On Instagram today, I saw a post by Jewish Voices for Peace that emphasized the parallels between the colonization of Turtle Island and Palestine. It reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share a paper I wrote this Spring semester that looks at June Jordan’s poetry about Palestine.
Jordan was nothing if not intersectional and prophetic. She was not afraid to highlight the connections between the U.S. and the State of Israel as colonizing forces—and criticize the complicity and silence of the American public in regard to both. And this was in the 1980s when it was even more verboten to name Israel as a colonizing power than it is today. Even in the progressive feminist circles of which Jordan was a part, her support of Palestinian liberation was controversial.
But more on that below. You can read several of Jordan’s poems on Palestine here. For more, check out this collection of Jordan’s work, Directed By Desire, at bookshop.org, your local bookstore, or your local library.
“Where Are My Loved Ones?”: June Jordan’s Rhetoric in “Moving towards Home”
Introduction
June Jordan’s poetry and activist work challenged various forms of imperialism, racism, and ethnic cleansing in different countries (Harb 72), including the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Even though it was Jewish and Israeli activists who first politicized Jordan on Israel (Feldman 209), and many of the activists and organizers who sustained Jordan in her work were Jewish women (217), Jordan’s support of Palestinians was very controversial. In 1985, Jordan published Living Room, a collection featuring poems on Palestinian oppression with specific attention to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila genocide, a massacre primarily of Palestinian refugees in Beirut, Lebanon, carried out by the militia of Lebanese Forces at the behest of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
As Keith Feldman, Zahra Ali, and George Abraham, respectively, have all observed in their writings on Jordan’s Lebanon poems, Jordan took issue with the way American media covered the invasion of Lebanon and the Palestinian plight. Jordan believed the passive voice constructions of mainstream media, and its failure to platform Palestinian voices, enabled and reinforced state violence: “[Jordan’s Lebanon writings made] visible how the abstractions of state discourse mask the violence of state practice” (Feldman 208).
This paper will examine how Jordan’s Lebanon poems engage with the U.S. media, with special attention to “Moving towards Home,” in which Jordan quotes and directly responds to The New York Times’ coverage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. It will argue that, in “Moving towards Home,” Jordan uses what Abraham calls a “collective lyric ‘I’” (“Teaching Poetry”) while invoking the theme of speech to forge and perform a new speech-act that serves as a counterpoint to the mode of discourse used by U.S. media. In the process, Jordan turns the poem into a discourse not only on Lebanon, but on speech itself, and how even the ways we speak can affect violence or restoration: Speech can move us closer toward home or further away. By opening her poem with the voice of a Palestinian woman in grief, Jordan centers Palestinian yearnings for home, in direct contrast to the disembodied rhetoric of journalism evinced the the New York Times’ coverage of the massacre.
Historical Background
Although Living Room was published in 1985, Jordan began composing her Lebanon poems three years earlier, during the Israeli military invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982 (Feldman 207), some months before the Sabra and Shatila massacre of September 1982. In Chapter 5 of A Shadow over Palestine, Keith P. Feldman discusses women of color feminisms and what he refers to as “the Lebanon conjuncture,” arguing that the Sabra and Shatila genocide shifted feminist discourse on Palestine in the U.S. (191). Fifteen years earlier, the June 1967 War “marked a discursive opening for race radical movements in the United States to critique Israeli settler colonialism and fashion anticolonial expressions of Palestinian solidarity” (187).
As Israel’s racialized regime of rule intensified, the question of how to articulate the gendered tensions between Zionism, Jewishness, and race also intensified and reached a climax in the Lebanon invasion (195). Despite the invasion’s extensive coverage in the media over the summer, Lebanon was a taboo topic at the June 12, 1982 nuclear disarmament rally in NYC and the June 16-20 conference of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) : “Reports note that the taboo was largely adhered to, save for a speech by Noam Chomsky at the New York rally, and several notable speeches and placards at the coordinated march in San Francisco” (Feldman 207). Jordan herself was not at the conference due to health issues, but two weeks later (June 30, 1982) came together with faith leaders and activists, including Israeli peace activist Shulamith Koenig, at a press conference to condemn the Israeli military’s action (207-209).
