Black Life Newsletter: June Jordan Forever
An April poetry workshop, film screenings about war & liberation
Next month, Black Life proudly celebrates writer, poet, and activist June Jordan and Poetry for the People, the arts and activism program Jordan founded in 1991 at UC Berkeley. Poetry for the People exemplified the late Jamaican American poet’s insistence on multicultural and intersectional solidarity in global struggles for self-determination. This special celebration includes readings of Jordan’s writing selected by Black Life curator ruth gebreyesus, as well as a poetry workshop in collaboration with Jasmine Flowers, a steward of the Erskine A. Peters Reading Room on the UC Berkeley campus.
“Sometimes this will mean that this one room will be throbbing with unimaginable tensions,” Jordan said with a giggle at a 2000 Poetry for the People gathering. “And I say, ‘So what?!’ The big great wonderful thing about Poetry for the People is that we do have one room, [and] we will stay in this same one room together, and we will work it out. Maybe not well, maybe not brilliantly, but we will do our best. It’s one big safe place for people who are really, really, different.”
Join Black Life and Jasmine Flowers in honoring June Jordan on Friday, April 12 at 4pm at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.
As always, we reserve a set amount of free tickets that we joyfully offer to Black Life’s extended community of Black and brown filmmakers, artists, creators, and curious viewers. We encourage you to send a request for a ticket to June Jordan and Poetry For the People with your full name to blackblacklifelife@gmail.com by April 10.
Black Life Recommends: From Colonial Statues to Carnival Masks: Amílcar Cabral and the Liberation of Guinea-Bissau
Screening on the evening of Thursday April 4th are four films, all concerned with Guinea-Bissau’s and Cape Verde’s struggles for independence, are from different time frames and perspectives. The liberation leader and political thinker Amílcar Cabral is a thread through three of them. Cacheu, another of Portuguese filmmaker Filipa César’s single-take performance films, analyzes four statues seen in photographs and film footage in different configurations over time, revealing the dark past of the Portuguese colonial presence in Africa. Madina Boé, made in support of Guinea-Bissau’s liberation struggle by Cuban filmmaker José Massip, includes portraits of guerillas—a hunter, canoe builder, and poet, as well as an anti-fascist Portuguese doctor. The first film of independent Guinea-Bissau, The Return of Amílcar Cabral uses Guinean songs and archival footage of Cabral, who was assassinated in 1973, to honor him on the occasion of the transfer of his remains from Conakry to Guinea-Bissau in 1976. Carnival in Bissau, by French filmmaker Sarah Maldoror (of Guadaloupean descent), is a joyous meditation on the importance of creativity to the African people and its role in strengthening Guinea-Bissau’s sense of national unity. Beautiful, ephemeral masks replace the colonial statues that opened the program.
Thursday, Apr 4, 2024
7:30 PM (94 mins)films in this screening:
Cacheu
Filipa César, Germany, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, 2012
Madina Boé
José Massip, Cuba, Guinea-Bissau, 1969The Return of Amílcar Cabral
(O regresso de Amílcar Cabral)
Djalma Fettermann, Flora Gomes, José Bolama, Josefina Crato, Sana na N'Hada, Guinea-Bissau, Sweden, 1976
Carnival in Bissau
(A Bissau le carnaval)
Sarah Maldoror, Guinea-Bissau, 1980As always, we reserve a set amount of free tickets that we joyfully offer to Black Life’s extended community of Black and brown filmmakers, artists, creators, and curious viewers. We encourage you to send a request for a ticket with your full name to blackblacklifelife@gmail.com by April 3.
à propos of Cabral & Guinea-Bissau & Cape Verde & liberation & war …
Joy James "Until the Next (Up) Rising" April 14, 2021
“Those who live in the material conditions of struggle are most informed about how struggle can be waged. It is not just your victimization from poverty or incarceration, it is your agency to resist that victimization. And that agency in its most fierce aspects is formed in the zone of struggle also known as a war zone…The only way to comprehend war is to look at it through the international lens and to understand this democracy to be imperial. the question of whether or not we want an imperial democracy seems to me to be addressed in an ethical way in terms of conventional abolitionism but not with a specificity or least i’ve not seen it clearly. so i look forward to you enlightening me not with a specificity that we’d challenge this state itself. So I wonder if we wish to abolish war by staying out of war. If we wish to abolish war by studying texts by authors who never went to war. Or are we willing to abolish war by studying those who fought in war zones and thus have the existential knowledge when they speak of what they speak which is how to stop war. and here, I want turn then to Cabral.”
Orchestra Baobab - Cabral (Live)
Apologies to All the People in Lebanon by June Jordan
Dedicated to the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who lived in Lebanon from 1948-1983.
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said you shot the London Ambassador
and when that wasn’t true
they said so
what
They said you shelled their northern villages
and when U.N. forces reported that was not true
because your side of the cease-fire was holding
since more than a year before
they said so
what
They said they wanted simply to carve
a 25 mile buffer zone and then
they ravaged your
water supplies your electricity your
hospitals your schools your highways and byways all
the way north to Beirut because they said this
was their quest for peace
They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery
stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors
to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys
whose bodies
swelled purple and black into twice the original size
and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then
they said this was brilliant
military accomplishment and this was done
they said in the name of self-defense they said
that is the noblest concept
of mankind isn’t that obvious?
They said something about never again and then
they made close to one million human beings homeless
in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed
40,000 of your men and your women and your children
But I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
They said they were victims. They said you were
Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?
Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
They told you to go.
One hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinians in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: You
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?
I didn’t know and nobody told me and what
could I do or say, anyway?
Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that
paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family
But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren't so bad
You can expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV
You see my point;
I’m sorry.
I really am sorry.
Take good care of each other,
ruth