Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays

"June Jordan is so important to me that I have her words tattooed on my arm: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” June Jordan was the walking embodiment of a feminist revolution against patriarchy. Whether it was through her poems or her columns for progressive magazines. Some of Us Did Not Die is a collection of her lectures and poems. June Jordan lived her life by fighting all those tentacles of the octopus of oppression. There is a quote from remarks she made at Barnard College that really gets to the heart of this: “That confrontation with heavyweight intolerance carried me through our Civil Rights Revolution and into our resistance to the War Against Vietnam and then into the realm of gender and sexual and sexuality politics. And those strivings, in aggregate, carried me from Brooklyn to Mississippi, to South Africa, to Nicaragua, to Israel, to Palestine, to Lebanon and to Northern Ireland, and every single one of those embattled baptisms clarified pivotal connections among otherwise apparently disparate victories, or among apparently disparate events of suffering and loss.” Her ability to connect those apparently disparate victories or events of suffering is what I ask us to do by looking at the tentacles of the octopus. The United States lags behind in so many ways. It is not the center of the universe, when it comes to feminism and so many things. June Jordan asks, “when will we revolt against our marginalized, pseudo maverick status and assert our majority” as women? Feminists in Mexico are already doing that. They took over the headquarters of a human rights body in Mexico City last September and they invited abused women and children to shelter there. Across Latin America, in Chile, in Ecuador, in Peru, feminism is advancing by, for example, successfully pushing to decriminalize abortions in Argentina. The earliest known anarchist feminist newspaper was published in Argentina at the end of the 1800s, which speaks to the long history of radical feminism in Latin America. I hope that more feminists, from around the world, will learn from the example being set by women committing the Seven Necessary Sins in Latin America and elsewhere."