There, Jordan read her poem, “To Sing a Song of Palestine,” which she dedicated to Koenig. Even then, several months before the Beirut massacre, it was clear to Jordan that the Israeli military’s project was Palestinian genocide, a conviction she did not hesitate to make clear in her remarks (Feldman 209). In a study of Jordan’s anti-war poems, Philip Metres argues that while June Jordan’s “righteous certainty” created a poetic rhetoric that attracted some and repelled others, this stance is “a necessary performance of self-empowerment on behalf of the disenfranchised selves that Jordan identifies with and champions—in particular, the people of color both at home and abroad victimized by American power” (181-182).
Interestingly, Metres notes that most American poets have been “weaned on an aesthetic of ambiguity and disinterestedness,” and so might find Jordan’s poems unnerving (183), which may suggest that U.S. media discourse represents only one aspect of America’s larger discourse problem. When it is vague and unclear who the actors are, there is no one to blame for violence; absolution becomes a simple task of not looking too closely at the humans affected by American violence. In the summer of 1982, Jordan demanded that people pay attention to the Beirut invasion and look at the violence the American support of Israel was doing to Palestinians. Less than three months later, the Lebanese Forces, supported by the IDF, carried out the Beirut massacre. In light of this, an aesthetic of disinterest and ambiguity begins to feel far more unnerving than Jordan’s aesthetic of “righteous certainty.”
Memorialization of Lebanon
In “Aesthetics of Memorialization,” Zahra A. Hussein Ali focuses on the ways three artists memorialize the 1982 Sabra and Shatila genocide in their work: Kuwaiti sculptor Sami Mohammad, French writer Jean Genet, and American poet Jordan Jordan. Ali’s goal is to look at the role of commemorative art and literature amidst media hegemony by comparing the aesthetic strategies of three artists who commemorated the same event through different mediums. Ali argues that June Jordan’s poetic mode betrays an anxiety about media power and traces this concern to how the media often collapses the idea of political interest and the idea of justice (612). As an Afro-American woman familiar with the role the media has played in the subordination of Black Americans, Jordan is keen to show that American corporate media is not a reliable source; rather, the media betrays “disciplinary perspectives that homogenize the viewers’ perceptions and shape the meaning of the genocide to accord with a dominant Eurocentric discourse” (612).
Aesthetically, Jordan’s poems play off the rhetoric of the media (612). Ali suggests Jordan’s satiric tone, tempo, cinematic style, and slowed-down pace serve as foils to the media’s verbalizations about the genocide. By structuring her poems this way, Jordan provides focus on the genocide across two distances (bifocality), in contrast to the media’s vision, which is monofocal (590). “Nightline: September 20, 1982” plays off the media by excerpting a quote from the ABC news program’s guest commentator that assigns the memory of the Sabra and Shatila genocide to “an insignificant event to the annihilating past”: “I know it’s an unfortunate way to say it, but / do you think you can put this massacre / on the back burner now?” (616).
“The Cedar Trees of Lebanon” uses the image of uprooting an indigenous tree as an allegory to depict the optical horror of the slaughter of Palestinian refugees (612). “Moving Towards Home” and “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” portray the heinousness much more graphically “through the sensory onslaught on the reader’s consciousness of mutilated bodies” (612). Ali argues that, stylistically, all three of these poems contest “the anchorperson’s rushing sentences and the rapid flux of information articulated in a supremely detached tone” and, instead, offer readers “the controlled, decelerated rhythm of an attention-giving frame of mind” (613).
Sirène Harb’s “Naming Oppressions” looks at the influence of June Jordan’s politics, philosophy, and thought on the writing of Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad, arguing that both poets’ work “is inscribed in a comparative analytic inspired women of color critique” that shows the connections between neoliberalism and formations like nationalism, be it minority or bourgeois (71). Harb’s discussion of Jordan’s poems on Palestine are set in the context of how they contribute to this analytic.
