June Jordan
1936–2002
Poet, novelist, essayist, educator, activist
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“I write for as many different people as I can, acknowledging that in any problem situation you have at least two viewpoints to be reached,” June Jordan said in a Publishers Weekly interview. “I’m also interested in telling the truth as I know it.” By the mid-1990s Jordan had become one of the country’s most prominent contemporary black women writers. A nationally renowned lecturer and activist, she produced an extensive and varied body of work, through which she strongly affirmed herself, herrights as a woman, her thoughts on black consciousness, and her ties to the African-American community. Though she was best known for her intimate, powerfully direct poetry, Jordan also wrote award-winning children’s fiction, highly charged nonfiction pieces, plays, and songs.
Jordan’s poetry and other works reflect her belief in addressing the concerns of audiences of color, exploring black life, creating better living conditions for black families, and enhancing black culture. While self-realization is crucial, Jordan also believed in shared human goals for a better society; her poetry enabled her to express her political ideas while making art. She was frequently compared with politically conscious black poets such as Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, but her verse bore traces of other influences, including those of white American poet Walt Whitman, whose self-celebratory poems she admired.
Jordan’s varied works include her debut book of poems, titled Who Look at Me; her first young adult novel, His Own Where, which was nominated for the National Book Award and written entirely in black English; a biography written for young readers about Mississippi activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who struggled for black voting rights; the classic verse collection Things That I Do in the Dark; the essay collection Civil Wars, about violence in America from the 1960s to the 1980s; Naming Our Destiny, a 30-year compilation of poetry; and the 1992 book of essays, Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union.
In all, Jordan published twenty-seven books. One of her last books, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, published in 2000 is an autobiography and discusses her early childhood with an almost indifferent mother and sometimes brutally abusive father in some detail. In an Essence magazine interview with Alexis DeVeaux,
At a Glance…
Born on July 9, 1936, in New York, NY; died June 14, 2002, in Berkeley, CA; daughter of Granville Ivanhoe (a postal clerk) and Mildred Maude (a nurse; maiden name, Fisher) Jordan; married Michael Meyer, 1955 (divorced, 1965); children: Christopher David. Education: Attended Barnard College and University of Chicago.
Career: Poet, prose writer, educator, activist. Assisted producer for film The Cool World, 1963-64; City College of the City University of New York, instructor, 1966-68, assistant professor of English, 1975-76; Yale University, visiting lecturer in English and Afro-American studies, 1974-75; taught English and directed Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK Program) at Connecticut College, New London, 1967-69; taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, 1969-74; State University of New York at Stony Brook, assistant professor, 1978-82, professor of English, 1982-89, director of poetry center and creative writing program, 1986-89; professor of Afro-American Studies and Women’s Studies at University of California at Berkeley, 1989-02.
Memberships: Board member, Center for Constitutional Rights, 1984-02, New York Foundation for the Arts, and PEN American Center.
Awards: Rockefeller grant for creative writing, 1969-70; Nancy Bloch Award, 1971, for The Voice of the Children; chosen one of the year’s best young adult novelists, New York Times, 1971; National Book Award nomination, 1971, for His Own Where; Yaddo fellow, 1979-80; National Endowment for the Arts fellow in poetry, 1982; award for international reporting from National Association of Black Journalists, 1984; New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry, 1985; Writers for Writers Award from Barnes & Noble. 2001.
Jordan summed up her relationship with the two of them. “My mother was shadowy. I would be very hard-put to tell you what about me, about the way I am or think, comes from my mother. My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.” She also told De Veaux that the message that she hoped to send to young black girls who read Soldier is that the girl can survive and become the woman—that she need not assume a victim mentality that she can take control and overcome adversity.
Born in Harlem on July 9, 1936, Jordan was the only child of hardworking immigrant parents who moved to New York City from the island of Jamaica. Her father, Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, held a night position at the U.S. Postal Service, while her mother, Mildred, worked as a nurse. Jordan spent her first five years in Harlem before the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It was there that she wrote her first poems at the age of seven. Her concern with her family and locale stayed with her into adulthood and prompted her to write in her essay collection Civil Wars: “You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola [and that] leads you back to your own bed.”
Jordan’s childhood was a painful one. She grew up in a home where her father beat her out of his own sense of oppression while her mother stood passively by. These early experiences contributed to her passionate search for self-realization—a search that was delayed by her parents’ decision to send her for three years to an all-white New England preparatory school, the Northfield School for Girls in Massachusetts. In her English classes there, she studied almost exclusively the work of white male poets, which she later acknowledged had a stifling effect on her growth as an African-American artist.
After graduating from prep school, Jordan entered Barnard College in the fall of 1953. There she met Michael Meyer, a Columbia University student, whom she married in 1955. Because Meyer was white, the couple experienced the anguish of intense racial prejudice—during the pre-civil rights era in the United States, interracial marriages were against the law in many states. Jordan interrupted her schooling at Barnard in 1955 for a year of studies at the University of Chicago, where her husband was getting his graduate degree in anthropology; she returned to Barnard the next year.
