Poem: June Jordan, Moving towards Home, 1982

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

19 May 2021

Seventy-three years after the Nakba began, the Zionists continue their land and rights thievery, to which June Jordan, the Black American poet, bore powerful witness.

“Jordan wrote fearlessly of the parallel practices of apartheid in the two settlers’ states.”

Nakba, or al-Nakba, is an Arabic word meaning “catastrophe” or “disaster.” It is used to refer to the forced removal of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and the violent expropriation of their land and property in 1948. This date marks the beginnings of the cleansing of Palestinian territory by Zionist settlers, backed by the United States and Europe, to establish the state of Israel. As a consequence, Palestinians were made refugees in their own land. Families were broken up. Communities were displaced, forced into segregated ghettos or banished to a far-flung diaspora.

The Nakba is ongoing. So too is the settler colonial violence on which it is based. As the world watches, the Zionist apartheid regime that has colonized Palestine has unleashed yet another genocidal assault on the people of Gaza. This current wave of settler barbarity is but the murderous escalation of the recent attempts to forcibly evict Palestinian families from East Jerusalem’s Shiekh Jarrah neighborhood and the storming of the Al Aqsa Mosque by zionist miliary forces at the end of Ramadan.

“Palestinians were made refugees in their own land.”

Where there is repression, there is always resistance. Despite the ongoing savagery of the white supremacist settler colonial state -- buttressed by U.S. and European imperialism -- the proud, seventy-three year history of Palestinian resistance continues. Some say we are witnessing the beginning of the third Intifada.

The late poet June Jordan (1936–2002) was among the most eloquent Black chroniclers of the ongoing Nakbha. Jordan’s work also bears powerful witness to Palestinian resistance while testifying to the moral imperative of Black solidarity with Palestine. In essays like “The Blood Shall Be a Sign Unto You,” and “Moving beyond the Enemy Israel and South Africa,” both from 1985, Jordan wrote fearlessly of the

parallel practices of apartheid in the two settlers’ states. Yet Jordan’s politics and poetics of empathy and solidarity are perhaps most fully rendered in the poem “Moving towards Home.” Written after she learned of the September, 1982 massacre of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila on the outskirts of Beirut, “Moving towards Home” is both heartfelt and harrowing. And without hesitation or apology, Jordan embraces the Palestinian cause as her own:

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

Moving towards Home

June Jordan

“Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed.
“Who will bring me my loved one?”
The New York Times, 9/20/82

I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved her baby
into the stranger’s hands before she was led away
Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyes
of his wife
Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous
flares into the darkness so that others could see
the backs of their victims lined against the wall
Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies and
the stench
that will not float
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor
Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory
Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the
doors and
the breaking of windows and the hauling of families into
the world of the dead
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
“to purify” a people
those who dare
“to exterminate” a people

those who dare
to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”
those who dare
“to mop up”
“to tighten the noose”
“to step up the military pressure”
“to ring around” civilian streets with tanks
those who dare
to close the universities
to abolish the press
to kill the elected representatives
of the people who refuse to be purified
those are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginning

because I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten into
a tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home

I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home.

June Jordan, “Moving Toward Home,” in Living Room: New Poems by June Jordan (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993) and reprinted in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007)

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

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