June Jordan 1936–

Poet, novelist, essayist, educator, activist

At a Glance…

Search for Self-Realization Spurred by Abusive Childhood

Themes of Resistance

Struggled with Race and Gender Bias

Seeking Self-Determination

Selected writings

Sources

“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 has produced an extensive and varied body of work. In it she strongly affirms herself, her rights as a woman, her thoughts on black consciousness, and her ties to the African American community. Though she is best known for her intimate, powerfully direct poetry, Jordan has also written 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 believes in shared human goals for a better society; her poetry enables her to express her political ideas while making art. She is frequently compared with politically conscious black poets such as Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka, but her verse bears traces of other influences, including those of white American poet Walt Whitman, whose self-celebratory poems she admires.

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.

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.

At a Glance…

Born July 9, 1936, in New York City; 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 Bamard College and University of Chicago.

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; taught English and directed Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK Program) at Connecticul 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—. Visiting lecturer in English and Afro-American studies at Yale University, 1974–75; board member, Center for Constitutional Rights, 1984—, New York Foundation for the Arts, and PEN American Center.

Selected awards: Rockefeller grant for creative writing, 1969–70; Nancy Bloch Award, 1971, for The voice ol 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.

Addresses: Office —Department of Afro-American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 3335 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720.

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.”

Search for Self-Realization Spurred by Abusive Childhood

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.

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 Bronx-ville, 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.

Themes of Resistance

Since the publication of her first book of poetry, Who Look at Me, in 1969, Jordan has written a series of powerful works that chronicle her life’s struggle and reflect her growing maturity. The title poem in this first book best shows her movement away from victimization and toward resistance; in it she writes 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.”

Struggled with Race and Gender Bias

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.

Seeking Self-Determination

Because of her personal experiences, Jordan often expresses 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 makes those who support the status quo uncomfortable, her clear aim is to raise questions about the way we live and to provide people with visions of future alternatives.

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 Shakespe are Festival, April 1981.

Other

Editor of anthologies, including Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry, Doubleday, 1970; and The Voice of the Children (a reader), Holt, 1970. Composer of lyrics and libretto “Bang Bang Ueber Alles,” 1985. Recorded readings include Things That I Do in the Dark, Spoken Arts, 1978; and For Somebody to Start Singing, Black Box/Watershed Foundation, 1980.

Contributor of stories and poems, sometimes under name June Meyer, to various periodicals, including Esquire, Nation, Evergreen, Partisan Review, Black World, Black Creation, Essence, Village Voice, New York Times, and New York Times Magazine. Political columnist for New York’s Progressive magazine.

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

Essence, October 1992.

Library Journal, November 1, 1989, p. 92.

Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1992, p. E-1.

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.

Out 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.

Village Voice, July 20, 1982; August 17, 1982.

Women’s Review of Books, April 1993, p. 6.

—Alison Carb Sussman