" COME OUT/ WHEREVER YOU ARE/ WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING"
June Jordan, "Calling on All Silent Minorities"
My life has been about challenging white supremacy. I mentioned this to a polite liberal yesterday, I but I doubt if this individual, racially privileged by the supremacy of whiteness in our society, understood me. She and generations of her family have benefited from racist policies and laws enslaving my ancestors and then disenfranchising them; she and generations of her family have benefited financially from the support of a capitalist.
I suspect she thinks I'm angry about something that is not only invisible to her, but invisible, period! It's frustrating to be the challenge to those who have never felt as if they were standing in quicksand up to their necks. Nonetheless, for me what else is there to do? And yet, there have been times I've wondered if it's been worth the sacrifice to fight anti-democratic forces that are as fascist as they are determined to see a new order.
When the poet and activist June Jordan died in June 2002 of cancer, I was preparing to teaching in Africa. I don't remember if I knew I would be teaching in Ethiopia by June of that year. I had begun the process of securing a fellowship in May of that year. I was at home, trying to gather up the necessary material to support my application, while feeling as if I were standing in that proverbial quicksand up to my neck.
Having already received a call at home from, I believe, the only Black campus administrator warning me that I had better not reveal what happened two years prior, during the summer before the my first teaching term, the Fall term, when I was called to his office. I wasn't to leave until I agreed not to sign the two-year Visiting Professorship contract. He, who had little to do if anything with me being hired, was put up to it by the white administrators. His bosses"
I taught Jordan's poetry only once, and I while I had attended a good many readings by poets, I had never heard her reading her works. And yet, there I was, in my home, in 2002, feeling uncertain about the next few months ahead of me and certain of sinking ground beneath me when I heard that Jordan, a soldier ( Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, 2002 ), was no longer in the field. I would have to move out of the house I was renting since the campus never intended to renew my contract or offer me tenure track as they mentioned to me and my former chair before I arrived on campus. I would have to spread my books and personally things among three colleagues, and, at forty-nine, start again. Somewhere else.
Is it worth it?
**
June Jordan's parents were Jamaican-born immigrants to the US. In her memoir, Soldier , Jordan recalls that it was her father who taught her "everything from the perspective of a recruiting warrior." It was her father who told her that "there was a war against colored people, against poor people." Her father had been a "race man," a follower of Marcus Garvey and "an 'enthusiast' for theories about African origins of the human species, a zealous volunteer boxing instructor at the Harlem YMCA." Jordan's father was also a literate man, "literate in the available Negro poetry and political writings."
This is the man who spoke to her about the war and the lessons he had learned and now needed to pass down to her, his only child. Jordan's response was to accept the inheritance of resistance. "I had to become a soldier."
Soldiers continue passing down lessons learned from the field.
There is, June Jordan explains, "a hideous, neo-Nazi worldview loose on the land." The year is 1980, and Jordan's essay, "Civil Wars," calls out "adherents" of hate whose aim is to "subjugate or exterminate, everything and everyone who is not Christian and white and male and heterosexual." Jordan publishes a collection of essays, Civil Wars: Observations from the Front Lines of America in 1981. The poet was already looking down field at what obstructs the struggle for democracy.
In the "Introduction" (1995), to Civil Wars, Jordan writes, " Civil Wars begins thirty-one years ago. And tonight I feel the drifting/shifting of all these years. So much has changed! So much remains the same or worse!"
On the battle field, fighting "hard in the middle of an enormous argument about America," Jordan writes that she saw herself surrounded by "enemies." As a result, she accepts the media's characterization of her, a "'minority,'" in a 'naturally' white America." The feeling of being floundering and isolated was the catalyst for her to consider ways to resist submitting to her own subjugation. Jordan joined others marching for justice. She writes poems, letters. She speaks at rallies and sits in at meetings taking notes. But there was, nonetheless, always this "public display" of hate and contempt. And she found herself seeking the "chimerical prize" of self-respect.
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