It feels silly to call June Jordan a little known poet when her impact in Black, feminist, and queer communities remains 23 years since her death — a San Francisco high school has her namesake, she’s won a plethora of awards during her time and posthumously, and she was consistently mentioned and admired by renown contemporaries like Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich.
Unfortunately, Jordan is overlooked and under-appreciated in both the widespread literary canon and smaller circles, which is an injustice to all the unknowing, could-be fans of her work. My own introduction to her cannot be pinpointed in recollection, though I do remember a friend and I creating an elaborate poster board honoring her legacy in high school.Â
What I didn’t know when working on that project was that, in addition to her stunning essays and poetry, Jordan published a memoir entitled “Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood” towards the end of her life. Throughout 261 pages, she vividly recalls details from her birth up to entering boarding school in her early teen years.
The story of Jordan’s childhood is a harrowing one rendered masterfully with a blend of prose and poetics. When writing of the abuse inflicted upon her by her parents, she is able to capture both the childlike voice of confusion and innocence in addition to the unbelievable strength and intelligence she possessed beyond her years. Speaking from an authentic younger voice as opposed to her adult self looking back in hindsight doesn’t hinder the beauty and ability of the writing to cut deep, especially for the first eight parts of 10.Â
I hesitate to call the story redundant because it is ultimately her lived experience, but at a certain point (and to her credit it took until nearly the end to reach this point) the writing felt exhausted, as if it had gone as far as it could and was just drawing circles. I understand this desire for repetition, though, because the majority of the book was so enchanting that it felt like being under a time travelling spell landing you right alongside Jordan in her 1940s Brooklyn childhood.
Jordan is able to write of the absurdity of owning a pet raccoon like it’s a beloved cat or dog. When the raccoon is eventually at risk of getting put down or otherwise taken away, you find yourself rooting for the pest. In that particular account, a familiar theme comes up: Displacement. After reading of her childhood and all the awful circumstances surrounding her from such a young age leaving her, upon learning of WWII, to wonder if her house was a war zone, makes her common declarations of hating her family understandable and reasonable. She often communicates how she didn’t want to be home, she didn’t want to be anywhere, especially after the loss of My Raccoon, as she named him:
I wanted to leave.
I didn’t know where I could go.
So I sat at the kitchen table.
I tried not to be disrespectful.
I didn’t want to fight anybody anymore.
Throughout the pain and abuse, there are pockets of joy found in a beach day with her family, the love of her grandparents, and going off to summer camp, but much of the happiness is born out of Jordan herself, in the wake of her incredible strength and resilience.Â
The greatest feat of this memoir is in a woman nearing the end of her life so perfectly capturing the voice of the child she once was, electrified by the grown up horrors she went through. There are universal scenes of tenderness like having a parent take care of you when sick: “…and my mother would sponge bathe me and take my pulse, and sometimes I would finally be able to breathe deeply enough to doze off, and when I woke up sometimes I’d see my mother sitting near my bed, smiling at me.”Â
Jordan’s ability to reconcile the mistreatment levied at her by her mother and father alongside the rare moments of love, while also not absolving them from the abuse they inflicted on her, makes for an utterly sincere account.
In one remarkably powerful scene, Jordan details her opposition to sacrifice as a concept: “…sacrifice sent my father away to work through the night and sacrifice took my mother away to work part of every night and so sacrifice left me alone a lot of the time when it was dark inside the house and out. I hated sacrifice.” Here we are given the innermost thoughts of a child articulated in the way only a child can, making the whole passage so special.
That’s the most important part of this work: It’s special. I treasure and cherish this book and encourage everyone to check it out as it displays the whole range of Jordan’s talent. She is a truly one of a kind voice whose writing should be read and appreciated by all.