June Jordan Quotes

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life

And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.

If you are free, you are not predicatable and you are not controllable.

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me

I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black; it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

My heart is not peripheral to me.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.

To begin is no more agony than opening your hand.

and if i if i ever let love go because the hatred and the whisperings become a phantom dictate i o- bey in lieu of impulse and realities (the blossoming flamingos of my wild mimosa trees) then let love freeze me out. (from i must become a menace to my enemies)

We must make language accountable to the truths of our experience.

I am the history of battery assault and limitless armies against whatever I want to do with my mind and my body and my soul

And then I understood that the answer is yes, yes yes: I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

Freedom is indivisible or it is nothing at all besides sloganeering and temporary, short-sighted, and short-lived advancement for a few.

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives

I am a woman. And I am seeking an attitude. I am trying to find reasons for pride.

And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.

...love without being destroyed...

the motivation behind every sentence is the wish to say something real to somebody real.

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

Something has to be done about the way in which this world is set up.

If you can finally go to the bathroom wherever you find one, if you can finally order a cup of coffee and drink it wherever coffee is available, but you cannot follow your heart-you cannot respect the response of your own honest body in the world-then how much of what kind of freedom does any one of us possess? Or, conversely, if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force?

I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable this poem is not consent I do not consent

We had to break those laws or agree to the slaveholder's image of us: three fifths of a human being.

Bisexuality means to me that 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?

In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways. Indeed, originality is recognized as disobedience, pathology, incorrigible character and/or unlawful conduct to be prosecuted by the state.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life

Poem for My Love How do we come to be here next to each other in the night Where are the stars that show us to our love inevitable Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness and the rain falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh the black men waiting on the corner for a womanly mirage I am amazed by peace It is this possibility of you asleep and breathing in the quiet air

... momma help me turn the face of history to your face. - Getting Down To Get Over - Dedicated To My Mother

Buddy and Angela keep track of daytime just by figuring out the last and next time they will come together and how long alone. They become the heated habit of each other.

A man is not a tree'...If we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.

I am a woman searching for her savagery even if it’s doomed

These poems they are things I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are from “These Poems

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think." June Jordan

It would be something fine if we could learn how to bless the lives of children. They are the people of new life. Children are the only people nobody can blame. They are the only ones always willing to make a start; they have no choice. Children are the ways the world begin again and again. "But in general, our children have no voice--that we will listen to. We force, we blank them into the bugle/bell regulated lineup of the Army/school, and we insist on silence. "But even if we cannot learn to bless their lives (our future times), at least we can try to find out how we already curse and burden their experience: how we limit the wheeling of their inner eyes, how we terrify their trust, and how we condemn the raucous laughter of their natural love. What's more, if we will hear them, they will teach us what they need; they will bluntly formulate the tenderness of their deserving.

refusal, care, and collectivity. Refusal: because we cannot collaborate with the prison-industrial complex, as “only evil will collaborate with evil” (June Jordan). Care: because “care is the antidote to violence” (Saidiya Hartman).

the problem of gender identity is our evasion of the implications of power and our may-I-say-“feminine” inclinations to make nice. War is not nice.

The expression of hatred for your enemies is sometimes the only way to end self-hatred.

In the context of tragedy, all polite behavior is self-denial.

They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery / stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors / to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys / whose bodies / swelled purple and black into twice the original size / and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby / and then / they said this was brilliant

Refusal: because we cannot collaborate with the prison-industrial complex, as “only evil will collaborate with evil” (June Jordan). Care: because “care is the antidote to violence” (Saidiya Hartman). Collectivity: because “everything worthwhile is done with others” (Moussa Kaba).

I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND REACTION I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC OUT THE WINDOWS I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY NOBODY COLD I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE

This is the meaning of poverty: when you have nothing better to do than to hate somebody who, just exactly like yourself, has nothing better to do than to pick on you instead of trying to figure out how come there's nothing better to do.

This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.