Jordan is one of several other Black American writers who introduced Hammad to Palestinian writers, but Jordan’s impact was especially palpable (Harb 76). Hammad and Jordan never met or formally corresponded, but Hammad wrote about Jordan’s influence, particularly in “Moving Towards Home,” which was initially published in The Village Voice (75). Hammad reflected on how Jordan never directly discusses Palestine or the Right of Return in “Moving,” and suggested the poem’s power lay in how Jordan rendered the political as a story about the human, the personal (75). Harb suggests that Hammad’s insistence on reading Jordan this way “identifies an important axis pertaining to the epistemological framework of women of color feminism based on the decentering of normative politics” (76).
Speaking more broadly of Jordan’s use of the “living room” trope to write about Palestine, Harb shows how Hammad’s “love poem” is influenced by Jordan’s work. In this poem, Hammad “gestures toward poetic and political figurations of alternative spaces of being” by positing her body as “another possible living room that counters Israeli acts of racial and ethnic cleansing” (78-79)
Both “Aesthetics of Memorialization” and “Naming Oppressions” focus on Palestine in June Jordan’s work, but with very different emphases. The latter is concerned with the nitty gritty of linguistic aesthetics in relation to memory, how Jordan uses rhetoric to contest the American media’s portrayals of Palestinian genocide. The former surveys the influence of Jordan’s work on one specific poet, focusing more broadly on Jordan’s relationship to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist poetics rather than visiting the question of how Jordan employs specific rhetorical strategies in her poetry.
These two articles address four of Jordan’s poems on Palestine, but she included several others in Living Room, notably “March Song,” “To Sing a Song of Palestine,” and “The Beirut Jokebook.” The latter is tonally similar to “Nightline” in how it takes sentiments expressed by American news commentators (if not direct quotes) and arranges them in a way that highlights the incongruity and inhumanity of their messages (Jordan 396). “To Sing a Song,” is more meditative and mournful, even psalmic (345). It draws on images of land, curses, war, magic, and most of all the picture of the mother’s body as a metaphor for the creation of home, a living space.
“March Song” feels surreal with its vivid descriptions of the land, presumably as seen through the eyes of Palestinians forced to march toward refugee camps, juxtaposed with the horrific reality of their displacement: “We follow the leaders who chew up / the land / with names like Beirut / where the game is to tear / up the whole Hemisphere / into pieces of children / and patches of sand” (362). Jordan dedicated Living Room to the children of Atlanta and Lebanon and, as both Ali and Harb have shown, Jordan saw the oppression of Black bodies as part of the same racist, colonialist matrix that enabled (and continues to enable) the oppression of Palestinian bodies. “March Song” and Jordan’s other poems on Palestine are set alongside poems that document oppression in other areas around the globe, showing the human cost of political conflict and how the political is always personal.
Moving Towards Home
“Moving towards Home” begins with an epigraph from a New York Times press release by Thomas L. Friedman on the Beirut massacre, published on September 20, 1982. As more details came to light, NYT published a second press release by Friedman on September 26. An analysis of these NYT articles shows that Jordan based the graphic imagery in her poem on these reports. Nearly every line in the first two-thirds of the poem can be traced to a specific atrocity reported by Friedman.
Jordan’s references to “the bulldozer” and “the red dirt,” allude to images from the first NYT press release. Friedman reported that there was “a wide patch of freshly turned red dirt inside the camp with arms and legs sticking out one end” that appeared to be a mass grave (“U.S. Presses Israel”). “In addition,” Friedman wrote, “no one has any idea how many bodies were taken off in the scoops of bulldozers, how many were driven away and killed outside of the camp and how many are buried under buildings that were intentionally bulldozed to cover up bullet-riddled men, women and children.”
There are a multitude of other details drawn from the NYT articles. Jordan’s lines on “the nightlong screams / that reached / the observation posts where soldiers lounged about” (398) allude to the complicity of the Israeli army during the Beirut massacre. Though Friedman was at first unsure whether Israeli army knew what was happening in the Sabra and Shatila camps, he speculated that from their observation posts “it would not have been difficult to ascertain not only by sight but from the sounds of gunfire and the screams coming from the camp” (“U.S. Presses Israel”). However, as more information came to light, it was clear that the Lebanese Forces had entered and exited the camp through Israeli lines, and Israeli soldiers had been lounging in their observation posts during the massacre (“The Beirut Massacre”).
