention. We don't want folks walking out of there feeling wrecked.
Jordan_03.jpg
Scene from I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky.
JK Even the title, I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, which is taken from a post-earthquake observation of destruction, can be looked at in two ways. First, there is a hole where my roof should be. On the other hand, by the end of the piece, it becomes a very hopeful statement: I'm looking beyond the ceiling to the bigger sky. That's a nice inversion. Let me ask you a bit about the character Mike, the white cop, who throughout the piece is associated with a closeted queer sexuality. I wanted to hear more about this character especially in the light of your other work, your writings on bi-sexuality, your recent poetry and essays like, “A New Politics of Sexuality.” So many of your longer romance songs are built into the conventions of heterosexual romance, I was wondering how his character was meant to work in and out of that.
JJ What I was looking at there, was to show somebody who is in love with the idea of being a man, which most people are, including women. The whole culture is about John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and so, to me, there is a homoerotic content to it. I was hoping that the character could help people toward a revelation. I think of him as a do-good Clint Eastwood. He's sincerely a good guy who's in the Marines, plays basketball…
JK Likes being in the locker room more than he is aware…
JJ Slapping each other on the butt, yeah, he likes guys. Then you have to look at that and say, “What does that mean?” ‘Cause if you really, really like guys and you really, really, like looking at men then you're really, really not that crazy about women, probably. Right? I was interested in trying to confront people with that, have them look at that as a possible revelation.
JK Especially because he's a cop.
JJ ‘Cause he's a cop, right. I'm not entirely happy yet with how he's been realized, but I'm hoping we'll get someplace where he's a total guy-guy. The idea that he might be gay would be the farthest thing from his mind. And I want him to be a queer basher. In the rewrite I've made him a little more obnoxious and a little more obvious. He is ready to kill queers. I'm talking serious queer basher. So that when you get into Act Two, it's like, “Whoa! Talk about earthquakes.” Why are you so overwrought about somebody else's sexuality unless your own is not nailed down? This is the sort of question I'm trying to raise with Mike. It's a very tricky thing that I'm trying to pull off and maybe it won't work. I don't know. I wanted to have him remain sympathetic, so I wanted it to be clear that he really does good things. He's a committed guy. He's what I call a community activist and he means well. He believes that everything he does is about being a good man. So he's not coming from an evil place. And he's also completely committed to this woman reporter, Tiffany, who rides with him in his car and is so infatuated with him. She's excited just tagging along. He's never had anybody like that. I tried to make it clear that there are a lot of people who are out of touch with themselves, most of us I think. He happens to be out of touch with himself in this way. He really does love Tiffany, it's just a different kind of love each of them is talking about. What I was trying to do was to make each person realistic and complicated. So that if I could persuade you that each of these people was somebody to care about and cherish, then you would be cherishing somebody real and not a fantasy or some hero—somebody like yourself. I developed a legal pad for each character: What does he eat? What does he wear? What kind of shoes? What color socks? What kind of cereal? What kind of music? What kind of girl does he like? Everything I could possibly think of I had a pad for each of them, then I started figuring out, okay, who's gonna hook up with whom? I didn't have that clear at all.
JK The ultimate matchmaker role! To actually set up your characters.
JJ This is my party! But on the political side what was really creepy was that Propositions 184 and 187 were not a twinkle in anybody's eye when I wrote the libretto. [Proposition 187 denies all state benefits except emergency medical care to undocumented immigrants and Proposition 184 is California's “three strikes” law.] Now, suddenly, this is everybody's opera out here because we're all in it. (pause) I want to say something about the word ‘opera.' It is a story in song. Everything is sung and nothing is spoken, which is partly the definition of an opera. Another definition, according to Leonard Bernstein, is that there are parallel plots and subplots. There is love. There is tragedy. There is triumph. There is extremity throughout. I thought that this context would automatically confer a dignity and stature upon these young men and women that otherwise might not be available to them.