Because it was raining outside the palace Because there was no rain in her vicinity Because people kept asking her questions Because nobody ever asked her anything Because marriage robbed her of her mother Because she lost her daughters to the same tradition Because her son laughed when she opened her mouth Because he never delighted in anything she said Because romance carried the rose inside a fist Because she hungered for the fragrance of the rose Because the jewels of her life did not belong to her Because the glow of gold and silk disguised her soul Because nothing she could say could change the melted music of her space Because the privilege of her misery was something she could not disgrace Because no one could imagine reasons for her grief Because her grief required no magination Because it was raining outside the alace Because there was no rain in her vicinity.

My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back into your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage.

The whole world will become a home to all of us, or none of us can hope to live on it, peacefully. But much of the American dream mistakenly supposes that, like a tree, we will grow and flourish, standing in one place where we murmur doomed declarations about our roots, about finding our roots, or putting down roots. In fact, of course, if we remain where we start from we will neither grow nor flourish.

Our runaways may well be the backbone courageous among our kids: the ones who will risk hunger and forced prostitution and jail and death, in order to say NO to this overwhelming suffocation and victimizing, adult defeat into which they have been trapped, by dint of being born.

I try to use words, whether in prose or poetry, that people can understand, that make them feel in an intense way. I'm a writer, that's what I do.

Who the hell set things up like this?

And I am not pleased I am not very pleased None of this fits into my notion of “things going very well

I could no longer participate in an exchange requiring acrobatics of self-denial.

Oh! If you would only walk into this room again and touch me anywhere I swear I would not long for heaven or for earth more than I'd wish to stay there touched and touching you

I believe that suffering does not confer virtue upon the victim. Hence it is possible that the slave will become the slaveholder and that the victim will become the executioner.

If we collaborate with the powerful then our language will lose its currency as a means to tell the truth in order to change the truth.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

Do You Follow Me We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

Rather than struggling to share in a patently evil kind of power, the power of people who will demean and destroy those who are weaker than they, I think we might, more usefully, have sought to redefine that meaning of power, altogether.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can't tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life

What kind of a person could kill a Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and stay above suspicion? What about the police? What about somebody Black? What sixteen year old would say no to a cop? What seven year old would say no thanks to me? What is an overreaction to murder? What kind of a person could kill a Black child and then kill a Black child and then kill a Black child? What kind of a person are you? What kind of a person am I? What makes you so sure? What kind of a person could save a Black child? What kind of a people will lay down its life for the lives of our children? What kind of a people are we?

Not too many people wanted to grant that maybe schools are political institutions teaching power to the powerful and something unpalatable and destructive to the weak. Not too many people wanted to reexamine their fantasies about the democratizing function of American education.

These Poems - 1936-2002 These poems they are things that I do in the dark reaching for you whoever you are and are you ready? These words they are stones in the water running away These skeletal lines they are desperate arms for my longing and love. I am a stranger learning to worship the strangers around me whoever you are whoever I may become.

Sure enough, we have plenty of exposure to white everything so why would we opt to remain our African/Asian/Mexican selves? The answer is that 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.

And as long as we study white literature, as long as we assimilate the English language and its implicit English values, as long as we allude and defer to gods we 'neither sought nor knew,' as long as we, Black poets in America, remain the children of slavery, as long as we do not come of age and attempt, then to speak the truth of our difficult maturity in an alien place, then we will be beloved, and sheltered, and published.

For a long time I believe we supposed that the problem was that of misinformation. If only Americans knew the truth of things then they would rally to help, to stop the invasion, the slaughter. What I gradually began to understand, however, was something importantly different. The problem was not one of misinformation, or ignorance. The problem was that the Lebanese people, in general, and that the Palestinian people, in particular, are not whitemen: They never have been whitemen.

When we do disability justice work, it becomes impossible to look at disability and not examine how colonialism created it. It becomes a priority to look at Indigenous ways of perceiving and understanding disability, for example. It becomes a space where we see that disability is all up in Black and brown/queer and trans communities—from Henrietta Lacks to Harriet Tubman, from the Black Panther Party’s active support for disabled organizers’ two-month occupation of the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation to force the passage of Section 504, the law mandating disabled access to public spaces and transportation to the chronic illness and disability stories of second-wave queer feminists of color like Sylvia Rivera, June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Marsha P. Johnson, and Barbara Cameron, whose lives are marked by bodily difference, trauma-surviving brilliance, and chronic illness but who mostly never used the term “disabled” to refer to themselves.

