Here Is My Love

on ancestry, citation, and remembrance

Earlier this month, Marina Magloire published an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books titled “Moving Towards Life.” Centered on the relationship between June Jordan and Audre Lorde, the article details how the Palestinian struggle for liberation was an issue that divided Jordan and Lorde’s circle of feminist writers and ultimately ended their friendship. June Jordan was an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian people throughout her life, even when it threatened her career and intimate relationships. Her anti-Zionism preceded that of peers like Lorde and Adrienne Rich, who initially sought to silence Jordan and the “atmosphere of…polarization” they accused her of helping create. While Lorde is often uplifted as an anti-colonial writer, her politics were not immune to the pressures of the American Zionist status quo. Like many, I’ve been reflecting on Magloire’s article and the questions it raises around how we relate to a Black literary and political past; how we interact with those who have become mythic in our collective imaginations; and how we reckon with the humanity and messiness of those we love.

I’m thinking about how many times I saw Audre Lorde’s quotes on Instagram posts and inspirational merch before I learned anything about her life. So many of those quotes were repeated almost to a point of meaninglessness, bent to the convenient purposes of entities from multimillion dollar nonprofits to college diversity and inclusion offices. This is what we do to the Black writers who have been posthumously forced to become our political beacons—the insistent decontextualizing, the soft memeification, the transformation of their words into convenient epithets about self-empowerment. But our ancestors were not convenient, and their lives don’t exist for our easy consumption. In the ways figures like Lorde are both celebrated and flattened, continually extracted from yet stripped of political nuance, we can see echoes of American celebrity culture. It’s a culture of the spectacle, the icon, the godlike and pedestalized figure. Celebrity culture is one answer to the question of how to relate to those we consider our ancestors under late-stage capitalism. The deep archival generosity of Magloire invites us towards is another.

Through my studies of African diasporic spiritual practices, I’ve most often encountered forms of ancestor worship that are rooted in active conversation, that see ancestors as dynamic and flawed beings with the capacity to learn and change. These practices have taught me that the veneration in ancestral veneration is not about uncritical celebration, but about a living ethic of care and revision. Celebrity culture in many ways feels like the opposite of this practice. When Black writers are pedestalized or conveniently trotted out to support this or that political argument, they are flattened rather than seen in the fullness of their humanity. In “Preface to James Baldwin’s Unwritten Suicide Note,” Harmony Holiday writes about the largely unacknowledged presence of suicidality in Baldwin’s life and work. Holiday writes,

“By tidying up the legacies of great talents, or just being oblivious to their shadow-sides, we undermine them completely and doom ourselves to repeating the struggles as much as the triumphs. On some perverse level we even come to fetishize the trouble, as if it’s part of the rubric of having a story to tell. Or worse, we aestheticize the trauma of an artist’s or any citizen’s translation into a public figure; we make them abstractions in our minds and leave them with no place left to be real, to become.”

Another thing about celebrity culture is that it’s focused, always, on the individual. The individual genius, the lone star leading us into the light. But the individual is an illusion. Behind every “public figure” is an endless ecosystem of people who shaped their thought, their commitments, and their principles, who struggled and sometimes fought with them, and in so doing, shaped everything they offered to the world. Magloire’s article takes Audre Lorde out of the heady glare of the spotlight, off the illusory and falsely worshipped pedestal, and places her back into a community of peers. By doing so, Magloire reminds us of a deeper way to love—to love as a citational practice. There is no 1989 Oberlin commencement speech, during which Lorde acknowledged the urgency of the Palestinian struggle, without the years of Jordan’s efforts to radicalize her, to challenge her towards a more capacious and global practice of Black feminism. Like the individual, the sole author is a collective illusion we’ve settled for out of convenience and economic necessity. Sometimes I think about the pages and pages of acknowledgments I would need to properly cite everyone who has shaped each piece of writing I create. For every text message, every brief newsletter, every essay: an infinity of ancestors, friends, lovers, co-conspirators, teachers. Not sources, but co-authors. May we all try and make moments for such necessary and impossible acts of citation.

Our relationships to ancestors—both claimed and assigned—are reflections of how we view the concept of family. The ideal of the family as a capitalist economic unit is predicated on unquestioning loyalty, a collective obscuring of foundational violences. It is often the first place we are indoctrinated into the kinds of complicities demanded of us as citizens of an imperial state. To sit with the fissures of Lorde and Jordan’s relationship, the realities of Lorde’s ethical compromises and the ways her silence on Palestine, as Magloire writes, “protected her career and her flourishing afterlife as a patron saint of the oppressed,” is to reimagine how we might relate to the practices of lineage and kin-making. We owe our ancestors more than the dissociated silences of manufactured consent. To truly learn from them means recognizing the moral pressures of the worlds which created them, and the ways their refusal and concessions have shaped how they are honored. To remember our ancestors with rigor, as Magloire does, is to practice loving them in a way that resists their incorporation into the American nationalist project.

In April 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led an online writing workshop where we meditated on survival lessons from Caribbean diasporic women’s literature. At the end of the session we read “Intifada Incantation” by Jordan (whose parents migrated to New York from Jamaica and Panama in the 1930s). I’ll never forget the feeling of reading the poem aloud together, hearing each other’s tentative and tender voices in this newfound digital space, turning to Jordan’s words as balm and protection, guidance and prayer. In J Wortham’s most recent newsletter, they share words Jordan wrote in tribute to Lorde a year after her death: “Here is my love that I place in your capable hands until we meet again.” An incantation across time and space, to a dear friend and maybe also to us all. June Jordan has left us a model of integrity, courage, and care that remains deeply instructive in a world marked by the ravages of capital. She has left her love in our capable hands.

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Header image: June Jordan, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, and Audre Lorde (L to R) performing at the 1979 Phyllis Wheatley Poetry Festival. Via Maya Cade.

Thank you to my friend Amirio for talking with me about Jordan and Lorde and placing our beloved elders in the context of their communities. Check out their newsletter Plantcraft!