Summary
Black feminist essayist, poet and teacher whose 1982 Lebanon writings, above all the poem “Moving towards Home,” Feldman places at the centre of chapter 5 of A Shadow over Palestine, as a relational, Black internationalist feminist practice fashioned against the taboo on Palestinian humanity in the United States (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 977-985).
Details
- Jordan’s poem “Moving towards Home,” written in the immediate aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, closes with the lines Feldman takes as the chapter’s epigraph, ending “It is time to make our way home” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 959-977). The poem was reprinted in the 2007 inaugural issue of Until Return, the Al-Awda newsletter, and excerpted by Suheir Hammad as an epigraph to Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996), where Hammad writes that Jordan “dared speak of transformation, of re-birth, of a deep understanding of humanity” (lines 979-981).
- In her first regular Progressive column, “Finding Our Way Home” (February 1989), Jordan wrote: “I believe that the issue of a home for Lisa Steinberg [a six-year-old girl killed by her abusive father] and the issue of a home for the Palestinian people is one and the same: The question is whether non-Europeans, and whether children, everywhere, possess a human right to sanctuary on this planet” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 981).
- Feldman, following Cheryl Higashida, calls Jordan’s stance a “black internationalist feminism” that figured Palestinian humanity as the benchmark for liberation; in an October 2000 interview Jordan called the exclusion of Palestinians and Arabs from “normal, regular human rights” the “moral litmus test of my life” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 983).
- Jordan was not at the 1982 NWSA conference; that summer she began her Lebanon writings from the taboo on the Lebanon invasion at the June 1982 New York nuclear disarmament mobilization. Her essay “Problems of Language in a Democratic State” takes Israel’s September 1982 mass protests — four hundred thousand people who “plunged into the streets of Tel Aviv to demand an investigation of the massacre of Lebanon” — as her prime example of an outcry against state language (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1103-1109).
- At a June 30, 1982 press conference arranged by the American Friends Service Committee, with Shulamith Koenig among those beside her, Jordan named the Israeli campaign a “genocide,” “conducted with American arms and American diplomatic support,” and asked: “Is it because the men, the women, and the children of Lebanon are not white? We should know by now the horrifying consequences that result from the valuing of one kind of life above another” (A Shadow over Palestine, line 1113).
- Her poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” (Village Voice, end of July 1982) is dedicated to “the 600,000 Palestinian men, women, and children who have lived in Lebanon since 1948”; Jordan replied to a hostile letters-page critic that the poem has no metaphors and “chronicles the Israeli invasion and the various, always changing, explanations offered by the Begin government” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1115-1141).
- Jordan co-organized, with Kathy Engel, Sara Miles and Kamal Boullata, the November 28, 1982 UNICEF poetry fund-raiser “Moving towards Home” at New York’s Ethical Cultural Center, attended by more than five hundred people, and closed the evening with “To Sing a Song of Palestine” and “Moving Towards Home” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1143-1159).
- Her poetry collection Living Room (1985), which culminates in “Moving towards Home,” is dedicated to “the children of Atlanta / and / the children of Lebanon” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1109-1115).
- In “Life after Lebanon,” written in the months after the fund-raiser, Jordan opens “I am not now nor have I ever been a whiteman,” theorises the “New Manliness” and the “New Women” who sustained her witness that summer, and writes of Palestinians that they “are not whitemen: They never have been whitemen. Hence they were and they are only Arabs, or terrorists, or animals” (A Shadow over Palestine, lines 1207-1213).
Related pages
A Shadow over Palestine, Association of Arab American University Graduates, Sabra and Shatila massacre, Lebanon invasion 1982, Black–Palestinian solidarity, Mahmoud Darwish