Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood

Description

A profoundly moving childhood memoir by one of the most widely acclaimed Black American writers of her generation  
 
Captured with astonishing beauty, through the eyes of a child, Soldier paints the battleground of June Jordan’s youth as the gifted daughter of Jamaican immigrants, struggling under the humiliations of racism, sexism, and poverty in 1940s New York. “There was a war on against colored people, against poor people,” Jordan writes, and she watches her mother turn inward in her suffering, her father lashing out, often violently, against his own daughter. She learns to harden herself, to be a “soldier,” while preserving a deep capacity for love and wonder. Poignantly exploring the nature of memory, imagination, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the vivid world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.June Jordan was Professor of African American Studies at U.C. Berkeley and was born in New York City in 1936. Her books of poetry include Haruko / Love Poems and Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems. She was also the author of five children’s books, a novel, three plays, and five volumes of political essays, the most recent of which was Affirmative Acts.

For more than ten years, she wrote a regular political column for The Progressive magazine. Her honors included a National Book Award nomination, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and a National Association of Black Journalists Award. June Jordan died in Berkeley, California on June 14, 2002."I didn't want to leave her—to let this little soldier go. So delightful, so proud, so loaded with expectations. There is so much always bubbling beneath the surface, and you see it all, just bubbling into these vivid recollections of a singular childhood: of yearning for and earning parental love; of learning fearlessness and beauty and poetry. Soldier is such an intensely perceptive memoir. I am left breathless, waiting for more." —Toni Morrison"With searing honesty and the ferocity of a child, June Jordan has once again found a way to make the impossible brutality of living a song." —Ntozake Shange"A memoir, a manual for survival, a critical deconstruction of the childhood of poetry, June Jordan's Soldier is the story of a child whose father dreamed of her becoming a soldier. She grew into a warrior instead." —Walter Mosley

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