my jaw hurts! finished a week-long intensive on decolonial theologies of care. my legs and feet hurt from all that sitting and contemplation… and of course, what do *i* want to do on a friday night but write?
because i just finished this course (4 PM EST, so really only a few hours ago), i have few coherent thoughts on decolonial care. what i want to underscore, however, is how with this course and the thoughts i had in it with the people i had them with, i can see clearer through-lines between womanist theology, Black feminist pedagogy and craft, and commitments to decolonizing the self.
i am not using decolonizing as a metaphor here. at least i think that’s what i’m doing. decolonizing the self requires constant returns (through action, broadly defined) to how we see ourselves as individuals embedded in communities. and so i think about June Jordan, a Black feminist poet who has shared many a spirit song with me over the years.
this essay is one i wrote in my first term of graduate school in 2019. so, while it is not sermonic in a theological sense, it will likely be the backbone from which the muscle of my sentences move in upcoming posts. i share it here because i gotta wrestle with my “old thoughts.” oh, how i have been changed.
content warning: rape and gender-based violence, murder, enslavement
In a 1986 keynote address in Oregon, poetess, political mind, and activist June Jordan (1936-2002) delivered a blow to modern democracy while reflecting on her own American Dreams: “A democratic nation of persons, of individuals, is an impossibility, and a fratricidal goal” (p. 115). Preoccupied with the isolation made desirable by distinctly American fantasies of white-picket fences, Jordan traces her disillusionment through moments of desire –– desire for quietude, private ownership, and autonomy. Individual success becomes coldly isolating, from the pangs of loneliness to the vulnerability that comes with being alone, with feeling alone. Jordan speaks candidly of the violent consequences: “Nevertheless, truly traditional/deranged/American images of the good life kept me in that wilderness, that willful loneliness, until somebody else came into [my] little house and raped me” (Jordan, 1986a, p. 111). The dream exacerbates and amplifies suffering. To Jordan, the dominant ideology of the nation, of a cluster of distinct and disconnected persons, drives responsibility and blame inward. In turn, her writing comprises decades of reconciliation with these fraught dreams.
Surviving systemic violence was commonplace to Jordan. An outspoken survivor of sexual assault, a mother, and a professor, Jordan not only lived through gendered and classed forms of violence, but also bore witness to the suffering of her students and her children. (In many ways, Jordan considered her students her children.) Living and working during the rapid social and political changes of the 20th century, Jordan found new inspiration in her identity as a Black/Caribbean American bisexual woman. She published on these topics and many others –– global warfare and modern slavery, civil rights, and queer sexuality, to name a few –– often using free verse to represent a cacophony of lived experiences. As her keynote suggests, these experiences were not hers alone, however. True democracy, according to Jordan, could only manifest with communal testimony and collective responsibility to listen. In turn, she used polyphony, a literary technique representing many voices through one speaker, to grapple with the impossibility of a democratic nation and, in many ways, the current impossibility of her place in it. These poetics present an alternative selfhood, one that contests the legitimacy of Western individualism and is placed smack-dab in the middle of many interwoven communities.
JORDAN AND THE BLACK FEMINIST TRADITION
June Jordan was, first and foremost, a poet. Her use of language and subjects of interest transformed throughout her life.She also wrote extensively on the craft and art of poetry, sewing a lineage of her work from great masters, especially Walt Whitman, to her graduate writing students. Black women writers figured prominently in the development of Jordan’s work as a teacher and writer. Her contemporaries included writers and civil and women’s rights activists Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995), and Barbara Christian (1943-2000). Jordan was inspired by 1960s Black Liberation Movement and its problematization of American nationalism, yet her poems and other writing often spoke truth to the complex desires of queer Black women. Neither the Women’s Movement nor the Black Liberation Movement of the sixties offered Jordan and other women of color the space to exist without racist or sexist marginalization. Queer women of color were excluded from heteronormative discourse about the roles of men and women entirely. Founded in 1973, the National Black Feminist Organization sought to reconcile the oversight of the earlier movements to the interweaving oppression experienced by Black women. Writing allowed Jordan to explore her desire and her Black feminist politics, as well as their resonances and futurity for Black women writers.
Committed to justice, her poems recalled the exclusion of and violence against Black women since slavery. She espoused Black poetry as an act of survival in her essay “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America.” Jordan argues that it is at once impossible and necessary to make a home for oneself as a Black writer: “[As] long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published” (1986b, p. 185). The essay pays homage to Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry and a prolific writer while enslaved. By maintaining pious language commonplace of eighteenth-century poets, mostly white men, Wheatley acknowledged the paradox of her very being. In Jordan’s words, “It is [Wheatley’s] matter of fact assertion that… Once [she] existed on other than your terms. [Since] we are talking your talk about good and evil/redemption and damnation, let me tell you something you had better understand. I am Black as Cain and I may very well be an angel of the Lord” (p. 178, emphasis Jordan’s). Jordan lifts up the growth of Wheatley’s confidence as a Black poet, finding power in herself as a “difficult miracle.” Her ancestor, Jordan argues, discovered a rare opportunity for indignance; both Wheatley and Jordan speak the language of their colonizers to subvert it.
Most important here is Jordan’s disruption of the first-person perspective. Although the prose clearly assumes Wheatley’s perspective, its tone is distinctly Jordan’s. Both poets stress the historical impossibility of their art; it is as though we can hear Jordan snarling through her prose. Jordan senses Wheatley’s frustration with her position and champions it. Celebrating artistic creation amid violence, Jordan speaks in solidarity with Wheatley, from the “I.” In the Black feminist literary tradition, the “I” speaks from history greater than the limited, autonomous self of the Western intellectual and literary tradition. It at once carries stately authority and possibility, where Black poets can be racially categorized and politicized, while resisting categorization entirely.
O.J. SIMPSON AND THE POLYPHONIC VOICE
In her essays, as well as her poetry, Jordan explores the political narrativization of Black and African American public figures. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, and Rodney King, to name a few, are depicted with the embodied tension as Black icons portrayed within the context of racism, and as complex men with complex pasts. Her essays on Dr. King, for one, carry the contradictions of both King’s notoriety as a champion of civil rights and infamous past as an adulterer and abuser (citation). While these essays contain much of the jarring self-assuredness of her poems, Jordan achieves a diligence in her prose that allows her to speak alongside multiple perspectives. Steadfast to the Black feminist tradition, Jordan re-/positions herself, her “I”, to observe how her own complex group membership could elide a critical positioning of their legacy.
A striking example of this feminist multivocality appears in her 1998 essay collection Affirmative Acts. Frustrated with the acquittal verdict of the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, in which football legend Simpson was tried for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, his ex-wife, Jordan penned her first-person essay “O. J. Simpson: Innocent of What?” Throughout the essay, the voice of Simpson, represented by the “I”, asserts that he is faring well despite the “annoying” (Jordan, 1998, p. 85) circumstances of the trial. Using the first-person perspective, Jordan not only dons Simpson’s bloodied gloves, but also illustrates the historical limitations of individualism in Western conceptions of the self.
Appearing at the end of the essay, the voice of Simpson, represented by this “I”, makes several claims about his status as a Black celebrity in the public eye:
But I’m having a pretty good time! At first I was kind of depressed. But I got over that. And folks are buying and selling these T-shirts dedicated to me. And I don’t have to do anything I don’t feel like doing. I don’t have to say ‘Boo!’ or ‘Diddley-Squat’ to my (white) ex-wife’s family, or anybody. So long as I show up ‘nattily attired,’ and ‘smiling,’ and ‘thumbs-up,’ I’m a winner!
And besides me, you ever heard of a Black man who could pick and choose when he was a Black man? (Jordan, 1998, p. 85)
This characterization of Simpson appears unburdened by the loss of his ex-wife and exalts the notoriety his trial has given him. T-shirts sold in support of his acquittal imply that in the public eye, celebrity outweighs suspicion. Elated – and distracted – by the public support, the speaker then slips into a fallacy. Simpson adamantly says that he “doesn’t have to do anything [he doesn’t] feel like doing,” yet he undermines himself soon after. The public remains in favor of Simpson, so long as he smiles. Their attention to clothes, worn and sold, defines the battle that Simpson has won; he deems himself a winner because his Blackness is eclipsed by the respectability of his class. His wealth enables him to turn his Blackness on and off with a switch, just as you can pull a T-shirt on and off.
Polyphony plays a key element in destabilizing this first-person narrative. This short essay initially signals Simpson’s perspective, but the speaker includes a parenthetical detail about his ex-wife. Contrary to the selective way that Simpson is a Black man, she is a “(white)” woman, thereby restoring the question of race to the speaker’s discussion of gender. Midway through his boast, the speaker interrupts himself, saying, “The papers note that I didn’t even ‘acknowledge’ the families of ‘the victims’ (my––white––wife and her friend)” (p. 84). Race and its intersections with gender are simultaneously relegated and restored. Selective racialization comprises a majority of the sarcasm of this piece, yet the presence of parentheses signals another voice. New questions arise: who is activating and reactivating the raced and gendered dynamics of this testimony? How are we to judge the speaker, the “I,” if we are not sure who is being represented?
Through a Black feminist lens, Jordan redirects our attention to the interplay of race, gender, and class in the Simpson trial. Considering the parenthetical asides that racialize gender, Jordan is likely speaking alongside Simpson. By reinstating both womanhood and whiteness into the narrative, she acknowledges the violence that circulates between men and women, as well as the racist historical narratives that surround Black men and white women. Whiteness also may be mentioned as a nod to O.J.’s celebrity status and subsequent selective racialization, as the white-led media and market shape the narratives about identity and testimony. In another way, who is believed and valued depends on how much power they have.
For all these considerations, the polyphonic function of the “I” does point to one conclusion: each perspective collected by the first-person relies on the construction of the others. The “nation of individuals” has been deposed. Collective responsibility has been restored.
“HOW CAN I BE WHO I AM?”: JORDAN IN THE BAHAMAS
Black feminist praxis embraces the self in its multivocality, its fluidity and history. In Jordan’s constructions of Phillis Wheatley and O.J. Simpson, each voice is interconnected with hers. The instability of the “I” does not eliminate its authority but rather allows us to place it within history, to reach solidarity in our shared and varied oppression.
But creating justice is not as simple as expanding the idea of selfhood. In a 1982 essay titled “A Report from the Bahamas,” Jordan describes an encounter she has with a hotel worker while on vacation. Late on Easter Sunday, she orders a sandwich at the hotel café, much to the chagrin of “Olive,” a woman of color who has been scheduled on the religious holiday. As she absorbs Olive’s glare, the futility of connection becomes striking:
And not only that: even though both ‘Olive’ and ‘I’ live inside a conflict neither one of us created, and even though both of us therefore hurt inside that conflict, I may be one of the monsters she needs to eliminate from her universe and, in a sense, she may be one of the monsters in mine. (p. 219)
For Olive, there is no joy in serving anyone on Easter, even if they are another woman of color. For Jordan, there is guilt at the exploitation of Olive’s labor and her own participation in it. Their conflict is one facilitated by capitalism. Although these Black women are oppressed by the same systems of sexism and racism, class differences elide their ability to connect. Global racial capitalism severs the women from each other; they are both separate entities, signaled by the use of quotation. The “I” reverts to its solitude. It is modern capitalism, then, that gives rise to the impossibility of a democratic nation in America or, for that matter, in any other country affected by its global reach.
“Partnership in misery does not necessarily provide for partnership for change” (1982, p. 219), Jordan wrote. A political storyteller, Jordan understood that democracy would not exist without collective testimony to history. Solidarity required one to bear witness to the complex selfhood of others, such as the in/vulnerability of a self-made Black man such as OJ Simpson or the rebellious poetics of Phillis Wheatley. Polyphony was one strategy Jordan employed to maintain Black feminist ethics in her writing. By collapsing the Western singularity of the “I,” Jordan envisions a future where solidarity is an examination of oppression and power, not a phenotypic category. “How can I be who I am?” Jordan asks. Black feminism and polyphonic testimony may provide a more complete answer.
