"Affirmative Acts": Language, Childhood, and Power in June Jordan's Cross-Writing

In a famous essay reprinted in What is Found There, Adrienne Rich meditates on the meaning of "The Hermit's Scream"—"'Love should be put into action!'"—in Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Chemin de Fer," and more particularly about the way poetry might serve as "a carrier of sparks" in a culture given over to "the language of therapy groups, of twelve-step programs, of bleached speech" (56-57).¹ Among the poems she discusses in the essay is June Jordan's "For Michael Angelo Thompson" (1973) about a thirteen-year-old boy, hit by a city bus, who died after being refused treatment at a Brooklyn hospital. In her discussion, Rich confesses that for a long time, "Race came between me and full reading of the poem: I wanted to believe the poet was elegiac, not furious":

"Peace" is not the issue here, but the violent structures of urban class and racial power. The poem is a skin—luminous and resonant—stretched across a repetitive history of Black children's deaths in the cities, in a country that offers them neither hope nor respite.

(67-68)

Learning to read Jordan's "For Michael Angelo Thompson" as "furious" rather than "elegaic" is tantamount to understanding "the difference between poetry and rhetoric," a phrase that is central to Audre Lorde's "Power," another poem Rich discusses in the essay (67-68). The univocal perspective of the "confession," Rich implies, is merely rhetoric, while "the double-edge, double-voicedness" she finds in "Michael Angelo Thompson" is poetry (67). From her first book, Who Look at Me (1969), a poem initially intended for children (and only later for adults), to her striking recent memoir Soldier: A Poet's Childhood (2000) Jordan has insisted on a poetics that interrogates private notions of childhood through activist, public positions.

Such a stance is unusual in contemporary poetry, and more unusual still in the now commonplace genre of the childhood memoir. Subverting the popular trope of the "traumatic childhood" Jordan insists in Soldier on "June's" agency, eschewing the pathos present in such works as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, or even Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As Patricia Pace argues, in her provocative article "All Our Lost Children: Trauma and Testimony in the Performance of Childhood," "the traumatized child" has become "a powerful locus of cultural anxiety" in contemporary memoirs (238). Using Mary Karr's The Liar's Club as her primary example, Pace shows that we are, perhaps, too adept at reading such accounts of childhood trauma. Just as the insights of so-called confessional poetry once seemed fresh but are now exhausted, "our experience with memoirs and other confessional texts" about childhood are by now so familiar that our "imaginative reconstructions" obscure the material circumstances of actual, rather than remembered, children. Furthermore, the power of a contemporary view of childhood "activated by sentimentality"—the "designation of the child to the private realm"—obscures the ways in which the child participates in our social, historical, and economic matrices (Pace 237-38).

By locating childhood victimization in the private sphere of a particular family, writers' testimony about that victimization tends to reinscribe fictions of innocence violated rather than revealing the ways in which childhood and children are interpellated by the social. To testify against a broader ideology (in place since at least the eighteenth century) that views children contradictorily and often simultaneously as "little innocents and the limbs of Satan" (to use Fred Inglis's terms [70]) violates Romantic notions of authenticity and disturbs the Romantic and post-Romantic fiction that childhood is at once innocent and endangered.²

Jordan's approach to the memoir shares with other innovative works like Lyn Hejinian's My Life the view that "a child is a real person, very lively" (Hejinian 79). In other words, identity, including child identity (beyond that which is merely given), is complex. For the child, identity is formed from being in the world and negotiating that world, just as it is for adults...