NAMING OUR DESTINY : NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

by June Jordan

Book by Jordan, June

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Feminism, Nonfiction, African American Literature

Paperback

First published October 1, 1989

About the author

June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 – June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean-American poet and activist.

Jordan received numerous honors and awards, including a 1969-70 Rockefeller grant for creative writing, a Yaddo Fellowship in 1979, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1982, and the Achievement Award for International Reporting from the National Association of Black Journalists in 1984. Jordan also won the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award from 1995 to 1998 as well as the Ground Breakers-Dream Makers Award from The Woman's Foundation in 1994.

She was included in Who's Who in America from 1984 until her death. She received the Chancellor's Distinguished Lectureship from UC Berkeley and the PEN Center USA West Freedom to Write Award (1991).

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to love this more than I did. A good number of the poems just didn't work for me, or they were about specific moments in history that I don't know enough about to feel affected by the words. But a lot of the poems are pure fire.

Three examples (these are all from Part Four: New Poems 1985-1989)

Trying to Capture Rapture
The point is not to pacify the soul
Or sleep through torments measuring the night
And I concede I hold no trust or goal
That, trembling, yet retains the body’s light.
And I admit I hardly understand
The motions of a hand that wants a hand
Or deadlines for a love that perseveres.
But I cannot survive the blurring of the years:
Untouched, unknown, estranged and, now, alone.

And having said, “I cannot,” here I do
Again declare: I will not beg for you.
And love will say, “Nobody asks you to!”
But I have died for rapture other days.
Oh, I have tried for rapture other ways!


Winter Honey
Sugar come
and sugar go
Sugar dumb
but sugar know
ain’ nothin’ run me for my money
nothin’ sweet like winter honey

Sugar high
and sugarlow
Sugar pie
and sugar dough
Then sugar throw
a sugar fit
And sugar find
a sugar tit
But never mind
what sugar find
ain’ nothin’ run me for my money
nothin’ sweet like winter honey

Sugar come
and please don’ go
Sugar dum
but oh-my: Oh!
Ain’ nothin’ run me for my money
nothin’ sweet like winter honey



The Female and the Silence of a Man
cf. W.B. Yeats's “Leda and the Swan”

And now she knows: The big fist shattering her face.
Above, the sky conceals the sadness of the moon.
And windows light, doors close, against all trace
of her: She falls into the violence of a woman’s ruin.

How should she rise against the plunging of his lust?
She vomits out her teeth. He tears the slender legs apart.
The hairy torso of his rage destroys the soft last bastion of her trust.
He lacerates her breasts. He claws and squeezes out her heart.

She sinks into a meadow pond of lilies and a swan.
She floats above an afternoon of music from the trees.
She vanishes like blood that people walk upon.
She reappears: A mad bitch dog that reason cannot seize:
A fever withering the river and the crops:
A lovely girl protected by her cruel/incandescent energies.

[Rochelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apologies to All the People in Lebanon
Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children

But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?

Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?

I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family

But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad

You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV

You see my point;

I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.

[Kara Hisatake · Rating 3 out of 5]

June Jordan is a poet of whose tremors and influence reaches far beyond my knowledge--she was a poet in and beyond her time. That said, a lot of poetry from this collection didn't have quite the play with language I was expecting, and was much more raw and specific to moments in history dealing with women, being black, being queer, and dealing with colonialism (such as solidarity with Native, Palestinian, and Latin American peoples). In this way, Jordan is way before her time, and speaks to the conflicts of today. However, many would consider her poetry radical--perhaps too much so?

Since the poetry is from 1950s-1989, there is often much historical context that the modern day reader is missing; I need a reader for this.

What I thought was most poignantly beautiful was the poem dedication at the beginning--
These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
They are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger l
earning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become.

For example, Jordan speaks quite often of rape with this brutality that's almost shocking--trigger warning for the rest of this review. I find poetry like this hard to share, especially with students. However, her words are plain and powerful; she also has this connection to all colonized peoples, including Native Hawaiians--see the Liliu'okalani poem.

