Still Moving

In Oakland, an eternal June Jordan looks to her right — toward the future — fixing her gaze on the Palestinian flag. The painter of the mural has placed a Black power fist to Jordan’s left, with a keffiyeh flowing between and wrapping her shoulders. The ending declaration of her poem, “Moving Towards Home, 1982,” is printed along the scarf’s edges. 

Jordan wrote the poem after reading an account of the Sabra and Shatila massacre that Israel unleashed upon the Palestinian people exiled to a refugee camp in Beirut during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Averse to the politics of pity, in this poem she wills herself not to speak of the atrocities. Instead, the speaker surrenders her Black American woman’s voice to the unnamed mother in the epitaph, who asks for her son Abu Fadi to be returned to her.   

This is what Jordan, who died tragically of breast cancer in 2002, asks of us from the land of the dead: to give our voices over to our Palestinian brothers and sisters. To be willing to be possessed. Jordan brought us “Moving Towards Home” and her many other writings dedicated to the liberation of Palestine at great personal cost, as did many of her Black feminist peers. Throughout the 1980s, Jordan’s work was rejected by presses that had previously published her, and she was made a pariah by agents in the women’s movement, who charged her with antisemitism. Jordan held firm to a vision of Black radicalism that was international in its scope, even as a sense of interconnected struggle in continental America lost its grounding.   

Jordan resisted the pull of American exceptionalism; she felt that the fate of Black people in the States was linked eternally to the fate of Palestinians, two peoples facing the same empire. A new generation feels the same pull. Some young lovers of liberation quote her exhortation today without knowing that they are quoting her: “I am born a Black woman and now. / I am become a Palestinian.” Language lives.

“Moving Toward Home”
June Jordan

“Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed.
“Who will bring me my loved one?”
The New York Times, 9/20/82

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved her baby
into the stranger’s hands before she was led away
Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyes
of his wife
Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous
flares into the darkness so that others could see
the backs of their victims lined against the wall
Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies and
the stench
that will not float
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor
Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory
Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the
doors and
the breaking of windows and the hauling of families into
the world of the dead
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
“to purify” a people
those who dare
“to exterminate” a people
those who dare
to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”
those who dare
“to mop up”
“to tighten the noose”
“to step up the military pressure”
“to ring around” civilian streets with tanks
those who dare
those who dare
to close the universities
to abolish the press
to kill the elected representatives
of the people who refuse to be purified
those are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginning

because I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten into
a tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home.

June Jordan, “Moving Toward Home,” in Living Room: New Poems by June Jordan (New York: Thunder’s  Mouth Press, 1993) and reprinted in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007)

Doreen St. Félix is a writer for the New Yorker. She has been awarded the National Magazine Award for Criticism.