18 pages • 36-minute read
Poem about My Rights
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Themes
The Intersection of Racism, Sexism, and Colonization
One of the most interesting facets of “Poem About My Rights” is that June Jordan chooses to address not just the intersection of racism and sexism but also the ways these systems of oppression intersect with colonization. Throughout the poem, the speaker’s lack of power and experiences with violence are directly related to global imperialist issues. The speaker’s use of the first person plural perspective, especially in the middle of the poem, highlights Jordan’s hope to show how individual struggles reflect the larger political issues of the time in regard to systemic oppression.
After a direct call to the reader to “Follow Me” in Line 45, the speaker describes the CIA’s decision to remove different political leaders in African countries (Nkrumah in Ghana and Lumumba in the Democratic Republic of Congo). Immediately following this description is a turn toward the speaker’s own “father on the campus / of [her] Ivy League school” (Lines 52-53). Jordan weaves together these images to showcase the interconnection of national racism and sexism with globalized efforts to colonize and control countries—particularly countries where Black people were in power.
The choice to center on the intersection of racism, sexism, and colonization supports Jordan’s overall argument in the poem: Forms of domination across the globe are inherently related to one another and function to violently oppress people. This is emphasized in some of the final lines of the poem, where the speaker describes being not just “the wrong sex the wrong age / the wrong skin” (Lines 94-95), but also “the wrong geographic” (Line 96). The wrongness of these different characteristics, in Jordan’s poetic opinion, is the way they are perceived by the White, male, oppressive powers governing the speaker’s life and the lives of many others around the world.
The Personal as Political
First coined as part of the second wave of American feminism in the 1960s and 70s, the idea of the personal as political is usually interpreted to mean that peoples’ personal choices and lived experiences are just as political as larger policies, systems, or institutional decisions. While June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights” doesn’t directly name this concept, the speaker of the poem often relates her own personal issues to larger societal problems. This interwoven narration spotlights the ways that things that occur on the personal scale should be interpreted as political, and, therefore, of importance to the larger society.
Perhaps one of the most illustrative aspects of this theme is the title of the poem: Even though it is a “Poem About My Rights,” Jordan references many different global and American-specific political events, including imperialist acts and government-sanctioned murders. The contrast of “My” and the many lines written in first-person with these larger issues shows Jordan’s intention to reflect the idea that the personal is political. This is also highlighted in the concluding section of the poem, where the speaker describes herself as “the problem everyone seeks to / eliminate” (Lines 99-100); the speaker’s individual self is representative of the problems on the global scale.
Rape as Representative of Oppression(s)
June Jordan’s intentional choice to include multiple mentions of rape in “Poem About My Rights” is important to examine. Over the course of the lengthy narrative, it becomes clear that Jordan’s desire is both to lift up a common form of violence about women while simultaneously connecting rape to larger systems and forms of oppression. This is also emphasized by repeated descriptions of not being able to control one’s “own body” (Line 8, Lines 19-20) as this relates to larger structural violence like the colonization of land.
Rape is first described toward the beginning of “Poem About My Rights,” as the speaker describes how there are French laws restricting how rape is defined if the man “does not ejaculate” (Line 24). The specificity of this description illustrates how important this kind of violence is to Jordan the poet: Rape is not an abstract or intangible act. It is a physically bound and personally experienced event. In this same section, the speaker connects her own possible rape to the penetration of different countries leading to the “self-immolation of the villages” (Line 42). For Jordan, sexual violence and war are inextricably linked and should be understood as parts of the same problem.
Later in the poem, Jordan’s speaker begins expressing her own ownership of “the history of rape” (Line 77). The speaker subverts traditional narratives of violence, describing how her name is her “own” (Line 110) and emphasizing that she does “not consent” (Line 103). If the poem is understood as a statement of what the speaker’s rights should be, then this conclusion firmly describes that the speaker has the right to her own body and the right to not be raped. When taken in the larger context of the systems of oppression against which Jordan is writing, the conclusion of the poem thus speaks to a broader desired resistance (Line 112) and “self-determination” (Line 113) on the part of oppressed people everywhere.
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