"Case in Point"
A friend of mine who raised six daughters and
who never wrote what she regards as serious
until she
was fifty-three
tells me there is no silence peculiar
to the female

I have decided I have something to say
about female silence: so to speak
these are my 2¢ on the subject:
2 weeks ago I was raped for the second
time in my life the first occasion
being a whiteman and the most recent
situation being a blackman actually
head of the local NAACP

Today is 2 weeks after the fact [. . .]
He was being rhetorical.
My silence was peculiar
to the female. (80-81)

"Poem about Police Violence"
Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower
subsequently?

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
comes back to my mouth and I am quiet
like Olympian pools from the running the
mountainous snows under the sun [ . . .]

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rabid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle (don't
you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue and
scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a "justifiable accident" again
(again)

People have been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I'm saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
blots it out/the bestial but
not too often

tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower
subsequently? (84-85)

"Poem about My Rights" (excerpt)
I am very familiar with the problems of the C.I.A.
and the problems of South African and the problems
of Exxon Corporations and the problems of white
America in general and the problems of the teachers
and the preachers and the F.B.I. and the social
workers and my particular Mom and Dad/I am very
familiar with the problems because the problems
turn out to be
me
I am the history of rape
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
I am the history of the terrorized incarceration of
my self
I am the history of battery assault and limitless
armies against whatever I want to do with my mind [. . . ]
I have been the problem everyone seeks to
eliminate by forced
penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/
but let this be unmistakable this poem
is not consent I do not consent [ . . .]
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 (103-4)

"An Always Lei of Ginger Blossoms for the First Lady of Hawai'i: Queen Lili'uokalani"
Never mind
Even the Be-Still tree will never stop
the spirit rivers of the Koolau mountains
nor the twisting smash surf drown
the great gong
pounded by the living
for the right to live

On your island dolphins
slope below belief
then rise in somersault or triple flip affection
for the laughter of the weary
ones who need

more than African tulips
more than bareback riding of a whale
more than Banyan roots
more than Diamond Head above their shoulders
more than mango guava sugarcane or pineapple and papaya
more than monkey pod elegance of shelter
more than the miracle revised to feed the blue and silver and yellow and spotted and large and small fish who receive bread from the fingers of a hand
more than forgive and forget about "the secret annexation society"

mainlander businessmen who held you
prisoner
inside the Iolani Palace
kept you
solitary in confinement
nine months
minus even pencils or a piece of paper
nine months
before the businessmen relented
and allowed you your guitar

more than the souther star skies
and the delivering wild ocean swells
that rule the separating space
between Tahiti and the statue
of Your Highness
schooling Honolulu into secret conduct
suitable for thimbleberries
suitable for orchids
suitable for the singing ghost of your guitar

On your island dolphins
slope beyond belief
then rise

On your island (never mind)
the weary ones throng
faithful to the great song
once again to pound
the great gong
sounds again and then
again (164-166)

Teacher's note: This would not be the collection or Jordan poems to assign--it's pretty long; if anything, this would be useful for 1970s and 1980s historical review of black feminist writing, radical poetry, or postcolonial critique in college.

[Nicole Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

20 years after I first read it, Poem About My Rights is still my favorite. Others: War and Memory and Poem for South African Women. This is not peaceful nature poetry. This is mass graves poetry and massacres and police killing black men poetry and rape is not a poem poetry. This collection was published in 1989 and I read it and I wondered how much has changed in those last 30 years? Not enough. But it's also protest poetry and survival poetry and how you go on living when the living seems impossible poetry and so it's hopeful poetry.

[sonny singh suchdev · Rating 5 out of 5]

many of my favorite poems by june (and in general) are in here. incendiary words.

[Maryam · Rating 5 out of 5]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! *scans entire book*