"Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law." -- June Jordan

June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 - June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher, and committed activist. In her three decade career Jordan made her mark as one of the fiercest and most compassionate voices of her time. She became a passionate voice of a generation battling the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, violence, and human rights. Jordan played an important role in the development of black artistic, social, and politic movements and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.

Quotes more less

"Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?""But, based on my friendship with Evie as young mothers, I started going on freedom rides in 1966.""Consequently, most of us really exist at the mercy of other people's formulations of what's important.""CORE was committed to nonviolence, but I was not.""I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.""I think I have come to a place where I'm able to feel more comfortable about being honest.""I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.""In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.""It means to educate myself incessantly about the world around me.""My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair.""My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.""One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here!""Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.""So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.""That attitude that fighting is probably not fair, but you have to defend yourself anyway and damage the enemy, has been profoundly consequential as far as my political activism goes.""The courts cannot garnish a father's salary, nor freeze his account, nor seize his property on behalf of his children, in our society. Apparently this is because a kid is not a car or a couch or a boat.""The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.""The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.""There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.""To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.""We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived."

Early Life/marriage more less

June Jordan was born the only child of Jamaican immigrant parents, Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maud Jordan in Harlem, New York. Her father worked as a postal worker and her mother as a part time nurse. When Jordan was five, the family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. While life in the Jordan household was often turbulent, Jordan credits her father with passing on to her a 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 Poet's Childhood which she dedicated to her father. In this short memoir Jordan explores her complicated relationship with a man who encouraged her to read broadly and memorize passages of classical texts, but would also beat her for the slightest misstep and called her "damn black devil child". In her 1986 essay For My American Family Jordan explores the many conflicts to be dealt with in the experience of being raised by black immigrant parents with visions of the future for their offspring that far exceeded the urban ghettos of the present. In Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan recalls her father telling her "There was a war on against colored people, I had to became a soldier". While grateful to America for allowing him to escape poverty and seek a better life for his family, Jordan's father was conscious of the struggles his daughter would face and encouraged her to fight. After attending Brooklyn's Midwood high school for a year, Jordan's father enrolled her in the Northfield school for girls in Gill, Massachusetts.

Through her education Jordan became "completely immersed in a white universe" attending predominately white schools, but was also able to construct and develop her identity as a black American and a writer. In 1953 Jordan, graduated high school and enrolled at Barnard College. Jordan later expressed how she felt about Barnard College in her book Civil War, she wrote, "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."

It was at Barnard that she met a white Columbia University student, Michael Meyer whom she married in 1955. Jordan subsequently followed her husband to the University of Chicago, where he would pursue 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. The couple divorced in 1965.

Career more less

Jordan's first published book, Who Look at Me, appeared in 1969, was a collection of poems for children. Twenty-seven more books followed in her lifetime, one (Some of Us Did Not Die, Collected and New Essays) 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 a re-issue of the 1970 poetry collection, SoulScript, edited by Jordan.

In her memoir Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Jordan depicted in detail her relationship with her father in the book and was happy with the outcome stating, "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. This is a story, I think, with a happy outcome, you know" . 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 of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky Jordan states, "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."

Jordan's teaching career began in 1967 at the City College of New York. Between 1968 and 1978 Jordan taught at Yale University, Sarah Lawrence College, and Connecticut College. Jordan then became the director of The Poetry Center and was an English professor at SUNY at Stony Brook from 1978 to 1989. From 1989 to 2002 Jordan was a full professor in the departments of English, Women Studies, and African American Studies at the University of California Berkeley. At Berkeley Jordan founded Poetry for the People in 1991. The program inspires and empowers students to use poetry as a means of artistic expression. On how she began with the concept of the program Jordan states,"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" . Jordan composed three guideline points that embodied the program which was published with a set of her students writings in 1995 titled June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint .