June Jordan on Palestine and American Delusions
In these excerpts of “Life After Lebanon” and “Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams,” June Jordan insists on the ever-present need for coalition building across difference.
Sherell Barbee and June Jordan
I SAID I LOVE YOU AND I WANTED / GENOCIDE TO STOP … I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED / NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY / NOBODY COLD / I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED / JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE,” June Jordan wrote in her 1996 poem “Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.” As the Los Angeles Review of Books notes, Jordan faced “death threats, a loss of writing opportunities and social ostracization within multiracial feminist circles” for years because of the unabashed anti-Zionism that became a fixture of her work.
Jordan’s experience navigating censorship began in the 1980s and foreshadows the experiences of many present-day voices for Palestinian liberation. At least 111 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli occupation forces since October 2023, and countless writers and artists around the globe have lost jobs and partnerships because of their open condemnation of the genocide in Gaza. But in spite of the attempts to silence Jordan, her work continues to serve as a blueprint for Black queer feminism rooted in unwavering solidarity with Palestine.
From 1977 to 1979, Jordan and Toni Morrison were both a part of The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met in a New York City apartment to eat and drink together while discussing liberation. Whether addressing genocide, imperialism or the American literary establishment, the writers in the group, which also included Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange, saw their work as a means to make interventions against dominant narratives of colonialism and oppression.
Their words ring prescient.
In “Peril” (2008) and “Racism and Fascism” (1995), reprinted here, Morrison recognizes what the creep of fascism looks like, particularly the censorship of dissent. Below, in an excerpt of the essay “Life After Lebanon” (1984), Jordan reflects on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (funded by American taxes, of course), the backlash she faced after publicly condemning it and the fearless women who supported her in spite of it all. And below in an excerpt of “Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams” (1986), Jordan underscores the dire need for coalition-building across differences.
For these Black literary luminaries and their successors, the gathering storm of fascism was an ever-present counterpoint to the North Star of liberation. Following that, I recommend revisiting Eve Ewing’s 2010 essay “In Defense of the Public,” from In These Times’ archive, which elaborates on the themes of Morrison’s “Racism and Fascism” with the warning that fascism is “recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship.”
Today, with both public square and public services deeply eroded, Jordan’s voice reminds us there are no sidelines. A freedom struggle is being waged, and fascism feeds on silence.
Two years ago it was a Jewish woman who first alerted me to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and to the issues of that horrendous episode in our history: territorial integrity, the survival of the Palestinian people, facts versus propaganda, self-determination versus neocolonialism, and American taxes — my and your money — providing the Israeli armed forces with means to carry out this invasion of another country.
It was an Israeli woman who informed me about the Peace Now movement inside Israel, a movement opposed to the invasion, and opposed to the massacre of the Palestinian people. It was an Israeli woman who warned me that the ulterior purpose of the invasion was Israeli settlement of the West Bank, i.e. complete displacement and disenfranchisement of the Palestinian people.
During the summer of 1982, it was another Jewish woman with whom I spoke daily, comparing newspaper and radio accounts, tracking eyewitnesses recently returned from Lebanon, and planning whatever we could to counter the lies that saturated the U.S. media; we wanted to stop the war. The other people with whom I kept my witness, and wept, and worked, that summer, were, again, mostly women, and mostly Jewish women. For a long time I believe that we supposed the problem was that of misinformation. If only Americans knew the truth of things then they would rally to help, to stop the invasion, the slaughter.
What I gradually began to understand, however, was something importantly different. The problem was that the Lebanese people, in general, and that the Palestinian people, in particular, are not whitemen: They never have been whitemen. Hence they were and they are only Arabs, or terrorists, or animals. Certainly they were not men and women and children; certainly they were not human beings with rights remotely comparable to the rights of whitemen, the rights of a nation of whitemen.
In addition, I learned as a result of a poem I wrote that was published in July 1982, in The Village Voice, and I learned as a result of all of the op-ed pieces of mine that the New York Times unabashedly refused to print, that no women and that certainly no non-white woman should presume to think about/form an opinion/construct an analysis of any issue of conflict between any whitemen. Either the whitemen in this country will censor and block the publication of such a woman’s thoughts, or they will whitelist and pounce upon her with such epithets as “anti-Semitic” and “naive” and “divisive.”
