Technical Difficulties by June Jordan

First published: 1992

Type of work: Essays

Form and Content

In 1981, June Jordan published her first collection of essays, Civil Wars: Selected Essays 1963-1980, a pioneering volume described by the publisher as the first book of political essays to be published by a black woman in the United States. Perhaps best known as a poet and anthologist/critic, Jordan has also been very active politically as a commentator, teacher, organizer, and witness. Despite her national reputation, she never had the kind of forum available to political writers who were less critical of conventionally accepted ideas and policies. “If political writing by a Black woman did not strike so many editors as presumptuous or simply bizarre,” she wrote in 1985, “I might regularly appear, on a weekly or monthly schedule, as a national columnist.” Instead, she published her work in periodicals sympathetic to the challenging or unconventional view, magazines such as The Village Voice in New York City and The Progressive in Madison, Wisconsin.

Even with these forums available, Jordan’s second collection, On Call: Political Essays (1985), and Technical Difficulties contain essays that were not published previously. She explained the necessity for these collections by saying that books “must compensate for the absence of a cheaper and more immediate” print outlet and emphasized the need “to pose our views in the realm of public debate” as the major impetus behind her books. In such comments, against what she describes as an “American censorship” that she identifies as the restrictions imposed by all the positions of power across the political spectrum, she sees herself as “a dissident American poet and writer” who is determined to work toward the betterment of “my country, my home.” Explaining further that her politics are an expression of “my entire real life,” she asserts that nothing in her writing or thinking “reflects any orthodox anything” and lists as the goal of her work “my political efforts to coherently fathom all of my universe, and to arrive at a moral judgement that will determine my further political conduct.”

The essays gathered in Technical Difficulties were written between 1986 and early 1992 and express Jordan’s extremely critical judgments about the direction of governmental policy and social expectancy during that time. Continuing the coverage of the issues of race, gender, and class from her previous collections, Jordan combines reflections on her own experiences as a single parent, a professional African American writer and educator, and a person gradually discovering all the dimensions of her sexuality. Her reportorial technique employs statistics, factual information, and a carefully developed, logical argumentation to present a powerful, openly personal perspective on the “State of the Union.” As she did in her earlier essays, Jordan juxtaposes essays on the virtues of American democracy in theory and practice, often concentrating on exemplary people whose lives exhibit these qualities in action, with the worst examples of what she considers to be the most serious impediments to the realization of these ideals and principles. She writes about Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson in Technical Difficulties, focusing on the kind of political activist, one who stands for principled, outspoken, determined resistance to undemocratic tendencies, whom she wishes to emulate in her writing, teaching, and public pronouncements. Her work as a poet is not necessarily secondary. She uses all the dynamics of poetic language to charge her essays with a fervor that demands attention and response.

Like other American artists whose love for what they believe their country can be has led them to speak forcefully about their disappointments, Jordan is sensitive to the accusation that she is merely a malcontent. Her initial essay is a loving recollection of her father and other members of her family who believed in the American Dream and whose lives were expressions of a dedication to its promises and obligations. These people, along with King and Jackson, are the measure of citizenship and its responsibilities that Jordan uses to condemn prominent politicians such as past presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. The fact that her examples of excellence and standards for achievement are black men and women emphasizes the importance of African American experience in building a just society in the United States. Similarly, in an essay about her family and in an essay called “Park Slope: Mixing It Up for Good,” which is the only essay in the collection originally published in what might be considered a nationally prominent publication (The New York Times), Jordan offers a description of a community in which a multicultural ethnic mix provides for a level of tolerance as well as a spirit of exuberance and vitality that might stand as a model both for the small “town” within a larger urban setting and for the entire country.

The organizational pattern for the contents of the book is generally chronological, following Jordan’s own thoughts and personal development during the time period under examination. After the essay written in admiration of her family, there is a very personal essay entitled “Waking Up” in which the dark side of the American Dream, the nightmare/shadow looming over the light of optimism and hope, is evoked in terms of an ever-present sense of danger from which a vulnerable member of American society (that is, almost everyone, but particularly an independent African American female artist) is never really free. The alternation of a positive position with its points of weakness, or a negative situation with a possible solution, is a mode that continues throughout the book, not specifically in the bracketing of contiguous entries but in the elements linking several essays, or within an oppositional context in a specific one. This technique is an echo of the classic Afrocentric style of the “call and response.” It suggests by implication that there is a complexity in human affairs that defies the simplistic proscriptions of those who wish to defend a single approach to literature, education, sexuality, or artistic endeavor as the only correct one. Consequently, an essay such as “No Chocolates for Breakfast,” which considers the aloneness of a single female parent, is answered by “Don’t You Talk About My Momma!,” which is a defense of and tribute to black women who are the heads of families. The viciousness decried in “Alternative Commencement Address” is counterposed with the healing instincts of people responding to the San Francisco earthquake in “Unrecorded Agonies.” The immoral actions of the United States government in Nicaragua (“Where Are We and Whose Country Is This, Anyway?”) and the foreign policy that led to the Gulf War (“On War and War and War and . . .”) are counterposed with many examples of individual acts of conscience against oppression.

The most prominent thread of these intertwined essays is the political one, centered on the essay “Inside America,” which carries the explanatory subtitle “An Essay on Blackfolks and the Constitution.” Jordan explicitly details the disparity between the principles set out in the documents that describe the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the actual conditions of life in the United States for many African Americans. She then extends this cleavage to the academic curriculum in practice in many American universities, one that is exclusionary and narrow, and thus inappropriate for and inapplicable to the lives of the majority of the population who are not male and not white. This division between two conflicting positions is brought to a dramatic conclusion in the last two essays, as the elements of contention are located within the African American community. In a blistering discussion of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings and the Mike Tyson rape trial, Jordan concludes the book with a stunningly candid critique of the failures of many black people to move beyond positions of power and privilege to speak out for the kind of justice that is at the heart of her entire political philosophy.

Critical Context

The fact that Jordan was the first black woman to publish a collection of political essays in the United States is interesting and important as a register of the historical constraints placed on both women and African Americans. As John Thompson, the basketball coach at Georgetown, remarked when his team won the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship, he would not have been the first black coach to achieve this honor if similarly capable people had had similar opportunities. Jordan joins other pioneering black writers finding means to speak, but her work is clearly within a tradition of commentary. What is more significant is that her work has an enduring power that satisfies Ezra Pound’s definition of literature as “news that stays news.” While they are still firmly grounded in the specific experiences of her life as a poet and professor of African American studies, and as a woman of color in the United States in the late twentieth century, Jordan’s concerns are those of all responsible Americans, and her writing has a relevance that American citizens ignore at the nation’s peril.

Bibliography

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Twelve essays on images of race in popular culture, including a discussion of the Thomas-Hill hearings.

Jordan, June. Civil Wars: Selected Essays 1963-1980. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981. Jordan’s first collection of political essays.

Jordan, June. On Call: Political Essays. Boston: South End Press, 1985. Jordan’s second collection, with many connections to Technical Difficulties.

Jordan, June. Things That I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry. New York: Random House, 1977. A representative group of poems illustrating the strengths of Jordan’s grasp of language and style.

Kinloch, Valerie. June Jordan: Her Life and Letters. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006. This critical biography of Jordan gives equal time to her poetry and prose, devoting two full chapters to her political essays.

Madhubuti, Haki. Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? Chicago: Third World Press, 1990. Incisive essays and poems discussing the same issues Jordan covers but from a masculine perspective.

Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. New York: Routledge, Chapman, Hall, 1990. An examination of the relationship between black men and women, paralleling some of the concerns Jordan addresses.