As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America.
Interpretation
This quote expresses a profound love for the power of words while simultaneously lamenting the oppressive nature of language that can erase identity and history.
June Jordan's quote captures the duality of language as both a source of creativity and a tool of oppression. As a poet, she appreciates the beauty, potential, and transformative power of words, recognizing how they can convey joy and honesty. However, as a Black poet, she is deeply aware of the language that marginalizes her identity and history, feeling a visceral hatred towards the words that dismiss or devalue her experience and the legacy of her people. This juxtaposition highlights the complexities of language in shaping individual and collective identity.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of language in literature festivals.
I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.
Good poetry and successful revolution change our lives. And you cannot compose a good poem or wage a revolution without changing consciousness unless you attack the language that you share with your enemies and invent a language that you share with your allies.
I am the history of the rejection of who I am
We need everybody and all that we are. We need to know and make known the complete, constantly unfolding, complicated heritage that is our black experience. We should absolutely resist the superstar, one at a time mentality that threatens the varied and resilient, flexible wealth of our Black future.
Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.
Through Kurt I saw the beauty of minimalism and the importance of music that's stripped down.
Analysis I take to be a scientific procedure. What I do is creative. It doesn't spring from the same part of the mind.
When I started, I was an artist; I wanted to be an artist. I became an actor almost by accident. I acted for fifteen years and tried to produce. I looked for stories that were the story beneath the story that you thought you knew, like 'The Candidate'.
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it, putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before.
When I was a mailman, writing songs was my escape from the regular world, and now writing songs is my job. And I've always been one to avoid my job.
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