Exploring the correspondence of June Jordan and Audre Lorde, Marina Magloire assembles an archive of a Black feminist falling-out over Zionism.
In Jordan’s handwritten notes for her 1990 essay, “Intifada, U.S.A.,” the word “INTIFADA” is repeated, like a spell, like a chorus to a song yet to be written. When Jordan visited Lebanon in 1996, we clearly see her commitment to intifada as a practice. During this trip, she took many photographs at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, the sites of the atrocities she had raged against 14 years prior. Her photos and notes linger on the signs of life stubbornly creeping back into the landscape of the camps: clotheslines strung between blasted buildings, a young man ducking behind bullet-pocked stairs, women planting flowers. Like Lorde, we find Jordan amid the rubble, but in the latter’s case, it is her material presence: her sneakered feet, her hands clasping a camera, her yellow legal pad dutifully documenting the martyrs and those who survived. She was not content to merely lament Palestinian death from afar; she wanted to sit in the living room they created atop the ruins: “I watched a woman setting out a jasmine plant that would probably manage the atmosphere and, possibly, flourish.” Jordan’s model of solidarity is as arduous as the slow growth of this embattled jasmine, and it goes far beyond the cessation of genocide. If, as Jordan has it, “the issue of the Palestinian people is the issue of the value of human life,” Jordan teaches us to move towards life. {read}