In the fall of 1982, myself and two other women met at my house to discuss what else we might attempt. This was immediately prior to the massacre of Sabra and Shatilah. We decided to convene a poetry reading in which North American poets, Israeli poets, and Arab poets would combine their poetry inside an event to benefit the children of Lebanon: All monies raised by the reading would go directly to UNICEF, for the maimed and homeless children victimized by the invasion. After much toil, the other two women, both of them young white poets, and one of them Jewish, succeeded in organizing a historic poetry reading in which, indeed, Israeli, Arab, and American poets literally agreed to appear on the same stage on the same night.
As it happens, I was the last poet to read, that evening. When I finished, I found myself surrounded by large whitemen, two of them Israeli poets, all of them yelling at me and threatening me with the looming bulk of their bodies.
It was women who got me out of that auditorium. It was women, one of them Black, one of them Jewish, one of them WASP, who watched out for me, and who “covered my back” at the reception following, a reception at which one whiteman told a young Jewish woman that I, “That Black woman over there should be burned alive in green fire.”
It is noteworthy that this particular whiteman did not say this directly to me. Nor did he address his vile remarks to my son who was standing not more than three feet away from him, and who would have cheerfully punched out his lights, so to speak. It is noteworthy that not one white man, Israeli or otherwise, said anything to me, directly, except when he stood as part of a group of whitemen hugely outnumbering me.
But what I find more memorable are the women of that summer and of that November evening, 1982: The New Women of the New Womanliness who persisted against the male white rhetoric about borders and national security and terrorism and democracy and vital interests. And I also find memorable the distinguished U.S. Congressman, John Conyers, who nobly em-ceed that benefit poetry reading, and who hosted the reception afterwards: John Conyers is not now, nor has he ever been, a whiteman.
The Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the complicity of Americans through tax monies that supported the invasion, the slaughter of Lebanese peoples, the decimation and rout of the Palestinian peoples, the awesome determination by whitemen, in this country, to silence or to discredit American dissent, the vicious wielding about of the term anti-Semitic whenever anyone protested the interminable carnage executed and precipitated by that invasion, left me extremely embittered, shocked, and wondering about life after Lebanon: What would that be like?
In fact, the intellectual community, including the feminist community of North America, and the entire community of the political left in America separated into two seemingly irreconcilable groups, at a minimum: There were those for whom Israel remained a sacrosanct subject exempt from rational discussion and dispute, and there were those to whom Israel looked a whole lot like yet another country run by whitemen whose militarism tended to produce racist consequences; i.e. the disenfranchisement and subjugation of non-white peoples, peoples not nearly as strong as they.
Now it is one thing to disagree and quite another to prohibit disagreement. The invasion of Lebanon erected a subject off-limits to disagreement. The only supposedly legitimate persons allowed by the media to express any views whatsoever on Lebanon/Israel/Palestinians/U.S.-Middle East policies were whitemen. Everyone else was either an Arab (i.e. “Anti-Semitic”) or “Anti-Semitic,” or else “self-hating Jews” (i.e. “Anti-Semitic”).
With the construction of an ultimate taboo, a taboo behind which the fate of an entire people, the Palestinians, might be erased, how could there be an intellectual, a moral life after Lebanon in this country?
I would have to answer my own question in this way: Because many people in the United States and around the globe are not now nor have they ever been whitemen.
Many of these people are Black — one of whom tried to become President of our country. Many of these people are Jewish women who never quit from sending out flyers and making phone calls. Many of these people are male and female Jewish lawyers who are now personally threatened by new Reagan legislation intended to eliminate basic freedoms of dissent. Many of these people are young white women and young whitemen who do not want to grow up guilty of killing other people who have never hurt them. Many of these people are Black women and white women who perceive that the ambitions of self respect and species’ survival reveal deeply indistinguishable values.
Here and in South Africa and in Nicaragua and in Amsterdam and in England I see a New Woman: She frequently wears a uniform. She often carries a gun. She puts down her body to block missiles and bullets, alike. She grieves for the dead but she fights back, to honor the dead. She learns self-defense. She runs for public office. She earns positions of enormous political power. And she is not calm. She is very excited and very busy making over this place into a safe place for us all, including whitemen.