Two years later, their son, Christopher David Meyer, was born. But Jordan’s relationship with her husband was deteriorating. Increasingly she was raising and supporting her son alone and developing her own varied interests in poetry, journalism, the civil rights movement, and the Harlem community. She assisted a documentary filmmaker in producing a film about Harlem’s street kids called The Cool World. She also worked on a proposal with architect Buckminster Fuller to build low-cost, aesthetic housing in the Harlem community. Her work of the period was extensively influenced by her surroundings, by the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and by the factors that lead to the Harlem riots of 1964, which she observed and wrote about.
After she and her husband divorced in 1965, Jordan supported herself and her son alone and took various teaching positions. She taught English and literature at the City College of the City University of New York, Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. By 1982 she had been named a full professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and four years later she was directing the school’s poetry center and creative writing program. She began teaching Afro-American and women’s studies at the University of California at Berkeley in 1989.
After the publication of her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me, in 1969, Jordan wrote a series of powerful works that chronicled her life’s struggle and reflected her growing maturity. The title poem in this first book best shows her movement away from victimization and toward resistance; in it she wrote about the way she thought many white people of that era viewed people of color: “A white stare splits obliterates/the nerve-wrung wrist from work/the breaking ankle or/the turning glory/of a spine. Although the world/forgets me/I will say yes/AND NO. I am black, alive and looking back at you.”
By the time her major collection of poetry, Things That I Do in the Dark, edited by novelist Toni Morrison, was published in 1977, Jordan viewed herself thus: “I am a stranger/learning to worship the strangers on earth/around me/whoever you are/whoever I may become.” In her heavily autobiographical essay book Civil Wars, published four years later, Jordan describes an American landscape torn apart by racial tension and violence. Black writer Toni Cade Bambara summarized the book and put it in historical context in Ms. magazine: “[Civil Wars is a] chilling but profoundly hopeful vision of living in the USA. Jordan’s vibrant spirit manifests itself throughout this collection of articles, letters, journal entries, and essays. What is fundamental to that spirit is caring, commitment, a deep-rooted belief in the sanctity of life. Civil Wars is an ‘autobiography’ very much in the vein of Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, by W. E. B. Du Bois, the distinguished black scholar and activist of an earlier generation.”
Jordan’s works reveal an unwavering concern for basic human rights and equity for all people. In her “Poem About My Rights,” which appeared in her famous collection about violence in society titled Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, she expresses rage and frustration at racial and sexual discrimination: “We are the wrong people of /the wrong skin on the wrong continent. It was my father saying I was wrong saying that/I should have been a boy because he wanted one. I am the history of the rejection of who I am.” But she also affirms herself and vows to defend herself if necessary: “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name/My name is my own my own my own/and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this/but I can tell you that from now on my resistance/my simple and daily and nightly self-determination/may very well cost you your life.”
Critics have underscored Jordan’s simultaneously personal and universal appeal, as well as her use of Black English and irony. She is “a poet for many people, speaking in a voice they cannot fail to understand about things they will want to know,” commented Susan Mernit in Library Journal “[Passion] elucidates those moments when personal life and political struggle, two discrete elements, suddenly entwine.” Commenting on the power and skill of Jordan’s writings, Ms. magazine contributor Joan Larkin wrote, “June Jordan’s language is a high energy blend of street and literary idiom. Irony is basic to Jordan’s perception of a violent, antiblack, antifemale culture.” Other reviewers acknowledged her adherence to a black oral tradition. In a lengthy essay in African American Review, Scott MacPhail discusses Jordan’s role as a black intellectual. About Jordan he says, “June Jordan’s career thus inspires a broadening of our expectations for what an African-American intellectual can and should do, and how she can do it.”
Because of her personal experiences, Jordan often expressed identification with other nonwhite peoples around the globe who seek self-determination. Her books On Call and Living Room, collections of essays and poetry respectively, reflect her identification with the Palestinian people. In the 1980s her scathing poetic and prose criticism of Israeli policy concerning Lebanon and the Palestinians generated considerable controversy.
And, at other times on other topics, Jordan has drawn fire from critics for being one-sided and rhetorical. In 1989 when Naming Our Destiny —her compilation of poetry spanning three decades—was published along with previously uncollected verse, Publishers Weekly commented: “[Jordan] attempts to shoulder too many causes here, at times losing herself in rhetoric and politics that could benefit from a fuller discussion. However, in her best work, Jordan takes an infectious delight in language, playing with words to transform experience. She makes artful use of rhyme, and draws from slave ballads and blues music to protest the everyday human tribulations that otherwise might go unnoticed. We witness the author progressing from a youthful struggle with identity to a mature feminist assertion of the rights of all people.”
In her 1992 collection of essays, Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union, Jordan discusses her immigrant Brooklyn family’s quest for the American dream; she also deals with enduring stereotypes about race and class, as well as myths surrounding African-American historical figures from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Anita Hill. Commented Adele Logan Alexander in the Women’s Review of Books, “June Jordan has a prolific intellect and a vast reservoir of extraordinary and broad-based knowledge, yet her writing maintains its solid grounding in everyday experience.” Though Jordan’s voice often made those who support the status quo uncomfortable, her clear aim was to raise questions about the way we live and to provide people with visions of future alternatives.
