Rebecca Carroll’s 1994 anthology is re-released for a new generation.

In the summer of 1992, three books by Black women writers–Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Terry McMillan—made the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. I knew it had to be a first (it was), and to me, a recent college graduate and aspiring writer, it felt like a divine intervention. Two years later, inspired by that moment, I published a collection of interviews called I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black Women Writers. The book featured established writers like Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove, as well as then-emerging voices like Lorene Cary and Tina McElroy Ansa. 

Thirty years later, Red Clay is being re-released. And after an election that could have given us the first Black woman president but didn’t, this collection of intergenerational Black women and nonbinary voices feels like a necessary balm. In the new edition, I invited a younger writer to re-introduce the work of each original writer featured. In the excerpt below, New York Times Magazine staff writer J. Wortham explains what poet June Jordan’s work means to them, and to our world right now. And then, June Jordan speaks for herself.

—Rebecca Carroll

J. Wortham on June Jordan: “It is June Jordan’s time on the world clock again.”

June Jordan was an author, a professor, an activist, a poet, a parent. She was also a horologist. What I mean by that is she kept time. And time could be kept by her. When she wrote “Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires” in her 1985 essay collection, On Call, that was her way of calling for solidarity with the uprising in Nicaragua and drawing throughlines between the communities there and the American South, between her West Indian upbringing and our own ongoing liberation struggles.

The first time I read those lines, I gasped. I was gifted a collection of her prolific writings (including the essay with that searing line) called Some of Us Did Not Die and marveled at the breadth of her cultural criticism. She vivisected pop culture, Clarence Thomas, South African apartheid, motherhood, the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., with equal ease. She wrote toward the future while keeping the present accountable, even when it was considered unfavorable. June identified as a bisexual and often wrote about the Palestinian freedom struggle, including the oft-Instagrammed lines “I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian.”

…Her legacy has been dimmer than what she righteously deserves, despite being as firm a literary figure as Alice Walker or Toni Morrison, in community with Ralph Ellison and Malcolm X, and calling Fannie Lou Hamer a friend. But it is June Jordan’s time on the world clock again. “I mean to be fully and freely all that I am,” she wrote in a keynote speech delivered at Stanford University in April 1991. Even now, she is.

June Jordan on clarity: “I don’t even like to use the word racist”

I’m not concerned about missing anybody with my writing. I think that there is a racist, patronizing point of view around understanding certain ideas where black folks are concerned that I do not embrace. Most everything I write, I test out. Big audiences. Live. And that’s poetry as well as essays. So, it’s not too hypothetical to me whether it’s gonna hit or not. If it hits, I know. If it doesn’t hit, I know….

…A pivotal event for me as a writer and a poet happened during the sixties. It was a great big poetry reading down in Jackson, Mississippi. It was all black women poets—Sonia Sanchez, Audre Lorde, Mari Evans, I mean, you know, everybody at that time. It was held in a huge auditorium. I just thought I was the baaaadest poet in the world with my baaaad Brooklyn self. I got down there and was blown away. The place was packed, and folks was all dressed up, families and children and deacons. And all my poetry had profanity in it, and I was like, “Oh shit, I can’t read anything!” And Sonia said, “See? I told you so!” I mean, it was like church. Everybody was on time—in black Mississippi folks was on time! And I would never have presumed to imagine that being a poet merited that sort of respect. And trust. At that moment, I realized that as a black writer, people were looking to us/to me for vision, leadership, and most of all, people were looking to us/to me for The Word. 

I think as long as you try to be clear, and I always try to be clear, people will get it. I may have a word in my writing that somebody may not know, but that’s just a word, and that’s it. I think mostly my language is extremely straightforward, and I have worked on it quite a bit. It is not academic. And it is not common. You’ll never see the word feminist in my work, or patriarchal, or any of that—I just don’t use words like that. I’m not writing for the academy. I don’t give a shit about the academy. I’m writing for people who read. Mainly I try to reach college students, which is a huge, heterogeneous, and important audience to reach.

Academic language includes a lot of stupid words. I don’t even like to use the word racist. If I do use it, I have to really try and use it in a way that is still fresh, so it still hits and stings, so that people understand that “I’m here to kill you because of this.” You know what I mean? I’m not saying, “Well that was a racist incident,” no, I don’t mean it was a racist incident, no, I mean, “I’m gonna kill you cause that was racist!” How you rest that word in any usage, to give it the power that it originally had, is important. For example, in the context of Rodney King, some people call that a racist episode, which makes the word racist sound tepid—you know, it was pleasant, unpleasant, racist, casual, and so on. All those words sound the same. I try to use words, whether in prose or poetry, that people can understand, that make them feel in an intense way. I’m a writer, that’s what I do. 

 

Want to read more? Three June Jordan works to start with:

An essay: The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America 

A young-adult novel (her only): His Own Where

And, of course, poetry: The Essential June Jordan 

 

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Rebecca Carroll is a writer, cultural critic, and podcast creator/host. Her writing has been published widely, and she is the author of several books, including her recent memoir, Surviving the White Gaze. Rebecca is Editor at Large for The Meteor.