June 17, 2002
-
I just found out that one of my favorite poets (and people), June Jordan, the single most published African American author, beautiful brave woman, finally lost her battle against cancer on June 14th, 2002. I was lucky enough to meet her once, when I was in college, when she came to speak at a lecture sponsored by a class I was taking... she spoke of poetry as a way to liberate yourself, as well as your people. She spoke of the power and strength of love. I will most miss hearing her and her students read poetry on KPFA on my way home from work.
For some more on June, see
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/JuneJordan.html
Comments (4)
Thanks for the links, sweetie, June Jordan was quite an important voice. I notice that one of her "causes" was championing Black English. Not everyone in the African American community agrees. I was reading a memoir of an African American college professor the other day where he recounted an anecdote from his childhood. The kids in his inner-city school were razzing him because he talked "like a white boy". His father told him to tell them "You talk like white boys, too, but like ignorant, uneducated white boys." On the one hand I think that Black English is a form of rich verbal expression with rules and complexities just like any other language, on the other hand it's definitely helpful to the advancement of the African American community if its members are also "bilingual" in Standard English.
Yeah, this is a tough cause for me to give a voice on, being a whitey and all. While on the one hand, I tend take people less seriously when they use incorrect grammar, I also think that the language is constantly changing and evolving and a commonly used form of English can't really be "wrong." But I certainly don't think of Standard English as "White English" nor should it be.
Of course, this aggrieves me. I certainly have admired June Jordan's work more than I can begin to express. And on this other issue, I have very, very complex feelings to communicate. As an English instructor or more than two dozen years, I can say that I have expressed the need to African-Americans to have it in their repertoire to use standard American grammar well and effectively without in anyway making the syntax of standard American discourse necessary and sufficient. We are all interconnected, and June Jordan provids an incredibly central theme and beauty to our discourse. How can we get on without her? Really! How can we?
Love,
Grammy P
Fascinating, I certainly had not meant to start a debate on Black English... I guess I always was looking at Jordan;s work from the body of her poetry... but now that we have started...
I think the real issue is to remove the stigma attached with any native way of speaking, "BLack English", other dialects, Spanish, Tagalog, whatever, and to include and value it in education, and yet also make sure that kids learn the particular form of English that our society has chosen to privilege, so that they can find jobs, etc.
Comments are closed.