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land into new dust that rising like a marvelous pollen will be fertile even as the first woman whispering imagination to the trees around her made for righteous fruit from such deliberate defense of life as no other still will claim inferior to any other safety in the world The whispers too they intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit now aroused they carousing in ferocious affirmation of all peaceable and loving amplitude sound a certainly unbounded heat from a baptismal smoke where yes there will be fire And the babies cease alarm as mothers raising arms and heart high as the stars so far unseen nevertheless hurl into the universe a moving force irreversible as light years traveling to the open eye And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea we are the ones we have been waiting for

Alan Ladd as Neale Jordan Veronica Lake as Ellen Hillman Mike Mazurki as Paul Fontana Elisha Cook Jr. as Ciro Ricci Gloria Graham as May Martell Frank Lovejoy as Randolph McGraw Hugh Beaumont as Charlie Gray Lloyd Nolan as Victor Haskell June Lockhart as Janet Haskell James Craig as Eddie Lomax Laird Cregar as Frank Perkins William Bendix as Art Barker Richard Denning as Jerry Markle James Gleason as Sam Menard Tom Drake as Roy Douglas Dick as Tommy Barrow Virginia Grey as Claire Allen Farley Granger as Andy Hillman Edward Ryan as Gerald

Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.” Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor. “He wants to know,” continued Jordan, “if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.” The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths—so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden. “Did

A poll produced by Birzeit University in the West Bank at the time confirmed Hamas’s fears, showing that 77 percent of Palestinians favored recognition of Israel, less than five months after voting Hamas into the legislature.120 Under Haniyeh’s leadership, Hamas’s cabinet sought to limit the fallout as it worked with president Abbas’s office to reach a compromise.121 Haniyeh’s pragmatic efforts faced significant obstruction as both Israel and Palestinian factions, as well as internal Hamas forces, sought to prevent a rapprochement from emerging.122 In early June 2006, Prime Minister Olmert leaked information that Israel had approved three presidential trucks with approximately three thousand arms to be delivered to Fatah across the Allenby Bridge from Jordan, further inflaming tension among factions.123 From the Gaza Strip, rocket fire increased. This raised suspicions that Hamas’s external leadership, along with leaders within Gaza who were committed to Hamas’s project, were encouraging al-Qassam to prevent Haniyeh from adopting a moderate position in discussions with Abbas.124 On June 9, Israel carried out an air strike that killed a family of seven in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, who were picnicking on the beach. Officially breaking the ceasefire that had lasted since the Cairo Declaration the previous summer, al-Qassam promised “earthquakes.”125

Typical of the form is an item from the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog of June 24, 2013: The Social Security Administration’s inspector general on Monday said the agency improperly paid $31 million in benefits to 1,546 Americans believed to be deceased. And potentially making matters worse for the agency, the inspector general said the Social Security Administration had death certificate information on each person filed in the government database, suggesting it should have known the Americans had died and halted payments. Why do we allow this kind of thing to persist? The answer is simple—eliminating waste has a cost, just as getting to the airport early has a cost. Enforcement and vigilance are worthy goals, but eliminating all the waste, just like eliminating even the slightest chance of missing a plane, carries a cost that outweighs the benefit. As blogger (and former mathlete) Nicholas Beaudrot observed, that $31 million represents .004% of the benefits disbursed annually by the SSA. In other words, the agency is already extremely good at knowing who’s alive and who’s no more. Getting even better at that distinction, in order to eliminate those last few mistakes, might be expensive. If we’re going to count utils, we shouldn’t be asking, “Why are we wasting the taxpayer’s money?,” but “What’s the right amount of the taxpayer’s money to be wasting?” To paraphrase Stigler: if your government isn’t wasteful, you’re spending too much time fighting government waste.

