"There was a war on against colored people," June Jordan recalls her father telling her. "I had to become a soldier." Jordan's fierce, funny, lyrical memoir of her first 12 years reveals the seeds of her adult poetry in her childhood experiences: the magical sounds of words in the nursery rhymes her mother crooned, the awareness nearly from birth of the bitter complexities of family relations. Jordan's father (depicted in a brilliantly nuanced portrait) was a proud Jamaican immigrant who encouraged his daughter to read and took her to museums and to Carnegie Hall, but also called her "damn black devil child" and beat her for the slightest misstep. He moved his family from a Harlem housing project to their own home in Brooklyn, enrolled June at a white boarding school, and fought savagely with his wife, who argued, "The child is a Black girl ... you gwine to make her afraid to be sheself!" Jordan reproduces the rhythms of West Indian speech as vividly as she captures African American culture of the 1930s and '40s in a poignant autobiography that, for all its racial particularity, tells an all-American story of the charged emotional legacy bequeathed by parents striving to give their children a better life. --Wendy Smith


From Publishers Weekly
Known for her fiery protest poems and her sensitive portrayals of children, poet and novelist Jordan (Naming Our Destiny) offers a fast-moving memoir of her early years. "Born on the hottest day in Harlem" to West Indian immigrants, Jordan was largely shaped by her ambitious and hardworking but sometimes abusive father: she would be his "sturdy, brilliant soldier, or he would, well, beat me to death." When Jordan turned five, in 1941, the family moved to Brooklyn; shortly thereafter she became a pugnacious, sociable child, shuttling among fantasies, friends and teachers, and the unstable expectations of her home life. Remarkable passages cover Jordan's youthful obsession with cowboy heroes, "deep-sea fishing" with her protective father and early experiences with religion. Jordan (a professor of African-American Studies at UC-Berkeley) has selected a bitty, broken-up format: single paragraphs, sentences, anecdotes and prose sketches succeed one another as if in a photo album or a book of short poems. (Sometimes Jordan even breaks into verse.) This can make her work scattered or sketchy; it can also imbue single incidents or memories with remarkable resonance. At her best, Jordan writes as if for oral delivery: Jodi, her best friend at summer camp, "had tiger eyes and a lion's mane for hair and she chewed gum so that it cracked near her chipped front tooth and her skin turned the same color as my own skin from the sun." Jordan could easily have written a tear-jerking story of trauma and recovery, or a densely sociological document. Instead, she weaves early disasters, delights and difficulties into a thoughtful, often cheerful tale about the girl she wasAone who found herself (as a chapter title has it) constantly "choosing and being chosen, fighting and fighting back." Agent, Gloria Loomis. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The Village Voice
". . . a memoir that is as unsettling as it is insightful."


Los Angeles Times
Although Jordan provides some sense of the perspective she would attain with later years, this is primarily a book about childhood as a child would experience it, with a child's highly charged sense of reality. The limpidity of the language, the immediacy of the scenes and the intensity of the emotions make us feel we are seeing through the little girl's eyes.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this captivating memoir, June Jordan unfolds the day-by-day making of a poet and writer during the first l2 years of her life. Through Jordan's unfailing eye and uncanny ear the reader sees and hears how a great talent was forged inside a household both violent and loving, a childhood both idyllic and roiled by turmoil and conflict.

In its thrilling and absolutely fresh descriptions of a young girl's everyday life, Soldier carries us into the shock of what childhood looks and feels like from the inside out. Jordan recaptures how we first come to love, how we first come to need to describe, and possess the world around us, through words. From these earliest years, we encounter the lyricism and the musicality-as well as the strength and the outrage--that remain pivotal to June Jordan's world-renowned poetry, today.

Jordan's earliest years are defined mainly by her brutal and loving father, a West Indian elevator operator a West Indian elevator operator who wanted his only child to be successful-to attain the dignity and power allowed only to white men at the time. To advance this ambition, he repeatedly challenged the young June physically, psychologically, and intellectually. With her father's "military" training guiding the way, we follow the poet as she confronts a huge variety of formative events---- in-house conflict, adventure, one-on-one warfare, and first love.

Written with exceptional beauty, throughout, Soldier stands and delivers an eloquent, heart-breaking, hilarious, and hopeful, witness to the beginnings of a truly extraordinary, American life.