June Jordan: A Third-WaveFeminist towards a GenderedDemocratic PoeticsAbeer Refky SeddeekAssociate Professor in English LiteratureCollege of Language and Communication (CLC)Arab Academy for Science, Technology and MaritimeTransport (AASTMT)28AbstractThe aim of the present study is threefold: to prove that theAmerican poet June Jordan (1936-2002) is able to combine hersocial and political views along with her personal life to servepublic causes such as political oppression, African-Americanidentity, democracy in the US, and racial inequality; to reflect herfeminist advocation of shared human rights and goals for a bettersociety; and to underline her globalized notion of solidarityamongst the world's marginalized and oppressed in their searchfor democracy and freedom. The study is based on Nicky Marsh'sDemocracy in Contemporary US Women's Poetry (2007), itsdebate on third-wave feminism and democratic theory, and thecomplexities of being public in the US culture. The study provesthat Jordan's poetry examines the discursive assumptions ofdemocracy in the US, contributes to the democratic tradition of theUS contemporary culture through the gender theory that considerscitizenship and publicness as the main concepts of third-wavefeminism, and suggests new democratic cultures by its variety ofpublics and feminist discourse. The study concludes that Jordan'sfeminist discourse focuses on the relation between the private, thepolitical and the public and creates a strong public discoursecapable of reforming the inequality deeply implanted in thecontaminated formative discourses. As a third-wave feminist,Jordan is concerned with the conflict between a feminist and ademocratic identity to form a new poetic language for beingpublic. She adopts the gender theory that investigates the sociopolitical implications of democracy and exhibits the femaleidentity as a societal construct. Jordan's poetry suggests newmodels of gendered democratic poetics and shows that socialreality shapes the poet's identity through which reality isdeconstructed and offered alternatives.Key words: Feminist discourse, Gendered-democratic poetics,Political activism, The political and the personal, Thepublic and the private, Third-wave feminism29جون جوردان : شاعرة الموجة النسویة الثالثة والشاعریة الجنسانیة الدیمقراطیةملخصً: إثبات أن الشاعرة الأمریكیةترتكز الد ارسة الحالیة على ثلاثة محاور أساسیة، ألا وهى أولاجون جوردان (١٩٣٦-٢٠٠٢ (تمتلك القدرة على الدمج بین آ ارئها الاجتماعیة والسیاسیةوحیاتها الخاصة لخدمة قضایا عامة مثل القهر السیاسي، والهویة الأفریقیة الأمریكیة،وثانی : توضیح دعم ً والدیمق ارطیة في الولایات المتحدة الأمریكیة، والتمییز العنصري. اًا: إلقاء الضوءجوردان النسوي لحقوق وأهداف الإنسان المشتركة نحو مجتمع أفضل. وثالثعلى مفهومها عن التضامن العالمي بین المهمشین والمقهورین في العالم أثناء بحثهم عنالدیمق ارطیة والحریة.وتستخدم الد ارسة كتاب الكاتبة النسویة نیكي مارش "الدیمق ارطیة في شعر الشاع ارتالأمریكیات المعاص ارت" (٢٠٠٧ ،(وما یشمله من تعریف بالموجة الثالثة النسویة والنظریةالدیمق ارطیة وصعوبات التحول إلى الخطاب العام في الثقافة الأمریكیة.وتثبت الد ارسة قیام جوردان بتحلیل الافت ارضات الخطابیة حول الدیمق ارطیة بالولایات المتحدةٕ سهامها في التقالید الدیمق ارطیة للثقافة المعاصرة للولایات المتحدة من خلالالأمریكیة، وانظریة النوع التي تعتبر المواطنة والعمومیة بمثابة المفهومین الرئیسیین في الموجة الثالثةالنسویة، وطرحها لثقافات دیمق ارطیة جدیدة من خلال التنوع في الآ ارء العامة والخطابالنسوي. وتخلص الد ارسة إلى أن الخطاب النسوي لجوردان یركز على العلاقة بین الخاصا یستطیع إصلاح اللامسًا قویًا عاموالسیاسي والعام ویطور خطاب اواة المترسخة في وسائل ًالخطاب الشكلیة الملوثة.ولكونها شاعرة تندرج تحت مظلة الموجة الثالثة النسویة ، تهتم جوردان بالص ارع بین الم أرةوالهویة الدیمق ارطیة لصیاغة لغة شعریة جدیدة لمعالجة القضایا العامة. وتتبنى جورداننظریة النوع التي تبحث في مضامین الدیمق ارطیة الاجتماعیة والسیاسیة وتوضح الهویةالنسویة ككیان مجتمعي.ًا جدیدة للشاعریة الدیمق ارطیة ویبین كیفیة تشكیل الواقعكما یقدم شعر جوردان أی ًضا نم.
Auteur afro-américain SIGNÉ Je regardais June Jordan (couverture rigide 1995) populaire
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