The Israeli army not only knew what was happening, they sent up flares to provide the Lebanese militia with light as they went from house to house killing Palestinian families in their beds and at their dinner tables (Friedman). In some cases, the they gunned down Palestinian or slit their throats on the spot, while they took others outside, lined them up against the walls, and shot them. While the NYT press releases do at times name various actors pair with verbs (e.g., the militiamen below “who burst in”), the language tends toward the passive language typical of reportage. Take, for example, the passive verbs in this excerpt (italics mine):
[T]hose people whose bodies were found toward the southern entrance of Shatila were killed at random while other [sic] appeared to have been lined up against walls and shot. In other cases, what appeared to be entire families had been slain as they sat at the dinner table. Others were found dead in their nightclothes, apparently suprised [sic] by the militamen [sic] who burst in on them Thursday evening. Some people were found with their throats slit. Others had been mutilated with some kind of heavy blade, perhaps axes. (Friedman, “The Beirut Massacre”)
When Jordan writes about “the piled up bodies and / the stench / that will not float” and “the nurse again and / again raped / before they murdered her on the hospital floor” (398), she is not taking creative license. Lebanese soldiers invaded both the Gaza Hospital and the Akka Palestinian Hospital and, at the latter, repeatedly raped and then shot a nineteen-year-old Palestinian nurse named Intisar Ismail (Friedman, “U.S. Presses Israel”).
Jordan’s poem, however, is not a mere repetition of the explicit and unfiltered reports of the carnage. Rather, “Moving” is a distillation of the horrors of the massacre framed as an “unspeakable event” that must be spoken about nonetheless, and in ways that are more personal and intimate than the language of reportage allows.
It comes as no surprise, then, that Jordan’s entry point is the voice of a Palestinian in grief. “Moving” begins where the first NYT article ends, with a quote from a Palestinian woman searching for her son, Abu Fadi, in the aftermath of the massacre: “‘Where is Abu Fadi,’ she wailed. ‘Who will bring me my loved one?’” (Friedman, “U.S. Presses Israel”). While a journalistic approach prioritizes the uncovering and documenting facts, the ‘what’ of an event, Jordan starts with the impact of the event on human beings. Following this epigraph, Jordan establishes a formula, “I do not wish to speak about...Nor do I wish to speak about,” that she repeats throughout the poem:
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering
all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about
the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about (398)
The phrase “Nor do I wish to speak about” occurs eight times, each followed by a specific atrocity committed during the Sabra and Shatila genocide.
After these eight occurrences, Jordan repeats the four opening lines with the gruesome image of a bulldozer unable to cover up all the corpses, and then explains why she (I consider Jordan the speaker) does not want to talk about these things: “because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events / that must follow from those who dare / ‘to purify’ a people / those who dare / ‘to exterminate’ a people.” The phrase “those who dare” is repeated five times, each paired with a sentiment (either allusion or direct quote) that encapsulates the State of Israel’s inhumane attitude and policy toward Palestinians.
While these sentiments come from various sources, some Jordan takes directly from the NYT articles. “To purify,” for example, is an allusion to what an Israeli colonel told Reuters correspondent, Paul Eedle, about the Israeli army’s stance on Lebanese’ Forces massacre in the camps: “The colonel told Mr. Eedle that his men were working on the basis of two principles: that the Israeli Army should not get involved but that the area should be ‘purified’” (Friedman, “U.S. Presses Israel”).
The phrase “to mop up” comes from a third NYT article released dated September 27, 1982. In the second article released just a day earlier, Friedman had reported that “Israeli officers in East Beirut said what happened at the 4:30 Friday meeting was that the Phalangists told the Israelis that they needed more time to ‘clean up’ the area” (“The Beirut Massacre”). But Maj. Gen. Amir Drori, senior Israeli commander in Lebanon, denied knowledge of the massacre taking place in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Additionally, “General Drori was asked if the Phalangists [Lebanese Forces] had requested, and been granted, a few more hours just to mop up -as some Israeli military sources suggested. General Drori declined to comment” (Friedman, “Israeli General”).
