Towards Home (1989), three especially resonate: an
essay on MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., “The Man Who
Was Not God,” which refuses to mistake this great
man for a hypocrite; an equally compassionate
essay, “Requiem for the Champ,” that deconstructs
and excoriates the spiritual and economic pov-
erty of Mike Tyson’s childhood, a world in which
violence and contempt for women were a badge
of masculinity; and “The Dance of Revolution,”
which describes a kind of choreography between
“the lone Chinese man who stood in front of the
advancing line of tanks at Tiananmen Square” and
the tank driver who attempts but fails in his efforts
to evade crushing him.
In “Besting a Worse Case Scenario” (Affirmative
Action: Political Essays 1998), Jordan wrote about
her own breast cancer, linking, as she often did, her
individual experience with a necessary wider strug-
gle: “I want my story to help to raise red flags, pub-
lic temperatures, holy hell, public consciousness,
blood pressure, and morale—activist/research/vic-
tim/morale so that this soft-spoken emergency be-
comes the number-one-of-the-tip-of-the-tongue
issue all kinds of people join to eradicate, this af-
ternoon/tonight /Monday morning.”
June Jordan has written poems that demand
deepest apprehension, that resist stripping things
of their complexity. Her work is a cartography of
resistance against racism, against political and cul-
tural and economic colonialism and misogyny. She
insisted on the necessity of taking action against
injustice, instead of passively—or hopelessly—
waiting for things to change, because, as she has so
wryly observed, no one will do it for us—“God is
vague and he don’t take no sides.” Her poems take
place in Chile, Managua, Soweto, and Lebanon, as
well as on the streets of America.
In “The Rationale, or ‘She Drove Me Crazy’”—
at turns ironic, witty, and savagely funny, Jordan
deconstructs, and then withers, a man’s excuse
for sexual violence. The title poem of Jordan’s
first book, Who Look at Me (1969), repudiates the
white stare, one that refuses to notice the beauty of
blackness, “the turning glory / of a spine.” Jordan’s
poem celebrates a black self that remains intact,
alive, growing: “black face black body black mind/
beyond obliterating.... / We grew despite the
crazy killing scorn / that broke the brightness to be
born.” “Poem about my Rights” decried the viola-
tion of apartheid and Jordan’s actual and psychic
rape, insisting “I am not wrong: Wrong is not my
name / My name is my own my own my own.”
Her poems often allude to historical incidents
while omitting certain details, so that the poems
are experienced first in an almost surreal imagined
way, before the reader comes to realize, as in the
poem “Greensboro: North Carolina” that the hor-
rifying cruelty she conjures is factually based on
such details of the American past (or present) as a
white man’s acquittal for murder because his black
victim dared to say out loud “death to the Klan.”
In “Richard Wright Was Wrong,” she demolishes
the racist myth of the black rapist/murderer and
describes the “real Bigger Thomas” as “a white-
man,” as a figure of power who uses that power to
demolish the lives of others, as one who “allocates
this/appropriates that, incinerates, assassinates / he
hates he hates he hates.” “Poem about Police Vio-
lence,” one of her best-known poems, savages “the
diction of the powerful,” the “justifiable accident”
in which 18 cops “subdue” and “scuffle” one black
man to death:What you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop.....
you think the accident rate would lower
subsequently?But June Jordan’s love poetry—vulnerable,
genuine, principled, and full both of complexity
and longing—is also central to her canon, as in the
untitled Haruko/Love Poem: “I do not forget / the
beauty of one braid / black silk that fell / as loose
as it fell long.” or the final lines from “On a New
Year’s Eve,” in the voice of the speaker watching a
lover sleep:and
as I watch your arm
your
brown arm
just
before it moves290 Jordan, June