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Books by June Jordan
Some of Us Did Not Die
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Civil
Wars (1981)
On Call (1985),
Technical
Difficulties (1992)
Affirmative Acts
Directed by Desire /
Soldier: A Poet's Childhood /
Poetry for the People: a Revolutionary Blueprint
Kissing God Goodbye /
Haruko/Love Poems
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Remembering June
Jordan
Books, Bio, and Poems
1936-2002 June 15, 2002 another soldier gone—June
Jordan poet, activist,
professor Dead at 65
June Jordan, born in Harlem on July 9, 1936, was
the child of West Indian immigrant parents. Her future was
shaped, for better and for worse, by her relationship with a
father who projected his ambitions. She described her childhood
in her 1999 memoir, "Soldier: A Poet's Childhood."
Subjected to beatings by her father, Ms. Jordan was forced to
read and recite from Shakespeare's plays, the Bible, and the
poetry of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Edgar Allan Poe—all before
she was five years old. By the time she was seven, she was
writing poems herself.
In 1953, she entered Barnard College, where she met Michael
Meyer, a white student. The two married in 1955, and had a son,
Christopher, in 1958. The couple divorced in 1965. From 1967 to
1978, she taught English at the City College of New York, Yale
University, Sarah Lawrence College and Connecticut College. from
1978 to 1989 she taught at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook, before coming to UC Berkeley. Among other reward,
she received a Rockefeller Grant for creative writing and
special congressional recognition for her writing and work in
the progressive and civil rights movements.
June Jordan—poet, novelist, essayist,, and political
activist -- was one of the world's most articulate and essential
voices. Her work transcends traditional bounds of self and
society, expressing conscious optimism—the unity of justice,
equality, and tenderness. Jordan was one of those rare
writer/activists whose great strength was he ability to live
what she believed.
Internationally celebrated for her own accomplishments,
Jordan was Professor of African American Studies at the
University of California at Berkeley where she directed the
enormously popular Poetry for the people program. Poetry for the
People received a Chancellor's recognition for Community
Partnership on September 19, 2000, for reaching out to local
high schools, congregations and correctional facilities as well
as University students. Jordan has been Professor of English at
more than seven North American universities and colleges,
including Sarah Lawrence, City College, and Yale University.
Poet triumphant, Jordan's poetry is found in virtually every
major anthology of contemporary poetry. She has been included in
more than 30 collections such as the Norton Anthology of
Modern Poetry, The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature, Homegirls: Anthology of Feminism and The
Village Voice Anthology. The Library Journal (January
1994) hailed Jordan as, "One of the most important poets
writing today." A columnist for The Progressive,
Jordan wrote essays, poems, reviews, and articles for a wide
range of publications from the New York Times to VIBE
and from Ms. to Transition. Her commentary
challenged her readers to question their involvement in public
life.
Her career was once summed up by author and Nobel laureate
Toni Morrison as, "Forty years of tireless activism coupled
with and fueled by flawless art." Poet and friend Adrienne
Rich said Jordan was endowed with a rare gift for using words
with "elegance and precision," Rich said. "I
believe she felt that she should use it wherever it was called
for." June Jordan, who described herself as a "black
radical," often said that writing poetry was a political
act."
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June Jordan's final essay collection
serves as a barometer for the last four decades of
radical humanitarian thought.
Some of Us Did Not Die
is
comprised of new works and excerpts from four previous
books:
Civil
Wars (1981),
On Call (1985),
Technical
Difficulties (1992), and
Affirmative Acts (1998). From
anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209 to the 2000
presidential heist, Jordan has thought, and fought,
about the difficult issues. At turns hortatory,
critical, and, ruminative, Jordan's disquisitions are
not thematically organized. They are framed by something
looser, namely her unflagging quest for equity for
oppressed people. |
Jordan rose to prominence during the 60s
Black Arts and
women's movements, both of which bolstered and stultified her
pluralist impulses. Black Arts' cultural nationalism stifled her
individualism and gender critiques, while feminism failed to
consistently recognize race as an oppressive agent.
Jordan's insider/outsider status—as a black, bisexual,
feminist writer—helped her cultivate a global conscience.
Being simultaneously a part of and apart encouraged Jordan to
think outside the obvious boxes and caused her to identify with
the oppressed "other" anywhere. *
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I Must
Become A Menace to My Enemies
Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto,
President of The People's
Republic of Angola: 1976
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear
me:
Be afraid.