Alan Ladd as Neale Jordan Veronica Lake as Ellen Hillman Mike Mazurki as Paul Fontana Elisha Cook Jr. as Ciro Ricci Gloria Graham as May Martell Frank Lovejoy as Randolph McGraw Hugh Beaumont as Charlie Gray Lloyd Nolan as Victor Haskell June Lockhart as Janet Haskell James Craig as Eddie Lomax Laird Cregar as Frank Perkins William Bendix as Art Barker Richard Denning as Jerry Markle James Gleason as Sam Menard Tom Drake as Roy Douglas Dick as Tommy Barrow Virginia Grey as Claire Allen

In 1986, shortly after Chris’s fourteenth birthday, came a moment that would permanently alter drug enforcement polices moving forward. On June 19, just two days after being selected second overall by the defending champion Boston Celtics, Len Bias died from an overdose, and the world stopped. Bias was a basketball superhero. He had dominated college basketball at the University of Maryland with a combination of force, beauty, grace, and destruction that made him a true one-of-one. In joining the Celtics, he was pinned to become Michael Jordan’s greatest rival (the two had phenomenal duels in college) and prolong the dynasty in Boston, where Larry Bird had led the team to three titles in the last six years. Rumors spread in the press that Bias died after smoking crack. Cocaine, usually associated with lavish white communities and those living in the lap of luxury, was seen as an addiction. But crack was a crime. The drug, far cheaper than powder cocaine, was largely associated with Black communities and was being held significantly responsible for the erosion of society’s moral fabric.

If other First World people, if we, ourselves, took a notion to think and act just according to what we felt was good for us, if we thought and if we acted as though the big guys should just take a flying jump out of the nearest window whenever they come pushing their craziness into our countries, our houses, our heads, the whole world would soon become really different really fast.

June 30, 1992 Lunch with Doug. He wants to do POP: The Movie. He thinks he can raise $4 million from the licensees (Konami, etc.), then get the rest the usual way. $20

George Mumford, a Newton-based mindfulness teacher, one such moment took place in 1993, at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning center in Rhinebeck, New York. The center was hosting a retreat devoted to mindfulness meditation, the clear-your-head habit in which participants sit quietly and focus on their breathing. Leading the session: meditation megastar Jon Kabat-Zinn. Originally trained as a molecular biologist at MIT, Kabat-Zinn had gone on to revolutionize the meditation world in the 1970s by creating a more secularized version of the practice, one focused less on Buddhism and more on stress reduction and other health benefits. After dinner one night, Kabat-Zinn was giving a talk about his work, clicking through a slide show to give the audience something to look at. At one point he displayed a slide of Mumford. Mumford had been a star high school basketball player who’d subsequently hit hard times as a heroin addict, Kabat-Zinn explained. By the early 1980s, however, he’d embraced meditation and gotten sober. Now Mumford taught meditation to prison inmates and other unlikely students. Kabat-Zinn explained how they were able to relate to Mumford because of his tough upbringing, his openness about his addiction — and because, like many inmates, he’s African-American. Kabat-Zinn’s description of Mumford didn’t seem to affect most Omega visitors, but one participant immediately took notice: June Jackson, whose husband had just coached the Chicago Bulls to their third consecutive NBA championship. Phil Jackson had spent years studying Buddhism and Native American spirituality and was a devoted meditator. Yet his efforts to get Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and their teammates to embrace mindfulness was meeting with only limited success. “June took one look at George and said, ‘He could totally connect with Phil’s players,’ ’’ Kabat-Zinn recalls. So he provided an introduction. Soon Mumford was in Chicago, gathering some of the world’s most famous athletes in a darkened room and telling them to focus on their breathing. Mumford spent the next five years working with the Bulls, frequently sitting behind the bench, as they won three more championships. In 1999 Mumford followed Phil Jackson to the Los Angeles Lakers, where he helped turn Kobe Bryant into an outspoken adherent of meditation. Last year, as Jackson began rebuilding the moribund New York Knicks as president, Mumford signed on for a third tour of duty. He won’t speak about the specific work he’s doing in New York, but it surely involves helping a new team adjust to Jackson’s sensibilities, his controversial triangle offense, and the particular stress that comes with compiling the worst record in the NBA. Late one April afternoon just as the NBA playoffs are beginning, Mumford is sitting at a table in O’Hara’s, a Newton pub. Sober for more than 30 years, he sips Perrier. It’s Marathon Monday, and as police begin allowing traffic back onto Commonwealth Avenue, early finishers surround us, un-showered and drinking beer. No one recognizes Mumford, but that’s hardly unusual. While most NBA fans are aware that Jackson is serious about meditation — his nickname is the Zen Master — few outside his locker rooms can name the consultant he employs. And Mumford hasn’t done much to change that. He has no office and does no marketing, and his recently launched website, mindfulathlete.org, is mired deep in search-engine results. Mumford has worked with teams that have won six championships, but, one friend jokes, he remains the world’s most famous completely unknown meditation teacher. That may soon change. This month, Mumford published his first book, The Mindful Athlete, which is part memoir and part instruction guide, and he has agreed to give a series of talks and book signings