Following this middle, “those who dare” section, Jordan then introduces a second a second series of reasons that is separated by a line break, but is not a new sentence:
because I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten to
a tombstone (399)
By fronting this section with a second “because,” Jordan creates a link between the “unspeakable events” that she does not wish to speak about to what she needs to speak about. The phrase “I need to speak about” occurs five times and, similarly, “I need to talk about” is repeated three times.
What is the effect of this repetition? In this second section of “Moving towards Home,” Jordan enlarges the concept of “home” introduced in the poem’s title. For Jordan, “living room” is a place where the land does not suffer abuse and such unspeakable horrors do not happen. Put differently, Jordan shows how these unspeakable events demand that we speak of a world where there is living room. This act of speech becomes a prophetic act of dreaming that not only grieves and marks the devastation, but aims toward a future where “home” is a reality.
The third stanza of “Moving” is the section that has received the most scholarly attention, perhaps because it is here that Jordan makes an explicit connection between her identity as a Black woman and the plight of Palestinians:
I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones? (400)
In “Reciprocal Solidarity,” Sa’ed Atshan and Darnell L. Moore discuss the intersection between Black and Palestinian queer struggles, naming Jordan as an example of Arab-Black solidarity (690). Atshan and Moore see connections between mass incarceration in the U.S. and Israel’s detainment of Palestinians, arguing that the “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel is rooted, in part, the ways both have criminalized racialized bodies (687).
To Atshan and Moore, the similar histories of racialized violence against Black and Arab people is opportunity for solidarity: “Palestine, the inner-city United States, Jim Crow America, and apartheid South Africa provide not identical, but parallel histories of segregation, racial violence, and opportunities for connection—and friendship—between Blacks and Arabs, queer and straight” (689). June Jordan saw this relationship between Black and Palestinian oppression quite clearly, and Atshan and Moore rightly identify the voice in the third stanza of “Moving towards Home” as as an example of Arab-Black reciprocal solidarity (690). They also cite “Born Palestinian, Born Black” by Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad as an example of solidarity (690), showing that this identification between Black and Palestinian people is indeed reciprocal; it is not simply Black writers who are making these connections.
June Jordan’s identification with Palestinians is not limited to the third stanza, but is present in the second stanza where she begins to speak about home. In an essay for Guernica, “Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse,” Palestinian American poet George Abraham discusses “an abusive pattern of language” employed by U.S. media that “contorts the English language into a supremacist enactor of the colonial projects.” Jordan wrote about these linguistic problems with the U.S. media’s coverage of Palestine, showing how passive voice and the absence of accountability-driven language that enables an ongoing Palestinian apocalypse: “[Jordan identified] an American capital-E-English which is not merely stagnant, but comfortable in our cyclic apocalypse” (Abraham).
Abraham sees Jordan’s “Moving” as a form of resistance to such linguistic violence. They argue that Jordan’s “lyric ‘I’” in this poem is a self that is collective, a multitudinous self. Unlike the imagination of the singular lyric “I” so often found in white canonical English poetry, Jordan’s “I” constitutes a lyric collective that creates space for many consciousnesses:
The poet demands that we see Palestinians beyond images of bulldozers, beyond white problems of language, beyond victims suspended in eternal and cyclic apocalypse. Instead, Jordan chooses the more difficult and transgressive path: to See, to Build with, to Love Palestinians. What better way to say “I love you” to a people than to say, not “I am you” or “I beyond you,” but “I am become you?” Or “I future you?” (Abraham)
As noted above, “Moving towards Home” opens with the distressed cries of a Palestinian woman searching for her loved one, which contrasts sharply with the September 20 NYT report. The NYT article starts with coverage of the violence and does not move to the personal until the conclusion. Jordan also concludes her poem by alluding back to this quote in the second to last line (italics mine): “there is less and less and less living room / and where are my loved ones? / It is time to make our way home.” (400).
