Friday, July 30, 2010

Home
EUR News
Weekly Events
iTunes
Mobile
Article Archives
Past Events

Top Story Article

Passing - June Jordan
Source: LAZ (Seattle Hip-Hop Mailing List)
Author: Unknown

Despite her death earlier this month, June Jordan's writings will continue to speak for her, sharing her many prismatic visions of the world. She was a black woman, a poet, dramatist, teacher, New Yorker, feminist, bisexual, first-generation American. The many aspects of her life she plumbed gently, piecing all together in eloquent expression and determined effort to carve public space for each one.

Born in Harlem to Jamaican parents in 1936, the 65-year-old University of California professor of African American and women's studies died June 14 after a lengthy battle with cancer at her California home. She was one of the most published, most anthologized black writers ever. Equally important, to those she left behind, she was a teacher, mentor and friend.

"She will be missed," said Nikki Giovanni, poet and English professor at Virginia Tech University, who collaborated with Jordan for her own anthology, Night Comes Softly. "June was one of our really great experimental writers. She was brutally honest in her work. Her poetry she will be greatly missed."

Giovanni said the last time she spoke with Jordan, whom she first met when she was a young writer in New York, the two talked about the day-to-day struggles they faced as cancer survivors.

"I told her to hang on," Giovanni remembers.

Living with cancer since the 1970s, Jordan rarely let her pains overcome her or subdue her vigor.

"She was energetic," said Kevin Young, an author, poet and professor at Indiana University. "It's not just the large number of books she penned, it is also the Poetry for the People forum she organized at Berkeley." The forum brought together people from all around the bay area ˜ high school students, church congregations, prison inmates and others.

In her own work, Jordan was ""straightforward, unadorned, in-your-face," her colleague Ishmael Reed told the Berkeley newspaper. "No poems about blackberries here."

"What would the black arts movement be like without a voice like Jordan's?" mourned Giovanni.

Throughout her life, Jordan maintained a strong passion for and untiring commitment to social and humanitarian issues, remaining up until her death a strong voice for human rights. She spoke for the rights of Arabs and Africans with the same verve she used to raise the problem of women's rights and racism in the United States.

Jordan spoke from the richness of black culture, yet challenged her community to reinvent itself in a more dynamic way, embracing all of its parts and nuances and acknowledging the humanity of all. Moving from Harlem to Brooklyn when she was five, Jordan grew up in a predominantly black, mostly poor neighborhood, but followed her working class parents' high ambitions. She attended elite private schools and immersed herself in the fine arts. She later enrolled at Barnard College and the University of Chicago, but left both schools without earning degrees.

Marrying a white schoolmate, Michael Meyer, in 1955, Jordan had a child in 1958. Jordan and Meyer divorced in 1966.

For the rest of her life, Jordan was a single mother to her son, Christopher, while authoring over 28 books, including her highly successful first collection of poetry, Who Look at Me, along with several essay collections, librettos, children's books and numerous magazine articles. In recent years she had penned an outspoken column for The Progressive.

Her other works included Kissing God Goodbye: Poems (1991-1997); Haruko Love Poems (1994), Naming our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989); Living Room (1985); Passion (1977); Things That I Do in the Dark (1977) and her influential 1981 essay collection, Civil Wars. Her memoir, Soldier: A Poets' Childhood, was published in 2000, drawing praise from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who spoke of Jordan's ''40 years of activism fueled by flawless art.''

Jordan's life was not without sorrow. In addition to fighting cancer, she dealt with the all the challenges of single motherhood, the haunting chauvinism of her father and the painful loss of her mother.

Through it all, Jordan delved into both personal experience and political philosophy to craft a body of works that easily integrates the two, inspiring a generation of young Americans to speak unabashedly and unapologetically from wherever they find themselves in the world. She taught at Yale, Sarah Lawrence, the City College of New York and UC Berkeley.

In July 2000, Ms. Magazine named her "one of America's fiercest literary figures and social activists" and "the hope of a generation." Her final book, Some of Us Did Not Die, will be published by Basic Civitas Books this fall. One poem from the collection, which she read in a 2001 event at Barnard, described her fight against her illness:

He makes that dive
to savage
me
and inches
from the blood flood lusty
beak
I roll away
I speak
I laugh out loud
Not yet
big bird of prey
not yet
First published: June 25, 2002