Whether the army was capable of carrying out such an operation was a question never asked. The officer corps had been repeatedly purged, those ousted replaced by some 2,000 Ba’thist-indoctrinated ‘educators.’ “I worked as a teacher in the staff college,” remembered Ibrahim Isma’il Khahya who, in 1966, became commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade. “My officers were mostly teachers, too. They weren’t ready for war.” The head of intelligence for the Golan district, Col. Nash’at Habash, had been kicked out and replaced by a mere captain, brother of a high-ranking Ba’th official. Ahmad Suweidani, the former military attaché in Beijing, had been boosted from colonel to lieutenant general and chief of staff. Though Syria’s 250 tanks and 250 artillery pieces were generally of more recent vintage than Israel’s, their maintenance was minimal. Supply, too, could be erratic; deprived of food, front-line troops had been known to desert their posts. The air force was particularly substandard. An internal army report rated only 45 percent of Syria’s pilots as “good,” 32 percent as “average,”‘ and the remainder “below average.” Only thirty-four of the forty-two jets at the Dmair and Saiqal airfields were operational. Yet, within the ranks, morale had never been higher. Capt. Muhammad ‘Ammar, an infantry officer serving in the fortress of Tel Fakhr, recalled: “We thought we were stronger, that we could cling to our land, and that the Golan was impenetrable. We were especially heartened by the unity between Syria, Egypt, and Jordan.” Another captain, Marwan Hamdan al-Khuli, heard that “we were much stronger and would defeat the enemy easily.

At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger's consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words.

What is the moral meaning of our own gods?

on June 3, 1967, on the eve of the Six Day War, Israel sent a clandestine message to Jordan’s King Hussain offering to recognize the Green Line as the official border between the countries—so long as Jordan didn’t join the Arab countries’ war efforts.

Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed. “Who will bring me my loved one?” —The New York Times, 9/20/1982 I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the red dirt not quite covering all of the arms and legs Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams that reached the observation posts where soldiers lounged about Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved her baby into the stranger’s hands before she was led away Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons were shot through the head while they slit his own throat before the eyes of his wife Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous flares into the darkness so that the others could see the backs of their victims lined against the wall Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies and the stench that will not float Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and again raped before they murdered her on the hospital floor Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that did not halt on that keening trajectory Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the doors and the breaking of windows and the hauling of families into the world of the dead I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the red dirt not quite covering all of the arms and legs because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events that must follow from those who dare “to purify” a people those who dare “to exterminate” a people those who dare to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs” those who dare “to mop up” “to tighten the noose” “to step up the military pressure” “to ring around” civilian streets with tanks those who dare to close the universities to abolish the press to kill the elected representatives of the people who refuse to be purified those are the ones from whom we must redeem the words of our beginning because I need to speak about home I need to speak about living room where the land is not bullied and beaten to a tombstone I need to speak about living room where the talk will take place in my language I need to speak about living room where my children will grow without horror I need to speak about living room where the men of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five are not marched into a roundup that leads to the grave I need to talk about living room where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud for my loved ones where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi because he will be there beside me I need to talk about living room because I need to talk about home I was born a Black woman and now I am become a Palestinian against the relentless laughter of evil there is less and less living room and where are my loved ones? It is time to make our way home.