June Jordan is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also directs the Poetry for the People program. She has published numerous volumes of poetry and political essays, including Civil Wars, Technical Difficulties, Naming Our Destiny, Haruko /Love Poetry, Kissing God Good-Bye, and, most recently, Affirmative Acts. Her honors include Special Recognition by the United States Congress, A Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Conference of Black Writers, The Prix de Rome in Environmental Design, A National Books Award finalist nomination for her novel, His Own Where, a National Association of Black Journalists Award, and a PEN-West Freedom to Write Award.

SYNOPSIS

Jordan's day-by-day memoir of her first 12 years depicts her developing into a political poet and essayist torn between her West Indian emigré parents: her father to whom the book is dedicated and who wanted her success on the white man's terms, and her mother, quiet, religious, and conflicted about her husband's near- militaristic methods to achieve success for their only child. Jordan is professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of its Poetry for the People program. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Known for her fiery protest poems and her sensitive portrayals of children, poet and novelist Jordan (Naming Our Destiny) offers a fast-moving memoir of her early years. "Born on the hottest day in Harlem" to West Indian immigrants, Jordan was largely shaped by her ambitious and hardworking but sometimes abusive father: she would be his "sturdy, brilliant soldier, or he would, well, beat me to death." When Jordan turned five, in 1941, the family moved to Brooklyn; shortly thereafter she became a pugnacious, sociable child, shuttling among fantasies, friends and teachers, and the unstable expectations of her home life. Remarkable passages cover Jordan's youthful obsession with cowboy heroes, "deep-sea fishing" with her protective father and early experiences with religion. Jordan (a professor of African-American Studies at UC-Berkeley) has selected a bitty, broken-up format: single paragraphs, sentences, anecdotes and prose sketches succeed one another as if in a photo album or a book of short poems. (Sometimes Jordan even breaks into verse.) This can make her work scattered or sketchy; it can also imbue single incidents or memories with remarkable resonance. At her best, Jordan writes as if for oral delivery: Jodi, her best friend at summer camp, "had tiger eyes and a lion's mane for hair and she chewed gum so that it cracked near her chipped front tooth and her skin turned the same color as my own skin from the sun." Jordan could easily have written a tear-jerking story of trauma and recovery, or a densely sociological document. Instead, she weaves early disasters, delights and difficulties into a thoughtful, often cheerful tale about the girl she was--one who found herself (as a chapter title has it) constantly "choosing and being chosen, fighting and fighting back." Agent, Gloria Loomis. (May) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

KLIATT

June Jordan is Professor of African-American Studies at U.C. Berkeley, the author of 26 books, and the recipient of numerous honors including a National Book Award nomination. This memoir is drawn from her earliest experiences of her Harlem childhood and from her Brooklyn preteen years. Each of the 11 parts of her story is divided into a number of individual moments that are vividly recreated. Some are joyful; many are not. Clearly, Jordan's relationship with her father, Granville Ivanhoe Jordan, dominates her writing. Granville, a poor West Indian immigrant with little education, was determined that his daughter would have a better life than he had. At one point he told her, "Listen to me, girl. Mon to mon: You see? You have to be tink to you'self about evrting. You can't go through life like a nincompoop. You have to use you coconut!" On numerous occasions, Jordan was beaten by her father. She had to learn to be a "soldier." She had to learn how to defend herself. Every experience was an opportunity "to put hair on your chest." A trip to the beach meant learning to swim by being thrown into the water. A fishing trip was successful if she became ill but still managed to catch fish. He sent her to camp. He sent her to the best schools. Jordan had no choice but to become a fighter and a success. To a lesser extent, Jordan also writes warmly of her relationships with her mother, her grandmother, her Uncle Teddy, and numerous childhood "boyfriends." She recalls ordinary experiences in an extraordinary way. The richness of detail will capture the reader from the first page to the last. This memoir is appropriate for mature readers. Teachers might find this book helpful in generatingwriting assignments based on childhood experiences. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Perseus, Basic Books, 261p., $13.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Anthony J. Pucci; English Dept. Chair., Notre Dame H.S., Elmira, NY , September 2001 (Vol. 35 No. 5)

Doyle - Ms.

[An] unblinking new memoir...The symphonic interplay of prose, play, and poem lends this impressionistic autobiography the lyrical symplicity of a child's insight with Jordan witnessing, obeying, and ultimately fighting back.

Village Voice

. . . a memoir that is as unsettling as it is insightful.

Los Angeles Times

. . . the language, the immediacy of the scenes . . . make us feel we are seeing through the little girl's eyes.Read all 8 "From The Critics" >

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

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

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 narrative. I am left, breathless, waiting for more.  — Toni Morrison