In her written work and her activities, Jordan worked throughout her life to make sure that the black community remembered to value the black experience and black culture. She campaigned for the recognition of Black English and wrote several poems, essays, and a full-length book, His Own Where, in Black English. Two of her essays, “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You” and “White English/Black English: The Politics of Translation” explain why she felt Black English is important and why it should be studied as a dialect. In her later years, Jordan often took up the cause of black figures that she felt needed it. In one if her essays she speaks out against the black leadership in America for their failure to back Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In another she wrote a “Requiem for the Champ,” speaking about the forces that formed Mike Tyson and caused him to react with such violence. She explains that in determining responsibility for this type of violence, we must look to the community and economic structure that formed the man—she says “There must be some way for our culture to reward a black man for something other than violence; there must be something else for a black man from the ghetto to do or be.”
In 1995, in a rather interesting side track to her career, Jordan collaborated with composer John Adams and director Peter Sellers in a romantic musical that explored life in late 20th century Los Angeles. The result was a short-lived production called I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I saw the Sky. In a review for Insight on the News, Gale Hanson writes “But the best anyone could wish for this ill-conceived and badly executed effort is that the stage floor would open and swallow the production whole.”
Much of Jordan’s written work is drawn from her own life and experiences. Perhaps the clearest indication of her character can be found in her introduction to Civil Wars. Here she talks about how her uncle helped her learn to stand up to the bullies in this world—“It’s a bully. Probably you can’t win. But if you go in there, saying to yourself, ‘I may not win this one but it’s going to cost you’ they’ll leave you alone.” It is apparent that she lived her life with this philosophy. “nobody fought me twice,” she continues in the introduction. “They said I was ‘crazy’.” She spent her life working for the improvement of conditions in the black community and in many other areas where she thought there were inequalities and injustice.
In early 2002 Jordan received the 2001 Writers for Writers Award from Barnes & Noble. She was honored as a writer who had given generously to other writers and helped broaden the literary community. In particular, she was praised for her work in establishing the organization Poetry for the People. This organization offers free poetry workshops in high schools, community centers, churches and prisons in underprivileged communities.
Jordan died on June 14, 2002 in San Francisco at the age of 65. She had breast cancer. She leaves a legacy of her writings for future generations to read and emulate.
Selected writings
Poetry Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969.
Some Changes, Dutton, 1971.
New Days: Poems of Exile and Return, Emerson Hall, 1974.
Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry, edited by Toni Morrison, Random House, 1977.
Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, Beacon Press, 1980.
Living Room: New Poems, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985.
Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems, Virago Press, 1989.
Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989.
Essays Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981.
On Call: Political Essays, South End Press, 1985.
Moving Towards Home: Political Essays, Virago Press, 1989.
Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon, 1992.
For young readers His Own Where, Crowell, 1971.
Dry Victories, Holt, 1972.
Fannie Lou Hamer, Crowell, 1972.
New Room: New Life, Crowell, 1975.
Kimako’s Story, Houghton, 1981.
Plays In the Spirit of Sojourner Truth, produced in New York City at the Public Theatre, May 1979.
For the Arrow That Flies by Day, (staged reading), produced in New York City at the Shakespeare Festival, April 1981.
Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, 1995.
Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997, 1997.
Soldier, A Poet’s Childhood, 2000.
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays, 2002.
Sources
Books
Authors of Books for Young People, Scarecrow Press, 1990, p. 377.
Black Writers, 2nd edition, Gale, 1994.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 5, 1976; Volume 11, 1979; Volume 23, 1983.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 38: Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers, Gale, 1985.
Jordan, June, Who Look at Me, Crowell, 1969.
Jordan, June, Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry, edited by Toni Morrison, Random House, 1977.
Jordan, June, Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980, Beacon Press, 1980.
Jordan, June, Civil Wars, Beacon Press, 1981.
Jordan, June, Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union, Pantheon Books, 1992.
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Norton, 1988, p. 1467.
Periodicals
African American Review, Fall 1998, p. 504; Spring 1999, p. 57.
Essence, October 1992; September 2000, p. 102.
Insight on the News, June 12, 1995, p. 33.
Lambda Book Report, April 2002, p.32.
Library Journal, November 1, 1989, p. 92.
Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1992, p. E-l.
Ms., April 1975; April 1981; July/August 1990, p. 71.
Nation, January 29, 1990, p. 135.
New Statesman, June 5, 1987, p. 38; January 6, 1989, p. 31.
Ou t magazine, December 1992/January 1993.
Progressive, October 1989, p. 12; February 1991, p. 18; July 1991, p. 12; November 1991, p. 11; January 1992, p. 11; February 1992, p. 18; March 1992, p. 13; June 1992, p. 12.
Publishers Weekly, May 1, 1981, pp. 12-13; October 27, 1989, p. 62; August 17, 1992; May 8, 2000 p. 218; July 8, 2002, p. 42.
Village Voice, July 20, 1982; August 17, 1982.
Women’s Review of Books, April 1993, p. 6.
—Alison Carb Sussman and Pat Donaldson