June, how much you have left us with.

These writers brought forth June in a way that made me yearn for her presence. I learned of her through my masters in Black women's studies, but this book introduced me to her community, her life, and her legacy. June's passion for coalition building was palpable. She didn't just talk the talk, but she walked the walk.
Alexis De Veaux notes within her piece how June never truly had a "home" within a movement. With saying that she wasn't saying she was unloved, unseen, or unheard, but that her work transcended boundaries, frameworks, and the confines of the structures of many movements. June was not a "single issue" Afro-Caribbean woman. She understood intersectionality before it was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw. Many Black women lived their lives as such, and she refused to conform or mold herself into what a movement demanded of her to be more palatable and liked.

I cherished the words of this book so much. It made me go find as many of June's books as I could and place them in a cart. This book made me happy, sad, it made me long and yearn, it made me more radical, and it made me wish I could reach out and support June in a way that at times she felt unsupported. The work of a radical is often lonely....even when you have community and love. But she was surrounded by so much love, and I hope she feels that love throughout this work. Her legacy lives on, and I hope to one day be a part of this legacy. Thank you for this compilation, and for continuing to allow her to live for the next generation. She will only die if she stop speaking her name.

This Unruly Witness is an overview of poet June Jordan and her sweeping impact on other writers and the literary world during her lifetime. The work includes poetic praise, letters, essays, and the letter as essay.
One writer notes her impact on present day poetry slams in how she performed her own poetry in public, keeping up a metered speed to deliver lines. She impacted people like Ntozake Shange and others with their work.
Her music background made for efforts to create librettos and such for plays and other works. Jordan held to a revolutionary emphasis in her work for liberation of women, all people, and anyone under the auspices of colonialism and American manipulation on the world stage. One writer references a Report from the Bahamas on Jordan’s recognition that identities can be played against commonly oppressed people to set them at one another’s throats. With the current political climate, identities can be used to keep common oppressed groups from uniting against a common enemy that wants both group oppressed or destroyed altogether if they will not comply with political pressure.
Even more Jordan is trying to figure how to identify those who are readily about liberation or not. Her support of the Palestinian people is still relevant this many years later. Her piece on the O J Simpson trial about not choosing between being Black and a woman was rejected by the New York Times but accepted somewhere else. She was always trying to bridge the differences, stitch them together so that they work against oppression of all identities.
She is credited with helping to formulate the eco-poetry justice as a legitimate poetical form.
Her insightfulness around the use of language in words “working class” people might not recognize calls attention to the presumptions of class and education. Her thinking was use the words and let people learn new words to them instead of assuming they are ignorant around class assumptions.
Jordan worked in Nicaragua to make sure people there could get what they needed especially in the area of writing and reading as she realized how important a literate people are in opposing oppression.
Jordan’s protest and advocacy can be traced back to her mother’s death. Her mother had died, and her father couldn’t tell whether she were alive or dead. It is uncertain whether she committed suicide so Jordan could get an insurance policy or not. The inability to tell whether another human being was alive became the focal point of her resistance and political advocacy.
The common denominator in this celebration of June Jordan, her life, teaching, activism, and her literary work is how she taught people to be their authentic self. This contribution to her from so many over the love she gave is a testament to the fact that her dying of cancer did not erase her and she is being presented to a whole new generation.