Crossing the Jordan River into the New World

On February 2, 1980, June Jordan sent me the following note:

Dearest Ethelbert,

Thank you so much for the Walt Whitman foto. I’ve matted it and placed it, hanging up on my bedroom wall. It’s really a fine portrait of the hairy old man!

That June Jordan would mat and frame a picture of Walt Whitman underscores his importance to her life and work. It should not be overlooked that she hung the picture on her bedroom wall. She did not place Whitman in the living room. She placed him in the bedroom, a place of intimacy, a place of love, a place where one finds June Jordan doing things one does in the dark. When her book Things That I Do in the Dark was published in 1977, the cover design completely misunderstood what Jordan wanted to convey to her readers and audience. Whereas Random House presented a hand on a naked shoulder, Jordan was thinking about how she would rise in the middle of the night, perhaps groping for something to write with. How often are poems born out of dreams?

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me
whoever you are
whoever I may become.
—From “These Poems” by June Jordan

While Jordan is reaching out to strangers through her poems, we live in a world where the US government builds walls. Americans are afraid of the stranger, the other: the person of color, the person who might not speak English, the person who worships God in a different way.

Jordan in her 1980 note calls Whitman “a hairy old man.” They are words of endearment that could also be misinterpreted as those of caution. In her essay “For the Sake of People’s Poetry: Walt Whitman and the Rest of Us,” written in 1981, we find Jordan at her most curious. Always the poet asking questions, Jordan wants to know more about Whitman. Her essay is a wake-up call to our memory; a reminder of the archaeological challenges we still confront as writers—the digging we must do before we are dug.

Let us note that Jordan’s essay was written thirty-seven years ago, before the birth of Cave Canem in 1996 or CantoMundo in 2009. Today these organizations serve as literary sentinels protecting the American imagination. They guarantee that our future society and our literature will no longer be defined by whiteness or by the few.

In her essay Jordan also provides us with a definition of a New World. As writers we understand the importance of language and the need to define and provide clarity. It is perhaps just a coincidence that in 1981, the literary critic and editor Hoyt Fuller died at the age of fifty-seven. Fuller, who had been the editor of Negro Digest and Black World, had founded the journal First World. The title was a rejection of being viewed as part of a European-defined Third World, a movement from Black World to First World.

The writer John Killens often spoke about the need to be viewed as First World, not Third World. This Cold War term represented nations that were non-aligned with the Western or Communist bloc, or in economic terms so-called “developing countries.” Of course, Fuller’s and Killens’s definitions are an attempt to redefine what it means to be “first”—First World originally being used to represent the industrialized capitalist countries of Western Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.

How June Jordan defines New World is therefore critical, prior to our acceptance and adoption of the term. At times our future language must shed its past. We first notice Jordan’s wit and humor prior to defining what New World means. “New World does not mean New England,” she writes. This single statement rejects the American Revolution as the beginning of America. It’s a quiet way of acknowledging that Native Americans were here before the bearded people arrived. Jordan continues with a brief definition:

New World means non-European; it means new; it means big; it means heterogenous; it means unknown; it means free; it means an end to feudalism, caste, privilege, and the violence of power. It means wild in the sense that a tree growing away from the earth enacts a wild event.

Often when using a dictionary to look up the definition of a word we stop after discovering the term’s first meaning. In this case, one would simply conclude Jordan’s use of the term New World means non-European. What I find attractive within Jordan’s full definition is the equating of New World with the unknown. One can link this to Richard Wright’s encouragement to African American writers to pursue that aspect of the Black experience which embraces the forms of things unknown. This is the title Stephen Henderson gives to the introduction of his important anthology Understanding the New Black Poetry published in 1973. It is the unknown which at times speaks to the scientist and explorer. It is the unknown the writer embraces when realizing the need to provide evidence for things unseen. Here is where we might find the New World writer speaking as witness, reminding us what it means to be free, demanding an end to privilege and the violence of power.

Finally, Jordan’s use of the term to mean “wild” in the sense of a tree growing should remind us of something the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal wrote about at the end of his poem “Ecology”:

We will restore our forests, rivers, lagoons.
We will decontaminate Lake Managua.
Not only humans longed for liberation.
All ecology groaned for it also. The revolution
is also one of lakes, rivers, trees and animals.

We can link Jordan to Cardenal through the essay “For the Sake of People’s Poetry” in her collection On Call: Political Essays. On the cover of this book one finds a picture of June Jordan (with Francisco Campbell) in Nicaragua. In this book, Jordan’s note right after the copyright page reads:

Given that they were first to exist on the planet and currently make up the majority, the author will refer to that part of the population usually termed Third World as the First World.

To be a New World poet requires an openness to understanding how the world must be refigured. June Jordan was as much a futurist as Buckminster Fuller. It is Jordan who once wrote “Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.”

How do we learn to invent the power our freedom requires? Being a New World poet means we must find the solutions that link the material to the spiritual. In her essay, Jordan mentions the names of writers whose footsteps New World poets may follow, including Agostinho Neto of Angola. Jordan’s 1976 poem “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” is dedicated to Neto, who in 1976 was the President of the People’s Republic of Angola. She ends the poem with a reference to love, a word New World poets must place first in their vocabulary, and second on their tongues, and third in the ears of others. Jordan writes:

And if I
if I
ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
                  wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

In his biography Neruda: The Poet’s Calling, Mark Eisner mentions how Pablo Neruda kept a picture of Walt Whitman on his desk. When I read this I thought about June and I thought of my own space. What writers have I surrounded myself with? Here are their names: Reetika Vazirani, Zoë Anglesey, Dennis Brutus, Naomi Ayala, Charles Johnson, August Wilson, James Baldwin, Frank O’Hara and Langston Hughes and Liam Rector.

This pictorial gathering is my literary family. Only two are still living. These are the people whose faces I face every day. Their lives were not filled with beauty—but then neither is history. It’s a reminder that one must read, write, and grow strong. There is much construction to be done in the New World. Our writing must become blueprints.