Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays

by June Jordan

Overview

“Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.”  —Toni Morrison
 
Some of Us Did Not Die brings together the seminal essays of June Jordan, the widely acclaimed Black American writer known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Spanning the length of her extraordinary career, and including her last writings, the essays in this collection reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of injustice, democracy, and literature. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence that resonates sharply to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465036936
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	03/15/2003
Series:	New and and Selected Essays
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	458,135
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

June Jordan was Professor of African American Studies at U.C. Berkeley and was born in New York City in 1936. Her books of poetry include Haruko / Love Poems and Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems. She was also the author of five children's books, a novel, three plays, and five volumes of political essays, the most recent of which was Affirmative Acts.

For more than ten years, she wrote a regular political column for The Progressive magazine. Her honors included a National Book Award nomination, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award. June Jordan died in Berkeley, California on June 14, 2002.

Editorial Reviews

Insightful…provocative.”—New York Times

“A provocative and personal collection of essays from “one of America’s fiercest literary figures and social activists…the hope of a generation."—Ms. Magazine

“These selections offer real riches from Jordan’s mind and heart, essays that weigh and assess and which, even after her death, express her resilient credo, ‘Not yet/big bird of prey/not yet.'"—Reamy Jansen, San Francisco Chronicle

“Astonishingly powerful.”—Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

“A powerful voice…Jordan’s life and work is about quintessential American ideals of justice and resistance to tyranny. When rendered from a female African-American point of view that champions the disenfranchised, those ideals take on a special cast…Even in death, she has a voice that is committed and unafraid.”—Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Writer, activist, and professor June Jordan’s final essay collection serves as a barometer for the last four decades of radical humanitarian thought. Jordan’s days were spent in constant revelation. Read her words, risk your own unveiling.”—David Mills, The Village Voice

“Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival—of the body, and mind, and the heart.”—Adrienne Rich

“Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”—Alice Walker

From the Publisher

An inspiring poet, activist, Progressive columnist and UC Berkeley professor of African-American studies, Jordan died last month from breast cancer at the age of 65. Her Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint provided the ideological impetus behind myriad community-oriented poetry events and poems since its publication in the mid-1990s (a shorter essay version appears here). This book brings together 32 essays from four previous collections and eight previously uncollected recent pieces. Repeated engagements with sex and sexism, and race and racism, are matched with advocacy for legal reform ("Break the Law!") and agitation for collective responses to oppression and parsings of its language, including a seminal essay on Black English ("Nobody Mean More to Me than You"). Jordan also documents trips to Mississippi, Nicaragua and the Bahamas, and offers a still relevant assessment of the Israel-Lebanon war of 1982. New pieces include the title work, a response to September 11: "I hope we will bestir ourselves to rally around an emergency/ militant reconstruction of a secular democracy consecrated to the equality of each and every living one of us." With a steadfastness and resolute power, these essays show us a way toward that consecration. (Sept. 5) Forecast: Jordan's Soldier, an autobiography published in 2000, is in print in paperback from Basic. Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991-1997 (Doubleday) and the 1989 release Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (Thunder's Mouth) are also available, along with Poetry for the People (Routledge). National tributes to Jordan from major writers should be appearing as this goes to press; they could be enlarged and displayed with Jordan's work. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

June Jordan (1936-2002) was a professor of African American studies at U.C. Berkeley, and author of 11 books of poetry, five children's books, a novel, three plays, a memoir, and five volumes of political essays. This collection of 40 essays spans Jordan's career, from the 1960s civil rights movement to the aftermath of September 11, in which she reflects on such topics as supremacist values and policies, racial and gender inequality, children and education, life and hope. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

A grab-bag of essays and verse on politics, literature, and travel. Jordan (African-American Studies/UC Berkeley; Technical Difficulties, 1992, etc.) harbors understandable rage at the stupidities and inequities of life in a fundamentally racist society in a time when things, by all rights, should have gotten better. Instead, she writes, African-Americans "have moved from The Invisible Man to The Invisible People" whose opinions and indeed whose reality scarcely come into account in matters such as elections and education. Some of the stronger pieces here, many previously published in her column in The Progressive, address the vast complex of injustice that is contemporary American life. Others, better still, address educational and cultural issues such as Black English and the overall decline in standards in schools everywhere and for all: "We have silenced or eliminated minority children. We have pacified white children into barely competent imitations of their fear-ridden parents." Still others are less pointed, including several pieces on what amount to literary enthusiasms; coupled with Jordan’s hortatory approach to politics, these give the collection the feel of a bookish pep rally at which the exclamation mark gets quite a workout: Let’s all read Walt Whitman! Let’s take it to the man! Down with ex-husbands! Many of the op-ed pieces, too, are ephemeral, so much so that readers in the not too distant future may need footnotes to find their way through them. Who, they may wonder, was O.J. Simpson, other than someone Jordan criticizes for not wanting to be seen as black, but instead as a raceless star? What was a Sandinista? And what on earth does "Sometimes I am the terrorist I mustdisarm" mean? Judicious editing would have helped. Still, of some interest to activists, and especially to educational reformers.

Kirkus Reviews