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June Jordan
18 quotes
“Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter. These poems speak to philosophy; they reveal the corners where we organize what we know.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction to the "Corners on the Curving Sky" section of the book Soulscript (1970) compiled by Jordan. These lines have been widely published in verse format as work misattributed to Gwendolyn Brooks, usually as a p…
“And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea we are the ones we have been waiting for”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poem for South African Women", Passion (1980); on South African women protesting the dompas laws of apartheid.
“If any of us hopes to survive, s/he must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Case for the Real Majority" (1982), from Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989)
“Revolution always unfolds inside an atmosphere of rising expectations.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1988 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: America in Confrontation with Democracy, or, the Meaning of the Jesse Jackson Campaign" in Technical Difficulties (1988)
“I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams" in Technical Difficulties (1992) and Some of Us Did Not Die (2002)
“If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A New Politics of Sexuality" in "Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union" (1992)
“Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A New Politics of Sexuality" in Technical Difficulties (1992) and Some of Us Did Not Die (2002)
“As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth — whatever the truth may be — that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1984 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Life After Lebanon" (1984), later published in On Call : Political Essays (1985), and Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)
“Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?”
June Jordan (1936–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We, we know the individuality that isolates the man from other men, the either/or, the lonely-one that leads the flesh to clothing, jewelry, and land, the solitude of sight that separates the people from the people, flesh from flesh, that jams material between the spirit and the spirit. We have suffered witness to these pitiful, and murdering, masquerade extensions of the self.Instead, we choose a real, a living enlargement of our only life. We choose community.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Efficiency, competence: Black students know the deadly, neutral definition of these words. There seldom has been a more efficient system for profiteering, through human debasement, than the plantations, of a while ago. Today, the whole world sits, as quietly scared as it can sit, afraid that, tomorrow, America may direct its efficiency and competence toward another forest for defoliation, or clean-cut laser-beam extermination.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are among those who have been violated into violence.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Education has paralleled the life of prospering white America: it has been characterized by reverence for efficiency, cultivation of competence unattended by concern for aim, big white lies, and the mainly successful blackout of Black life.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive. I wanted to get well and what I wanted to do as soon as I was strong, actually, what I wanted to do was I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death. And I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don't see why it's a good thing when you give up, or when you cooperate with those who hate you or when you polish and iron and mend and endlessly mollify for the sake of the people who love the way that you kill yourself day by day silently. And I think all of this is really about women and work. Certainly this is all about me as a woman and my life work. I mean I am not sure my mother’s suicide was something extraordinary. Perhaps most women must deal with a similar inheritance, the legacy of a woman whose death you cannot possibly pinpoint because she died so many, many times and because, even before she became my mother, the life of that woman was taken; I say it was taken away.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Many Rivers To Cross" (1981); later published in Some of Us Did Not Die : New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (2002)
“I am working for the courage to admit the truth that Bertolt Brecht has written; he says, "It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak." I cherish the mercy and the grace of women’s work. But I know there is new work that we must undertake as well: that new work will make defeat detestable to us. That new women’s work will mean we will not die trying to stand up: we will live that way: standing up. I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all of the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Many Rivers To Cross" (1981)
“1. “The People” shall not be defined as a group excluding or derogating anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, sexual preference, class, or age. 2. “The People” shall consciously undertake to respect and to encourage each other to feel safe enough to attempt the building of a community of trust in which all may try to be truthful and deeply serious in the messages they craft for the world to contemplate. 3. Poetry for the People rests upon a belief that the art of telling the truth is a necessary and a healthy way to create powerful, and positive, connections among people who, otherwise, remain (unknown and unaware) strangers. The goal is not to kill connections but, rather, to create and to deepen them among truly different men and women.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) first seen 1991 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: General rules for the "Poetry for the People" program she founded at the University of Berkeley in 1991, as quoted in June Jordan : Her Life and Letters (2006) by Valerie Kinloch, Ch. 6 : Affirmative Acts: Political Ess…
“Most of the women of the world-Black and First World and white who work because we must-most of the women of the world persist far from the heart of the usual Women's Studies syllabus. Similarly, the typical Black History course will slide by the majority experience it pretends to represent. For example, Mary McLeod Bethune will scarcely receive as much attention as Nat Turner, even though Black women who bravely and efficiently provided for the education of Black people hugely outnumber those few Black men who led successful or doomed rebellions against slavery. In fact, Mary McLeod Bethune may not receive even honorable mention because Black History too often apes those ridiculous white history courses which produce such dangerous gibberish as The Sheraton British Colonial "history" of the Bahamas. Both Black and white history courses exclude from their central consideration those people who neither killed nor conquered anyone as the means to new identity, those people who took care of every one of the people who wanted to become "a person," those people who still take care of the life at issue: the ones who wash and who feed and who teach and who diligently decorate straw hats and bags with all of their historically unrequired gentle love: the women.”
June Jordan (1936–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Some of Us Did Not Die (2003)