Monday, April 28, 2008
Why Al Why?
Why would this ever be an appropriate metaphor? I'm pissed! Aren't you supposed to pretend you care about women al?
Al on the "abortion of justice"
Al on the "abortion of justice"
# posted by MB @ 8:34 PM 
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Okay this is really interesting. Unfortunately the video that you linked to has expired...or maybe they heeded your advice and took it down?
But this is interesting to me because June Jordan wrote something similar about 40 years ago in her poem "In Memoriam" (probably the only June Jordan poem that has had a major afterlife without the help of Sweet Honey). She refers to the assassination of MLK Jr. as a "deplorable abortion."
I was always really struck by her use of that metaphor and by the fact that that metaphor doesn't arrive until part II of the poem...which is the part that was routinely left out of the anthologies of the time (even the Soulscript Anthology which Jordan herself edited!). Jordan's description of this particular "abortion" as "deplorable" at least suggests something different from what Sharpton's use seems to assert...which is that all abortions are deplorable by default. Jordan wrote this only a year after pregnant black women engaged in civil disobedience for civil rights in North Carolina were sentenced to involuntary abortions as punishment for their activism.
Some abortions are indeed deplorable and of course we know that for women of color the right to choose to have children has been as embattled as the right to choose when not to...
Be this as it may Jordan censored her own us of the metaphor "abortion" in memory of MLK.
But in the first part of the poem Jordan does describe his murder as a way to "stop the weakly freedom fruit from being born"
a line that fascinates me both because of its use of natural imagery...but also because of it's queerness. When everyone else was describing MLK thru macho as "our lost father" "our slain King" Jordan is talking about "weakly freedom fruit."
Anyway...in part of my dissertation I do a reading of this poem (actually to prefigure the "difficult miracle of black poetry" that Jordan explains through a discussion of Phillis Wheatley years later) that looks at the way it feminizes freedom and the way it situates King in the position of the welfare mothers, the non-heroic agents of black survival...birthing freedom in without fathers in non-patriarchal relationships.
I even imagine that this poem could be read as a poem "In Memoriam" of the lost "free" poems of Phillis Wheately...untimely and impossible because in the late 1960s Wheately was completely out of style and not heroic or black power enough for consideration by the black arts movement.
All this is to say...I agree with you. Before Sharpton...there was a much more interesting and complicated deployment of the term abortion by June Jordan.
And even more than his use of this metaphor in a particularly anti-abortion manner...Sharpton's patriarchal style of leadership and his persistent silencing of the voices of women proves that he never got the message that Jordan was bringing.
(Black) freedom and justice doesn't come from the bossman actions of one loud man with a microphone...it comes from a movement of people ready and able to nurture something else.
(Sorry for rambling...let's talk about it more. I think this definitely has some important ties to your work on reproductive justice and media representations of black women's reproductivity.)
love,
lex
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But this is interesting to me because June Jordan wrote something similar about 40 years ago in her poem "In Memoriam" (probably the only June Jordan poem that has had a major afterlife without the help of Sweet Honey). She refers to the assassination of MLK Jr. as a "deplorable abortion."
I was always really struck by her use of that metaphor and by the fact that that metaphor doesn't arrive until part II of the poem...which is the part that was routinely left out of the anthologies of the time (even the Soulscript Anthology which Jordan herself edited!). Jordan's description of this particular "abortion" as "deplorable" at least suggests something different from what Sharpton's use seems to assert...which is that all abortions are deplorable by default. Jordan wrote this only a year after pregnant black women engaged in civil disobedience for civil rights in North Carolina were sentenced to involuntary abortions as punishment for their activism.
Some abortions are indeed deplorable and of course we know that for women of color the right to choose to have children has been as embattled as the right to choose when not to...
Be this as it may Jordan censored her own us of the metaphor "abortion" in memory of MLK.
But in the first part of the poem Jordan does describe his murder as a way to "stop the weakly freedom fruit from being born"
a line that fascinates me both because of its use of natural imagery...but also because of it's queerness. When everyone else was describing MLK thru macho as "our lost father" "our slain King" Jordan is talking about "weakly freedom fruit."
Anyway...in part of my dissertation I do a reading of this poem (actually to prefigure the "difficult miracle of black poetry" that Jordan explains through a discussion of Phillis Wheatley years later) that looks at the way it feminizes freedom and the way it situates King in the position of the welfare mothers, the non-heroic agents of black survival...birthing freedom in without fathers in non-patriarchal relationships.
I even imagine that this poem could be read as a poem "In Memoriam" of the lost "free" poems of Phillis Wheately...untimely and impossible because in the late 1960s Wheately was completely out of style and not heroic or black power enough for consideration by the black arts movement.
All this is to say...I agree with you. Before Sharpton...there was a much more interesting and complicated deployment of the term abortion by June Jordan.
And even more than his use of this metaphor in a particularly anti-abortion manner...Sharpton's patriarchal style of leadership and his persistent silencing of the voices of women proves that he never got the message that Jordan was bringing.
(Black) freedom and justice doesn't come from the bossman actions of one loud man with a microphone...it comes from a movement of people ready and able to nurture something else.
(Sorry for rambling...let's talk about it more. I think this definitely has some important ties to your work on reproductive justice and media representations of black women's reproductivity.)
love,
lex
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