Alexis Pauline Gumbs

The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

Survival Is a Promise

Marion

But earlier in the same decade, June Jordan's stance in solidarity with Palestinian and Lebanese people, and the Jewish and Israeli peace activists who fought against Israeli imperialism and occupation, left her blacklisted by The New York Times, where she had written reviews for years. They refused to publish any of her opinion pieces. She organized an event called "Moving Towards Home" to raise money to send to UNICEF for victims of the massacres and bombings in Lebanon, but prominent voices in the literary community, including the director of the 92nd Street Y and the executive committee of PEN, spoke against the politics of the reading. After the reading itself, where june spoke last, a group of white men surrounded and threatened her. According to Jordan, someone at the reception said she should be "burned alive.”

In her essay "Life After Lebanon," Jordan chose to emphasize the women who stood up for her, the women who protected her from the men who surrounded her, the women who stood in solidarity with her.

She pointed out that those brave women were in the lineage of Fannie Lou Hamer, the Black feminist poet Alexis De Veaux, the white Jewish poet Kathy Engel, the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan, the founder of the Arab-American Feminist League Carol Haddad, and others. This time,

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