On the Occasion of Juneteenth

June Jordan's Tribute to Audre Lorde in JEWISH CURRENTS

“In the middle of our fighting for freedom, we found ourselves fighting against hatred that would kill us if it could: hatred of us as Black folk and as Women folk, both. In the middle of our fighting for freedom we found ourselves daring to try for love across racial and sexual lines of vigilant taboo. In the middle of our fighting for freedom we found ourselves free beyond fear and beyond capitulation.”

—June Jordan

The essays in this volume chronicle Jordan’s “leadership and commitment in every conflicted sphere of our second millennium lives: the theft of democracy inside the United States, racial and gender inequality, and the failure of imagination that upholds all forms of injustice.”

Of the many magazines and journals read in service of curating a Best American Essays anthology, Jewish Currents is one that delivers extensive and astute commentary and analysis of both current and historical events.

Toni Cade Bambara called Civil Wars “a chilling but hopeful vision of living in the U.S.A. […], very much in the vein of Dusk by Dawn by W. E. B. DuBois.”

Politically charged essays are particularly important to me—many of my sensibilities were forged in the late 1970s to early 1980s reading work by George Orwell, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, Mitsuye Yamada, Susan Griffin, Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Rosario Morales, Paula Gunn Allen, Nellie Wong, Winona LaDuke, Leslie Marmon Silko, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan. Thus it was with great excitement that I opened an email on May 29th from Jewish Currents featuring June Jordan’s tribute to Audre Lorde, introduced by writer and scholar Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Of Zami, the Women’s Review of Books wrote: “[Lorde’s] perfectly ripened prose moves along in seemingly effortless sentences that are vivid, charming, nostalgic, hilarious, rich, succulent, sensual and erotic, but always at the service of the art.”

Addressed to Lorde a year after she died from breast cancer, Jordan’s text is a love letter celebrating the two women’s first encounter in the 1960s and their continued activism over the next three decades. Both Jordan and Lorde were primarily identified as poets, though both prolifically wrote essays. Toni Morrison called Jordan “our premiere black woman essayist.”

These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ”

“I have a tendency to write to the dead—so I can’t avoid the feeling of being too late. Every morning, I write with this feeling as I think about the loved ones I will never know, the poets and writers massacred, the children who will never live out the texts of their lives.”

—Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Essays by Alexis Pauline Gumbs have come across the Best American Essays transom via the Yale Review and, most recently, Orion. Gumbs’s work includes the 2022 Whiting Award-winning nonfiction work Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, a poetry triptych, and a biography (forthcoming August 2024) of Audre Lorde, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde.

Adrienne Rich wrote of The Cancer Journals: “Lorde is the Amazon warrior who also knows how to tell the tale of the battle: what happened, and why, what are the weapons, and who are the comrades she found. More than this, her book offers women a new and deeply feminist challenge.”