She is Fannie Lou Hamer and Geraldine Ferrarro. She is Barbara Masakela and Winnie Mandela. She is Vivian Stromberg of Mobilization for Survival. She is Kathy Engel and Alexis De Veaux of MADRE. She is Carol Haddad who founded the Arab-American Women’s Feminist League. She is Gale Jackson and Paula Finn of Art Against Apartheid. She is Sara Miles of Talking Nicaragua and The International Brigades to Nicaragua. She is Betsy Cohn who founded The Central American Historical Institute in Washington. She is Frances Fox Piven who co-founded The Human Serve Voter Registration movement that may permanently alter the composition of our electorate.
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 is the most painful sensation of a moral life.
In my own life after Lebanon it has been other women who have helped me to outlive and to undo my fears of telling the truth. As Etel Adnan has written: It is when we women, The New Women of the world, “Stand up to our brothers to defend the Stranger,” it is only then that we can hope to become innocent of the evil that now imperils the planet. It is only then, when we cease worshiping the tribe, that we will find our way into a tenable family of men and women as large and as invincible as infinite, infinitely varied, life.
Do we not live in the generous, pastoral land of the Marlboro Man? The land of healthy and good-looking and young people who ski and sail and laugh and smoke cigarettes, all at the same time, gracefully? If we do not match up to those images, then we have personally failed, somehow. And, naturally, you keep personal failure a secret.
American delusions of individuality now disfigure our national landscape with multitudes of disconnected pained human beings who pull down the shades on prolonged and needless agony. But if we would speak the unspeakable, if we would name and say the source of our sorrow and scars, we would find a tender and a powerful company of others struggling as we do, and we would know we should show to the world, at last, that shame belongs with blame, not on the victim.
We would undertake collective political action founded on admitted similarities and grateful connections among us, otherwise needful citizens who now regard each other as burdensome or frightening or irrelevant. This would mean a great national coming out — a coming out of our cars, a coming out of our deadpan passage through the streets of America, a coming out of the suburbs, a coming out of our perverted enthusiasm for whatever keeps us apart: home computers, answering machines, VCRs, and then the proverbial two weeks in a faraway cabin in the woods.
But each American one of us feels so special and so different that none of us assumes the validity of his or her outrage or longing inside the mythical context of “the American Mainstream.” We become persuaded that the people of our country must be somebody else, not you and me, even as we regard our government as some alien, half-deaf, and unaccountable monarch to whom we — sooner or later — must pay homage or, at least, taxes. We tolerate insulting, homicidal proposals for national security — such as an aircraft carrier or a helmet and bulletproof vest — when what we know is that national security must mean, for example, respectful and adequate and guaranteed tender care for elderly Americans and for any American one of us who cannot, by herself, do things without help. And meanwhile our American worship of space, open road space, frontier space, astral space and more particularly, as much space as possible between me and whoever you are — on the bus, on my block, on my job, in my field — our American dreams of “the first” and “the only” produce an invariably mistaken self-centered perspective that repeatedly proves to be self-defeating and, even antidemocratic. Demos, as in democratic, as in a democratic state, means people, not person. A democratic nation of persons, of individuals, is an impossibility, and a fratricidal goal. Each American one of us must consciously choose to become a willing and outspoken part of the people who, together, will determine our individual chances for happiness, and justice.
By people I mean the white people the black people the female people the lonely people the terrorized people the elderly people the young people the visionary people the unemployed people the regular ordinary omnipresent people who crave grace and variety and surprise and safety and one new day after another.
Democratic anything presupposes equal membership in the body politic. But we will never even approximate the equality a democratic state depends upon, we will never even understand the equality each American one of us requires for our rightful self-respect, as long as we will deny all that we feel and need in common.
But I’m special. I’m different, just like you. I worried about putting together these sentences I have written, here, from my heart: What was the point? To whom should I present myself? What can I know of the doubts and the aching and the bitterness that may prey upon a middle-class nuclear family living in, for instance, Portland, Oregon?
And then I understood that the question was, rather, do I care? And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes, yes: 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 quality and the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.
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Sherell Barbee is the print editor at In These Times where she also curates the culture section. She was a 2021 residence fellow at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
