June Jordan
June Jordan
June Millicent Jordanwas a Caribbean-American bisexual poet and activist...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 July 1936
CountryUnited States of America
beautiful love-yourself profound
To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.
freedom power african-american
Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ...
success determination motivation
Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we're talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.
names
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
way serious telling-the-truth
In the process of telling the truth about what you feel or what you see, each of us has to get in touch with himself or herself in a really deep, serious way.
mean men want
Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?
hate poet
As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words.
names voice diversity
If we lived in a democratic state our language would have to hurtle, fly, curse, and sing, in all the common American names, all the undeniable and representative and participating voices of everybody here.
beautiful love-yourself i-love-myself
To tell the truth is to become beautiful.
children adults may
As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.
suicide thinking survival
suicide is absolute, and if you think you will survive by hiding who you really are, you are sadly misled: there is no such thing as partial or intermittent suicide. You can only survive if you - who you really are - do survive.
suicide america black
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.
history african-american soul
All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.
father fighting taught
My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair