“I am become a Palestinian”: June Jordan, Black Queer Feminism, and the Question of Palestine

• In Event: Homonationalism, Imperial “Harm-Reduction,” and Pinkwashing Zionism

Abstract

Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign emblematized U.S. liberalism’s normalization of Israel’s genocide under the guise of feminist harm reduction, the safeguarding of trans and abortion rights, and elite identitarian progress. As the first Black and Asian woman to hold the vice presidency, and as the nominee of a Democratic Party facilitating Palestine’s destruction, Harris articulated the cognitive dissonance of a liberal order ostensibly invested in universal “human rights.” This contradiction signifies the dire need for a Black feminist politics that centers anticolonial, and specifically Palestinian, resistance and the concomitant imperatives of antiracism and anticapitalism.

This paper locates such an alternative political horizon in the anti-Zionist poetics and Black queer feminism of June Jordan. More precisely, Jordan’s poems “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon” and “Moving towards Life,” both published in 1982 amid Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and mass slaughter of Palestinian refugees, delineate the inextricable geopolitical relation between Black queer feminism and Palestinian liberation. While the Harris campaign desperately tried to disarticulate Black-Palestinian feminist solidarities, Jordan’s poetics challenge the very idea that this disarticulation is possible. As Jordan declares in “Moving towards Life”: “I was born a Black woman / and now I am become a Palestinian / against the relentless laughter of evil / there is less and less living room / and where are my loved ones? // It is time to make our way home.” Here, Jordan’s syntax and subjectivity consciously confound static notions of race, nationhood, and belonging. While she initially seems to be claiming a literal Palestinian identity, Jordan’s gesture of affiliation serves to activate a Black feminist internationalism that attends to the inseparability of white heteromasculine supremacy in the U.S. and Zionist settler colonialism abroad. For Jordan, to “become a Palestinian” constitutes the ultimate expression of borderless Black feminist insurgency.

Author

• Samuel J. Aftel, Northwestern University