I plan to give you
reasons for your jumpy fits and facial tics
I will not walk politely
on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in
particular
to those who hear my
footsteps
or the insubstantial
rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this
impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody
on an afternoon
surrounded by my
comrades singing
terrible revenge in
merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind
man studying his face.
I have set the table in
the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to
forgive me.
The dead do not give a
damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into
the phone
just as the subway
shakes into the station
wasting her message
cancelling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful
but late
and always after the
fact that could save or
condemn me
I must become the action of my fate.
II
How many of my brothers
and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for
instance:
do we agree that more
than ten thousand
in less than a year but
that less than
five thousand
slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?
I must become a menace to my enemies.
III
And if I
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated
from my universe
who should be cauterized
from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of
the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my
soul
in its bedevilled lecheries
And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and
the whisperings
become a phantom dictate
I o-
bey in lieu of impulse
and realities
(the blossoming
flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.
Source:
Trouble the Water
(325-327)
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1998 Mid-Day Philadelphia Haiku
Black men sleep homeless
Freeze far away from
Iraq
Still sleeping still men
for chuck
and Jane James
2/16/98
Source:
360° A
Revolution of Black Poets (85)
reposted 3 February 2007 |
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Be Like June . . .
Excerpts by Mark Anthony Neal
25 June 2002
To many in the mainstream,
the very idea of a black intellectual is obscure, so it’s not
surprising that Jordan’s death has received only nominal
(usually 400 words) attention in the mainstream press. There is,
of course, an all-too-long history of the invisibility of black
death. The Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas hearings
overshadowed the death of Redd Foxx in 1991. The most genius of
American Modernist—Miles Davis—was only given his due in jazz
circles, though he was the very definition of American style for
more than four decades. One “witty” commentator even went as far
to suggest that the Houghton family was out-of-line for their
grandiose funeral arrangements for their daughter, pop singer
Aaliyah (he was upset that traffic was backed up). Alluding to
the lack of coverage of Miles Davis’s death, bassist Foley,
joked on his 1993 track “Better Not Die (N Amerika Being Black)”
that the media would have paid more attention if it was “Sonny
or muthafuckin’ Cher” and of course Sonny Bono’s funeral (he was
by then in the US Congress) was covered live on CNN.
In another example, the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently ran a story about the
disappearance of Alexis Patterson, who was apparently kidnapped
a month before Elizabeth Smart’s disappearance in Salt Lake
City, but there has been little if any mainstream media coverage
of Patterson’s kidnapping. NBC, ABC and others have devoted more
than 30 minutes of coverage to the Utah kidnapping. The
intensity of the coverage of Smart immediately struck me as an
effort to divert attention away from Bush Jr.‘s attempt to
transform the American Government via the creation of a Dept. of
Homeland Defense—black folks were of course diverted by the
arrest of an accused child sex offender and R&B singer, who
appears in a widely-circulated bootlegged copy of child
pornography that has probably been seen by more people than
those who have read at least one June Jordan book—but I digress.
If June Jordan has been
invisible to the mainstream in her death, it was not simply
because she was black, but because she was a black woman, who
chose to be an activist and a intellectual, in a society that
seemingly has little value for black women who aren’t taking off
their clothes, while celebrating their “bootilicious” reality on
a Viacom-owned video channel or an HBO “sex” series. . . .
June Jordan was committed
to exposing herself—her passions, convictions, and fears in her
words, which she willfully gave to the world with the libretto
I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and
books such as
Civil Wars, Selected Essays 1963-1980 (1996), and
most recently her memoir,
Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (1999). In her essay
“Besting a Worse Case Scenario” (from Affirmative Action, 1998),
Jordan wrote defiantly about her illness: “I want my story to
help to raise red flags, public temperatures, holy hell, public
consciousness, blood pressure, and
morale—activist/research/victim/morale so that this soft-spoken
emergency becomes the number-one-of-the-tip-of-the-tongue issue
all kinds of people join to eradicate, this
afternoon/tonight/Monday morning.” For a decade, Jordan used her
own trauma to raise question as to why nearly 50,000 women
succumb to Breast Cancer per year.—NewBlackMan
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Medgar Evers—Part 1, Civil Rights Hero
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Medgar Evers—Part 2, Civil Rights Hero
Keeping It Trim &
Burning (poem for Fannie Lou Hamer)
Amite
County Beginning
Kish Mir Tuchas Black
Power
Africa Makes Some Noise—Documentary on contemporary music from Africa
/ Straight Outta
Hunter's Point
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 4 December 2011
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