Synopses & Reviews
Written with exceptional beauty throughout, Soldier stands and delivers an eloquent, heart-breaking, hilarious and hopeful, witness to the beginnings of a truly extraordinary, American life.
Synopsis
A profoundly moving childhood memoir by a noted poet, essayist, teacher, and journalist. "SHORTA not uncommon story is here captured with astonishing beauty" the childhood of a gifted daughter whose immigrant parents must struggle in order to provide her with the educational and social opportunities not available to them or, for that matter, to most blacks of her generation. In vivid prose that re-creates the heady impressions of youth, June Jordan takes us to the Harlem and Brooklyn neighborhoods where she lived and out into the larger landscape of her burgeoning imagination. Exploring the nature of memory, writing, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.
Synopsis
A profoundly moving childhood memoir by one of the most widely acclaimed Black American writers of her generation Captured with astonishing beauty, through the eyes of a child, Soldier paints the battleground of June Jordan's youth as the gifted daughter of Jamaican immigrants, struggling under the humiliations of racism, sexism, and poverty in 1940s New York. "There was a war on against colored people, against poor people," Jordan writes, and she watches her mother turn inward in her suffering, her father lashing out, often violently, against his own daughter. She learns to harden herself, to be a "soldier," while preserving a deep capacity for love and wonder. Poignantly exploring the nature of memory, imagination, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the vivid world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.
Synopsis
Some of Us Did Not Die Brings together a rich sampling of the late poet June Jordan's prose writings. The essays in this collection, which include her last writings and span the length of her extraordinary career, reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of the personal and public costs of remaining committed to the ideal and practice of democracy. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of American culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence in these accounts of her reckoning with life as a teacher, poet, activist, and citizen.
About the Author
June Jordan was Professor of African American Studies at U.C. Berkeley and was born in New York City in 1936. Her books of poetry include Haruko / Love Poems and Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems. She was also the author of five children's books, a novel, three plays, and five volumes of political essays, the most recent of which was Affirmative Acts. For more than ten years, she wrote a regular political column for The Progressive magazine. Her honors included a National Book Award nomination, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award. June Jordan died in Berkeley, California on June 14, 2002.