[We look to our elders to demonstrate another way of being in this
broken world, extending our circle of commitment to the person in
front of us, or to a group of people, like she did with Palestinian
people. June taught us it is important to practice self-love, to show
commitment to your community and to extend that care to those
struggling for justice around the world.]
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JUNE JORDAN’S LEGACY OF SOLIDARITY AND LOVE REMAINS RELEVANT  
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Sriram Shamasunder
February 13, 2023
Yes Magazine
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_ We look to our elders to demonstrate another way of being in this
broken world, extending our circle of commitment to the person in
front of us, or to a group of people, like she did with Palestinian
people. June taught us it is important to practice self-love, to show
commitment to your community and to extend that care to those
struggling for justice around the world. _

Sriram Shamasunder (left) poses for a photo with June Jordan
(right)., Photo courtesy of Sheila Menezes

 

I remember being a kid with shaky confidence. I entered the University
of California, Berkeley, as a freshman, a child of Indian immigrants,
keeping my head down and taking primarily science classes. To fill a
humanities requirement, I meandered into a class called Poetry for the
People, a course taught and conceived by June Jordan, the great poet
and activist. 

Even though I fulfilled the requirement in just one semester, I stayed
in the class for two years, not so much because I thought I was a
poet, but because June—as I later came to call her—made me feel
that even a young person like me might have something to say. 

June was both tender and fierce. At first, she was mostly someone I
admired at a distance in the classroom. This changed during my last
few weeks at UC Berkeley, when we studied Arab and Arab American
poetry. A disagreement between Jewish students defending Zionism and
those supporting Palestinian liberation grew from a murmur to a rumble
over the course of the semester. In one of our last classes, a
teaching assistant publicly accused June—in front of a class of 250
to 300—of failing to stand up on behalf of Palestinian people. She
didn’t show up for class the following week. 

The weekend after, I went over to her house in North Berkeley. She was
surprised to see me, but she let me in. The morning sun lit up the
kitchen and made specks of dust visible. We all knew she had breast
cancer, but we didn’t know the extent of her struggle. About 20
bottles of medications were laid out on the kitchen counter—to treat
cancer and fight nausea and pain. 

We sat at her kitchen table. I tried to find the words to encourage
her to come back to class. I stumbled as I tried to convey that the
whole class knew of her commitment to the Palestinian struggle. June
remained unmoved. She was worn down. The endless stream of medical
appointments and chemotherapy and array of medications on her
countertop had made her reflect more on questions of her legacy and
impact. 

She began to talk. She said her entire career had been brought to a
halt in 1982 by the political stance she took in _The Village
Voice_ when she wrote a poem titled “Apologies to All the People in
Lebanon
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the Israeli military’s massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps
in Sabra and Shatila. That same year, she wrote the poem “Moving
towards Home
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those iconic words that pushed so many of us to extend ourselves
beyond our demographic to make common cause with the most vulnerable,
the most persecuted peoples: 

_I was born a Black woman and now
I am become a Palestinian _

June paid significantly for taking a pro-Palestinian stand. In some
ways, she received the kind of backlash that congressional
representative Ilhan Omar (a Democrat from Minnesota) gets when she
stands up for Palestinians, except June didn’t have a social media
platform to fight back as Omar does today. And so, she was effectively
ostracized. She told me her bibliography shows a gap between the
mid-’80s and mid-’90s and revealed that publishers refused to work
with her. This may in part be the reason she is not as widely read as
her contemporaries like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. 

That afternoon in her sunlit kitchen, I listened to her. June was 65,
and tired and sick. I was 23. She had already paid a huge price for
her solidarity with the people of Palestine. Her willingness to risk
status for solidarity had been questioned by her student, a woman from
a younger generation, who seemed to be unaware of her personal
sacrifice. All of it was hard to stomach.

That afternoon, as June stood up and moved about her house, cleaning
up and doing chores, we continued to talk. When I played with her
beautiful black puppy, he climbed on me and left muddy paw prints all
over my white kurta. 

I had a T-shirt on underneath, so she insisted on keeping the kurta so
she could clean it and bring it back to me at our next class. I was
hopeful she _would_ return to our class. 

The next week, she returned to class with a new poem and my kurta. She
read the poem to the class, “It’s Hard to Keep a Clean Shirt
Clean
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poem’s central metaphor grappled with committing to certain values
and visions when, inevitably, the original ideal is sullied by the
messiness of life. To be _in_ the world rather than an observer of
it required a pact with the not-perfect—the profound wedded to the
practical. Even when we clean ourselves off, none of us is the same as
we were, or can claim purity. 