women writers and thinkers—Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Christa Wolf—writers who were political as well as literary.

poem for my love how do we come to be here next to each other in the night where are the stars that show us to our love inevitable outside the leaves flame usual in darkness and the rain falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh the black men waiting on the corner for a womanly mirage i am amazed by peace it is this possibility of you asleep and breathing in the quiet air

Although Jaffa was almost entirely evacuated, leaving only some 2,000 of its 75,000 residents in the city, the more resilient inhabitants of Lydda and Ramle – the two cities that were also within the boundaries of the Arab state according to the partition plan – had held on. They had armed themselves and were ready to defend their cities against the Jewish fighters. But as the Israeli army rearmed itself that summer and gained in strength, Lydda and Ramle soon realized that they could not stand their ground without help from an Arab army. From May 18 to 28 the 4,500-strong Arab Legion fought a fierce battle for Jerusalem which ended with them in control of the Old City. This gave my father hope. It was a unique instance of an Arab army winning a victory over the new Israeli forces. Disappointment, though, was soon to follow. During the four-week truce from June 11 to July 9 that was arranged by Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN envoy, Israel rearmed with weapons from the USA and the Eastern bloc. Meanwhile, under strong US pressure, Britain stopped supplying arms to Jordan. Then, in the next round of fighting, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Glubb decided to withdraw his forces from the area that had been designated part of the Palestinian state under the partition plan. This left the cities of Lydda and Ramle undefended and allowed the Israelis to force the inhabitants to leave at gunpoint.

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name My name is my own my own my own and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this but I can tell you that from now on my resistance my simple and daily and nightly self-determination may very well cost you your life

The possessive case scarcely ever appears in Black English. Never use an apostrophe ('s) construction. If you wander into a possessive case component of an idea, then keep logically consistent: ours, his, theirs, mines. But, most likely, if you bump into such a component, you have wandered outside the underlying world-view of Black English.

Whole campaign an' dint neither one of them joker talk about right or wrong. We knowed it was trouble. We been livin' with trouble for awhile.

These days, when the eagle want ssomething for lunch, he usually screams 'Communists!' or 'Cuba!' or 'National security!' In the old days, however, he used to solemnly say 'gold' or 'slaves' or 'Civilization,' and then these words would produce a great bustling of imperial energies, as newly marked areas of the map became targets for conquest and imperial exploitation.

Unless you accept white male standards of conduct, standards that castigate women for our 'emotionality,' our tears, our tendencies to take human life and responsible love quite seriously, why would you applaud any woman for remaining 'calm' in an outrageous circumstance?

I wanted to live my life so that people would know unmistakably that I am alive, so that when I finally die people will know the difference for sure between my living and my death.

Most Americans have imagined that problems affecting Black life follow from pathogenic attributes of Black people and not from malfunctions of the state. Most Americans have sought to identify themselves with the powerful interests that oppress poor and minority peoples, perhaps hoping to keep themselves on the shooting side of the target range.

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. We would not tolerate the language of the powerful and, thereby, lose all respect for words, per se. We would make our language lead us into the equality of power that a democratic state must represent.

How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes? How could these people living in this poor country where so many dreams arise from the facts of so much horror, how could they ever hurt me or any of us, up here, in the chill indifference of North America? They have given to me and to all of us an amazing example of self-love. With their bodies and their blood they have shown us the bravery that self-love requires.

I am saying that the ultimate connection cannot be the enemy. The ultimate connection must be the need that we find between us. It is not only who you are, in other words, but what we can do for each other that will determine the connection.

Wrapped up my money and I couldn't find my way. So I changed them bills to silver And I rolled another game so two could play so two could pay. And things ain't never been the same since then since when you came you blew my lonely game with love like a nickel and a dime making changes all the time love like a nickel love like a dime making changes all the time.

No hallway. Angela stare hard to see a house where people live without a hallway. That mean every part of the house is real. It belong to somebody, and be part of how you live, not how you get to where you live, and be.

To believe is to become what you believe