from April, from June Jordan
gratitude, promised resources and links
Thank you for reading Black Life.
& thank you for your patience on this follow-up note as I tended to things that fall under the critically sharp and perennially useful umbrella that is the captive maternal as coined by Joy James.
If you attended our April 12 event celebrating June Jordan, the magic of her Poetry 4 the People program and her firm solidarity for the people of Palestine and their fight for sovereignty and liberation, thank you. It was such a special afternoon and the most tender Black Life event in recent memory. It was especially lovely to share poems and stories with people who not only knew June but also attended different iterations of P4P at UC Berkeley and beyond. Thank you for your generous hearts that afternoon. Much gratitude to the event was co-organizer, Jasmine Flowers, a PhD student at the Black Studies department at UC Berkeley and a steward of the Erskine A. Peters Reading Room.
As promised, here’s a link to the footage of June leading a Poetry for the People event digitized by the UC Berkeley African American and African Diaspora Studies department that we screened during the event can be found here and starts at 27:10. “[This] is just a suggestion,” June giggles in the clip, before adding “No good life should lead to the death of another life.”
You can access more digitized archival material from Poetry 4 the People and beyond here (many thanks to Barbara Montano for her support and work on this along with those who helped digitize and archive this wonderful material.)
I made more promises to send two of the poems we read that afternoon. The first was Apologies to All the People in Lebanon and further down on the page, you’ll find Moving Towards Home. Thank you to all in the room for reading these out loud with us.
Finally, we also read a portion of Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” which you can find here. “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” Tbakhi asks to open the essay. I think Jordan’s work answers that question in many ways, over and over again, through her craft of poetry, of essays, of instruction, and more. We also quickly visited June’s essay “Where is the Love?”
We leapt from Tbakhi’s essay, and June’s poems and essay, to writing poems of our own—our own craft that can measure up to this moment of genocide that extends from other genocides. Our prompt, as provided by Jasmine, was “On your behalf, I am prepared to…”
You’ll hopefully indulge me patiently once more to share the lines of poetry we all wrote together that Friday afternoon as I work with Jasmine, to prepare a final and shareable version of that document.
We have passed half a year and unthinkable lives killed by what seems like interminable appetite for destruction of the people of Palestine. But in fact it is not interminable. It will end. It has to end and I hope you’re each finding ways to put an end to it. There are many ways that can be taken up all at once and to just name a few, support student protest movement by showing up and asking what they need, participate in BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), organize your workplace or union to commit to PACBI (The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel), support and learn about No Tech for Apartheid, get informed by reporters on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank, attend teach-ins to further your understanding and commitment to the liberation of Palestine, for all and eternally.
I’ll leave you with these words from June’s essay “Some of Us Did Not Die”:
We are not powerless. We are indispensable despite all atrocities of state and corporate policy to the contrary. At a minimum we have the power to stop cooperating with our enemies. We have the power to stop the courtesies and to let the feelings be real. We have the power not to vote, and not to register for the draft, and not to applaud, and not to attend, and not to buy, and not to pay taxes or rent or utilities. At the very least, if we cannot control things we certainly can mess them up.
in solidarity,
ruth