Soon after Jordan wrote that poem, I moved to New York for medical
school. My first years in medical school—2001 and 2002—were the
last years of her life. We ended up speaking on the phone a couple of
times a week across coasts. June navigated the world of oncologists,
chemotherapy, and MRI scans as I started slowly wading into that same
world, but as a student of medicine rather than a patient. It was
bewildering to both of us. During our conversations, she recounted her
life. I asked questions, and she expanded, seemingly grateful to
reflect on her experiences. 

She recalled sitting next to Malcolm X in Harlem as a young woman, and
described how he schooled her on how best to convey a message. When he
finished answering a reporter’s questions, he would turn to June and
quiz her on what was asked and when, and how he had responded to guide
the conversation down a path that best served his message. 

She spoke about her friendship with Fannie Lou Hamer, the great civil
rights leader who put her body on the line to register Black folks to
vote throughout the South. June at the time had a deep aversion to all
white people—a hatred, even. Hamer apparently said to Jordan,
“Ain’t no way, no how you can hate anyone and hope to see the face
of God.” That shifted her. She realized it was that bedrock belief
that enabled Hamer to face vicious threats and murderous hate and
respond with love—first and foremost for her own salvation. 

June recounted her experience with the acclaimed writer Ralph Ellison
when she was in her 20s. Ellison had become disenchanted with the
power of words to change anyone’s life and publicly taunted a group
of luminary poets, including T.S. Eliot, that their life of words did
not make one iota of difference against the violence of the mid-20th
century. When June was in her 20s, she didn’t have the words to say
directly to Ellison that the reason she wrote was for
the _victims_ to redeem possibility in their lives rather than for
the perpetrators of violence or oppression. She came to that clarity
later in her life. Some years later, I found that she had described
the experience in her book of essays, _Technical Difficulties_. 

Each conversation with her unveiled a different time of her life, and
the arc of purpose and love that lives at the center of a life worth
living. I was struck by the quality of her listening and her capacity
to be loving or indignant or vulnerable. 

As June got sicker, our conversations became less frequent until she
passed as I entered my second year of medical school. Now, when I
reflect on what she showed me in that year of conversations, I realize
it was the revealing of a committed life, as well as the passing of a
torch. She did the same for many of her other students. 

We look to our elders to demonstrate another way of being in this
broken world, another way of extending our circle of commitment to the
person in front of us, or to a group of people, like she did with
Palestinian people. June taught us it is important to practice
self-love, and to show commitment to your community as well as to
extend that care to those struggling for justice around the world. We
don’t need to choose between caring for ourselves and caring for the
world. There is no dichotomy or inconsistency in this orientation to
the world. _And_ and _both_. Jordan gave us that. 

Today, over 15 years after I graduated medical school, I run HEAL
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trains and transforms frontline health workers from nine countries
around the world, including Indigenous communities in the United
States. We worked in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, in Liberia
during the Ebola epidemic of 2014, and in Navajo Nation for eight
years, including through COVID-19 surges. Mostly, we work on the
non-glamorous task of building the capacity of local health
professionals to serve their communities. I see this as a form of
international solidarity, inspired by the example of June’s life. 

From time to time, I get asked why we work internationally when there
is so much need in the U.S. There is no “the United States or
abroad,” I answer. We do _both_. June taught me that. 

Those quiet conversations with June so many years ago have very much
shaped my own life. I had a daughter seven years ago whose middle name
is June, a nontraditional name for an Indian girl. The name reminds me
consistently to live life with enough personal risk to grow the circle
of who I might stand up for, and to bring the next generation (and the
next) into that commitment. 

_Sriram Shamasunder graduated from University of California, Berkeley
and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Harbor UCLA
Medical Center. He obtained his Diploma in Tropical Medicine & Hygiene
in 2013. Throughout the last decade he has spent several months out of
every year in underserved settings around the world including South
Los Angeles, rural Liberia, Haiti, Burundi, and rural India. Sri is an
Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSF, and co-founder and faculty
director of the HEAL Initiative, a health workforce strengthening
fellowship working in Navajo Nation and 9 countries around the world.
HEAL currently has over 160 fellows, over the last five years, half of
whom are Native American and from low and middle income
countries(LMIC). _

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