By returning to where the poem began, with a Palestinian woman’s search for her loved one, Jordan has moved the speaker of the poem into the voice of the Palestinian woman. And yet, this is not a usurpation of the woman’s voice or transformation of the speaker into a different, singular self. The speaker “was born a Black woman” and she has not left that identity behind, as though she has transitioned from one identity to another. She has not moved out of Black consciousness, but found resonances between Black and Palestinian experiences that suggest a shared vision of ‘home.’ Abraham’s emphasis on the futurity of the phrase “I am become” is apt because these words juxtapose present (am) and future (become) to suggest both movement and a perpetual state of solidarity.
Both a Black woman and a Palestinian woman (who also represents a collective of Palestinians) are present in this lyric collective “I.” There is “living room” for both in this multitudinous “I.” When the speaker asks where her loved ones are, it is an expression of grief, but it is also a statement of solidarity. In asking where her loved ones are, she is making a statement about who her loved ones are: The people with whom she is grieving and moving towards home.
It is significant that Jordan does not explicitly invoke the collective until that last line (emphasis mine): “It is time to make our way home.” She speaks about “my language,” “my children,” “my family,” and “my loved ones,” and does not use the first person plural until the conclusion. This lends further support to Abraham’s notion that this lyric “I” contains a multitude of selves. By the end, the Black speaker is “become Palestinian” and the movement towards home begins now, pulling the future into the present.
Conclusion
While the U.S. media uses language that denies Palestinian subjectivity, and insodoing perpetually defers Palestinian dreams of a return home, Jordan’s “Moving towards Home” creates a speaker whose own subjectivity interconnects with Palestinian reality. Where journalistic representations of the Sabra and Shatila genocide encapsulate an aesthetic that is as disembodied as it is voyeuristic, Jordan steps in with a speaker that wants no participation in voyeurism or the replication of violence. This speaker talks about violence only because memorializing the violence and demanding accountability is an integral step on the journey towards home.
Where is home for the speaker? Home is a place with living room “where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud / for my loved ones / where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi / because he will be there beside me” (Jordan 399). Jordan makes it plain who her loved ones are: Those in search of living room. As long as Palestinians continue to weep and search for their loved ones, Jordan will, too.
Works Cited
Abraham, George. “Teaching Poetry in the Palestinian Apocalypse.” Guernicamag.com, Guernica, 27 Sept 2021, https://www.guernicamag.com/teaching-poetry-in-the-palestinian-apocalypse/. Accessed 13 Nov 2021.
Ali, Zahra A. Hussein. “Aesthetics of Memorialization: The Sabra and Shatila Genocide in the Work of Sami Mohammad, Jean Genet, and June Jordan.” Criticism, vol. 51, no. 4, Wayne State University Press, 2009, pp. 589–621, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23131533.
Atshan, Sa’ed, and Darnell L. Moore. “Reciprocal Solidarity: Where the Black and Palestinian Queer Struggles Meet.” Biography, vol. 37, no. 2, University of Hawai’i Press, 2014, pp. 680–705, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24570200.
Feldman, Keith P. A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt14jxvz2.
Friedman, Thomas L. “U.S. Presses Israel to Let U.N. Troops Move into Beirut.” NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 20 Sept 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/20/world/us-presses-israel-to-let-un-troops-move-into-beirut.html. Accessed 13 Nov 2021.
---. “The Beirut Massacre: The Four Days.” NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 26 Sept 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/26/world/the-beirut-massacre-the-four-days.html. Accessed 13 Nov 2021.
---. “Israeli General in Beirut Says He Did Not Know of Killings.” NYTimes.com, The New York Times, 27 Sept 1982, https://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/27/world/israeli-general-in-beirut-says-he-did-not-know-of-killings.html. Accessed 18 Nov 2021.
Harb, Sirène. “Naming Oppressions, Representing Empowerment: June Jordan’s and Suheir Hammad’s Poetic Projects.” Feminist Formations, vol. 26, no. 3, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 71–99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43860762.
Jordan, June. Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sarah Miles, Copper Canyon Press, 2007.
Metres, Philip. “June Jordan’s Righteous Certainty: Poetic Address in Resistance Poetry.” Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Home Front since 1941, University of Iowa Press, 2007, pp. 179–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt20krznv.12.