Who Look at Me by June Jordan

First published: 1969; illustrated

Subjects: Arts, race and ethnicity, and social issues

Type of work: Poetry

Recommended Ages: 13-18

Form and Content

In the late 1960’s, when the concept of black pride enabled many African Americans to recognize and proclaim a hidden heritage of struggle and endurance, poet June Jordan collaborated with editor and publisher Milton Meltzer to design a book in which Jordan’s poetry would complement and comment on pictures concerning black identity chosen by Meltzer. In explaining her intentions, Jordan commented:

We do not see those we do not know. Love and all varieties of happy concern depend on the discovery of one’s self in another. The question of every desiring heart is, thus, Who Look at Me? In a nation suffering fierce hatred, the question—race to race, man to man, and child to child—remains: Who Look at Me? We answer with our lives. Let the human eye begin unlimited embrace of human life.

In order to guide the majority of white Americans in an exploration of the world of African Americans, Jordan has fashioned a poem—or, more precisely, a poetic cycle—that is interwoven with twenty-seven illustrations—paintings, lithographs, posters, and a collage—by artists from both the black and the white community. Her title Who Look at Me is both assertive and interrogative, emphasizing both the importance of the person who is the subject of the poem or painting and the questioning gaze of the onlooker joining the observer and the subject. The artists whose work illustrate the book represent a wide variety of styles and approaches, suggesting that there is no single way to see and no single, approved manner of appearance. Significant is the inclusion of a reproduction of Portrait of a Gentleman, by an unknown painter, the anonymity of the artist an indication of the universal impulse to capture the essential qualities of a human being in a permanent form.

Following several pages of poetry setting the direction of the book (“Who would paint a people/ black or white?”), the first painting to be included is a vividly colorful, semicubist rendering entitled Manchild, indicating the range of human experience to follow. The next five reproductions are in black and white, the absence of a complete palette diminishing the color-enforced sense of difference between races. The last in this group is called Enigmatic Foursome, its title posing the query of a society unsure how to deal with people who are not ruled by exclu-sionary, superficial racial characteristics.

Jordan and Meltzer deepen the common humanity that the book stresses by offering in the next section paintings by some famous white artists, including Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, who have chosen African Americans as subjects. The center of the book is a two-page reproduction and detail by another anonymous artist with the title The Slave Market—a powerful symbolic rendering of the crime against humanity at the heart of U.S. history. The remainder of the book contains an assortment of styles and subjects, concluding with a collage by Romare Bearden that fuses a traditional subject—a rural black family in a railroad shack— with a modern method that looks toward the future.

Critical Context

June Jordan expects much of her readers and justifies this demand by asking even more from herself. As in her novella His Own Where (1971), which renders the reality of a love between two teenagers in the language of the narrator’s mental observations, Jordan assumes that young readers can respond to a creative use of form and poetic structure and an inventive use of American English. She assumes that her young readers still retain the qualities of hope, enthusiasm, openness, curiosity, and decency that can be reached by an honest presentation of a complex, difficult subject. She wrote Who Look at Me for those who are not frozen by bigotry or poisoned by hate, and the continuing racial division in the United States has kept her work timely and relevant, just as the pictures, painted through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, speak both to a submerged history and to a contemporary reality.

The idea of a poet looking at a painting is a part of an established tradition in American letters, notably in William Carlos Williams’ essay “Pictures from Brueghel” (1962), and it carries the thought that the conventional division of genres need not prevent a fusion of modes, an appropriate point for a work that attempts to remove artificial boundaries that separate people. Considering how many young readers are familiar with the work/text union of comic books and magazines, Jordan’s efforts may not seem that unusual, and the increasing reliance on visual means of presenting information through computer technology may also make Jordan’s hybrid seem simply another variant in an increasingly fluid mix.