Be Like June...

Be Like June . . .by Mark Anthony Neal | Popmatters[25 June 2002]
"And I Got toThinking about the moral meaning of memory . . . [A]nd what it means to forget,what it means to fail to find and preserve the connections with the dead whoselives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own."— June Jordan
It was a meanderingSaturday afternoon—babygirl just finally down for her all-too-short afternoonnap—when I downloaded my latest batch of e-mail. Weekend e-mail is usuallymeaningless, no notes from editors, good words from respected colleagues, orqueries from ambitious grad students—the stuff that always gets me excited—justthe usual banter from the various listservs that rarely hold my attention. Itwas on one of those listservs that the news of June Jordan's death wasforwarded to me.
Diagnosed withbreast cancer in 1992, Jordan was given a 40% prognosis of surviving more thanfive years. She lived for more than a decade after her diagnosis, becoming anadvocate—on the real she had been an advocatefor the voiceless, the nameless, the faceless, and the despised for more than30 years—for other women afflicted with the disease. The author of 28 books ofpoetry, fiction, and social criticism, Jordan was one of the most prolificintellectuals of her generation.
But I am surethere are many, of all races, who perused newspaper accounts of her death, withno knowledge of who this woman was . . . is.In a society that believes that inane dictums embraced by American youth like"Be Like Mike" or "I Am Tiger Woods" are evidence of a color-blind, classless,genderless, and discrimination-free America, June Jordan worked as an activisttirelessly in the very trenches that Nike, Gatorade, McDonalds, Viacom and twonational political parties claim in the name of commercial products even moreinane than pop slogans for the miraculously athletic black men that we know ona first name basis. We are unlikely to hear any slogans in mainstream media . .. Ever . . . that proclaim we should"be like June."
In anotherexample, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelrecently ran a story about the disappearance of Alexis Patterson, who wasapparently kidnapped a month beforeElizabeth Smart's disappearance in Salt Lake City, but there has been little ifany mainstream media coverage of Patterson's kidnapping. NBC, ABC and othershave devoted more than 30 minutes of coverage to the Utah kidnapping. Theintensity of the coverage of Smart immediately struck me as an effort to divertattention away from Bush Jr.'s attempt to transform the American Government viathe creation of a Dept. of Homeland Defense—black folks were of course divertedby the arrest of an accused child sex offender and R&B singer, who appearsin a widely-circulated bootlegged copy of child pornography that has probablybeen seen by more people than those who have read at least one June Jordanbook—but I digress.
If June Jordanhas been invisible to the mainstream in her death, it was not simply becauseshe was black, but because she was a black woman, who chose to be an activistand a intellectual, in a society that seemingly has little value for blackwomen who aren't taking off their clothes, while celebrating their"bootilicious" reality on a Viacom-owned video channel or an HBO "sex" series.
How ironic isit that there is little graphic sex on the channel's Sex in the City which has no significant black female characters,yet black women are graphically featured on shows like Real Sex, the "hooker trilogy" of Hookers on the Point, PimpsUp, Hoes Down, Hookers at the Point:Five Years Later, and G-String Divas.Not surprisingly, HBO, which specializes in "groundbreaking" documentaries,passed on NO! , Aishah ShahidahSimmons' brilliantly brave and important documentary about black-on-blacksexual violence (some of those folks who have trafficked in child pornographyvia the R. Kelly video, need to spend a few hours with Simmons's film), on thebasis that it didn't have mainstream appeal.
June Jordan was committed to exposing herself—herpassions, convictions, and fears in her words, which she willfully gave to theworld with the libretto I Was Looking atthe Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and books such as Civil Wars, Selected Essays 1963-1980 (1996), and most recently hermemoir, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood(1999). In her essay "Besting a Worse Case Scenario" (from Affirmative Action, 1998), Jordan wrote defiantly about herillness: "I want my story to help to raise red flags, public temperatures, holyhell, public consciousness, blood pressure, andmorale—activist/research/victim/morale so that this soft-spoken emergencybecomes the number-one-of-the-tip-of-the-tongue issue all kinds of people jointo eradicate, this afternoon/tonight/Monday morning." For a decade, Jordan usedher own trauma to raise question as to why nearly 50,000 woman succumb toBreast Cancer per year.
Jordan was anavowed feminist, but like Joy James's notion of black feminist "Shadow Boxers,"Jordan eschewed the "feminism as simply identity politics" that so-calledfeminists have been able to soft-pedal in the New York Times or on the best-sellers list. Jordan instead sought"analyses of the world-wide absurdity of endangered female existence" (from theintroduction to the forthcoming collection Someof Us Did Not Die). She openly challenges women, asking "when will werevolt against our marginalized, pseudo-maverick status and assert ourmajority, our indispensable-to-the-species' power—and I do mean power: ourverifiable ability to change things inside our own lives and in the lives ofother folks, as well."
At the time ofher death, an advanced copy of Some of UsDid Not Die: New and Selected Essay of June Jordan (scheduled for releasein September of this year) sat in my bag, unread for close to a month. It wasgonna be part of my "summer reading." Jordan of course couldn't afford simplepleasures like planning her summer reading. In a poignant moment in "Besting aWorse case Scenario" Jordan wrote:
I do everything Ipossibly can every day,
I postpone nothing
I no longer procrastinate.
I give whatever I undertake all that I've got
I pay closer attention to incredible,
surrounding reasons for celebration and faith
I watch for good news.
I become hourly more aware
Of the privileges conveyed by human life . . .
It has been aprivilege for all those who have read Jordan's work or have known and workedwith her, to have shared some part of her humanity. Jordan was of course right,when she suggested that "some of us did not die." The essay was written weeksafter the 9-11 attacks, as Jordan struggled with the implications of theattacks and American response to them. Ultimately, she asserted (borrowing fromAuschwitz survivor Elly Gross) that "We're Still Here / I Guess It Was OurDestiny To Live / So Let's get on with it!" For those us still in the world, itwould do us well to "Be Like June Jordan."
Published at: http://www.popmatters.com/pm/feature/020625-jordanjune/