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June Jordan
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Some Of Us Did Not Die: Selected Essays: New and Selected Essays Paperback – March 15, 2003

by June Jordan (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars 61 ratings
“Forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.”  —Toni Morrison
 
Some of Us Did Not Die brings together the seminal essays of June Jordan, the widely acclaimed Black American writer known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism. Spanning the length of her extraordinary career, and including her last writings, the essays in this collection reveal Jordan as an incisive analyst of injustice, democracy, and literature. Willing to venture into the most painful contradictions of culture and politics, Jordan comes back with lyrical honesty, wit, and wide-ranging intelligence that resonates sharply to this day.
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  1. Print length
    320 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    March 15, 2003
  4. Dimensions
    6 x 0.73 x 9.25 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    0465036937
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0465036936
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Insightful…provocative.”―New York Times

“A provocative and personal collection of essays from “one of America’s fiercest literary figures and social activists…the hope of a generation."―Ms. Magazine

“These selections offer real riches from Jordan’s mind and heart, essays that weigh and assess and which, even after her death, express her resilient credo, ‘Not yet/big bird of prey/not yet.'"―Reamy Jansen, San Francisco Chronicle

“Astonishingly powerful.”―Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive

“A powerful voice…Jordan’s life and work is about quintessential American ideals of justice and resistance to tyranny. When rendered from a female African-American point of view that champions the disenfranchised, those ideals take on a special cast…Even in death, she has a voice that is committed and unafraid.”―Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Writer, activist, and professor June Jordan’s final essay collection serves as a barometer for the last four decades of radical humanitarian thought. Jordan’s days were spent in constant revelation. Read her words, risk your own unveiling.”―David Mills, The Village Voice

“Whatever her theme or mode, June Jordan continually delineates the conditions of survival—of the body, and mind, and the heart.”―Adrienne Rich

“Jordan makes us think of Akhmatova, of Neruda. She is among the bravest of us, the most outraged. She feels for all. She is the universal poet.”―Alice Walker

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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books (March 15, 2003)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0465036937
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0465036936
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.73 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 out of 5 stars 61 ratings

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June Jordan

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4.7 out of 5 stars
61 global ratings

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Top reviews from the United States

  • A. Hogan
    5.0 out of 5 stars A luminous voice that is missed...
    Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2002
    Verified Purchase
    June Jordan was many things: woman, Mother, friend, poet activist essayist. She excelled, apparantly, at each. She died earlier this year from breast cancer. She left us this final testament, a group of essays that touch on allof her abiding concersn: race, poetry,feminism, anit-semitism, The plight of the Palestinian refugees, breast cancer,militarism, rape[agonizingly, she had been rapes. Twice!},Martin Luther King, Jr. and his womanising...She touched on each of these subjects in essays, rails about the lack of spending in research in breast cancer, goes to a LA synagogue for Shabbat service after a psychotic gunmen had opened fire at a Jewish day care centre,speaks about her son and his childhood friend, Daniel Pearl, who had been brutally murdered in pakistan,wonders aloud about the racial implication of the 2000 election and the curiopus way it was handled in Fla., speaks on rape in blunt,terrifying fashion. June jordan was a superb writer, and a better human being. the world is emptier without her light and wisdom, though as succor we have her essays and poems, for which I, for one, am so damn grateful. Highly recommended
    28 people found this helpful
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  • Rita Doyle
    5.0 out of 5 stars nice read
    Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2021
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    It was a beautifully motivating book
    2 people found this helpful
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  • TC
    5.0 out of 5 stars I learned a lot!
    Reviewed in the United States on March 28, 2019
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    June Jordan is my new favorite author.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Schade
    5.0 out of 5 stars amazing writer.
    Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2015
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    I had the privileged of knowing June. I timeless, amazing writer.
    3 people found this helpful
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  • Gail M.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2017
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    Her story is powerful!
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  • Shopper
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2015
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    This is a remarkable book written by a remarkable writer.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Trista Hendren
    5.0 out of 5 stars How I wish I had read this earlier - A Prophetic and Wise book of essays
    Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2013
    What a voice. What a writer. What a loss.

    This is one of the most important selection of essays I have ever read. As timeless and pertinent as Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider.

    A few of my favorite passages:

    "Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying."

    "If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable."

    "And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes yes: I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience."

    "How I used to bow my head at the very name of Jesus: ecstatic to abase myself in deference to His majesty."

    "We have a rather foggy mess and not much hope for a democratic state when the powerless agree to use a language that blames the victim for the deeds of the powerful."

    "At any rate, as my lawyer explained, the law then was the same as the law today; the courts would surely award me a reasonable amount of the father's income as child support, but the courts would also insist that they could not enforce their own decree. In other words, according to the law, what a father owes to his child is not serious compared to what a man owes to the bank for a car, or a vacation."

    "In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is a form of self-denial. I can remember being eight years old and there was my mother warning me to watch the tone of my voice in the middle of a violent fight between my father and myself. The purpose of polite behavior is never virtuous. Deceit, surrender and concealment: these are not virtues." ~June Jordan, "Civil Wars"

    "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 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." ~June Jordan, "Civil Wars"

    "This means that, as a Black feminist, I cannot be expected to respect what somebody else calls self-love if that concept of self-love requires my suicide to any degree. And this will hold true whether that somebody else is male, female, Black, or white. My Black feminism means that you cannot expect me to respect what somebody else identifies as the Good of The People, if that so-call Good (often translated into manhood or family or nationalism) requires the deferral or the diminution of my self-fulfillment. We are the people." ~June Jordan, "Where is the Love?"

    "I wanted to be strong. I never wanted to be weak again as long as I lived. I thought about my mother and her suicide and I thought about how my father could not tell whether she was dead or alive.

    I wanted to get well and what I wanted to do as soon as I was strong again, actually, what I wanted to do was I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death." ~June Jordan, "Many Rivers to Cross"

    "When I was a child I never wanted to grow up. Now that I am grown, I look at the children and I think, "God help them to survive us, the big people in their lives." Mostly, of course, our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life, as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways. Indeed, originality is recognized as disobedience, pathology, incorrigible character and/or unlawful conduct to be prosecuted by the state. Departure from established modes of being is seldom perceived as innovative or valuably alternative or necessary or, in any wise, legitimate. At best, new behavior by the new people among us, the children, is perceived as something to patronize or to tolerate, knowing that the systematic force of our adult demands for slavelike mimicry will likely overcome rebellious inclination, soon enough. Soon enough for what? Soon enough to convert these new lives into old stories we should be mortified, by now, to hear." ~June Jordan, "Old Stories, New Lives"

    "As a teacher it is invariably the fact that my primary challenge is, year after year, to convince our children that they know something we need to know, and that their own feelings are important, at least as important as those adult values they must struggle against and, somehow, survive, if they will ever be certified as legitimate human beings." ~June Jordan, "Old Stories, New Lives"

    "I am convinced that our children pose the question whereby we must justify our power over their lives, or give it up. It seems tragically evident that we have to give it up: our power, our coercion of new life into old stories; we have to solicit and cultivate and respect major differences of behavior and habit and perspective as they emerge from our new life, our children." ~June Jordan, "Old Stories, New Lives"
    6 people found this helpful
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  • M. Mazzocchi
    5.0 out of 5 stars If you like June Jordan
    Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2014
    This was a gift for a friend. If you like June Jordan, then this is a great collection of her essays.
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Top reviews from other countries

  • The South Seas cruiser
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 12, 2014
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    I love her.
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