soldier–is jordan 4 real?

this was an unusual experience of a memoir (i can say this having read all of 4 memoirs in my life so far). this account of the first 8 years of june jordan’s life, contextualized by her adult self-knowledge, prove a surreal representation of who she is & what she lived for. i felt that her confusion at her father’s neuroses, her eventual wisdom & acceptance of them, her deepening understanding of her social locations & political responsibilities, secret desires & pleasures are expressed through her reflection & recording of living in precarious & paradoxical positions involving truth-telling & secrecy, duty & freedom, femaleness & masculinity. the role of performance here is crucial. jordan writes in the voice of a woman who, since infancy, knows her destiny. who is forced to plan her escape from her first breath. her first thought.

craft-wise, what stands out to me most is the inclusion of purely poetic expression during seemingly random moments in the book, especially towards the end. what this reminds me of is how i came to my own ability to self-articulate; i started from a point of words coming out in little poetic bursts when emotion made it impossible to be clearer, neater, or more intentional in my expression. when i was a kid struggling with material poverty & cultural bankruptcy right up against an unexpected inheritance of extreme spiritual wealth, i remember making my entire inner world a private place in which i reconciled the severe circumstances into which i was born. my poetic forms were always experimental & free. i had no other voice. & when i started to speak, my voice cracked, stalled, & sputtered. what i needed was the lubrication of confidence.

i got to revisit some of my own childhood moments, especially instants in which the knowledge that things were inexplicably but not unbelievably wrong became clear as quartz crystal. that my parents were doing their best under the pressure to assimilate, move up in the world, & keep things from falling apart completely (which happened anyway). the burden of knowing i didn’t belong, that these were the origins i would be forced to trancend,that i was alone in my mission to enjoy a higher consciousness, is what i recognized most uncomfortably while reading this account of a young coloredgirl’s life. how the dreams of immigrant parents become indelibly transferred to the new generation. how the necessity of achievement chafes miserably against the struggle to survive. how a parent’s actions can contain, in the same vein, elements of brutal violence & indestructible love. how pictures of fate, karma, & self-evolution are incontestible once you write the stories of your life down. concretize them & accept them as real, neither justifiable nor commendable. but extraordinary nonetheless.

rhythmic repetitions infused the vignettes of story that jordan constructs as intentionally, as passionately, as her father’s homemade clothesline. jordan’s narrative echoes with a childish insistence that reminds the adult reader what a child’s logic tastes like. the difficult & painful moments where shit doesn’t add up:

“I could hardly look at him, my father, while he talked to me.

I was not getting a bicycle.

He was breaking his promise.

He had broken his promises.”

how the best parents can give can be so inadequate. & how a child makes sense of this reality. lack, loss. how she reconciles her soul to the faults in her past. gaps where love did not bridge the space across which the child has to run if she is to stay alive, awake, & able. which jordan presents as crucial. key for the survival of jordan’s child self.

the painstaking reconstruction of these often devastating memories jordan shares with us in Soldier was not easy for me to read. i tried to resist the sickening pull of familiarity, the predictable similarities between jordan’s early life & mine. i wonder how her family received this literary disclosure of her formative years. i know my family would be guilty & heartbroken if their weaknesses were revealed as candidly as jordan exposes her family in this work. but it’s the truth. which is more important to jordan than silence. if there’s a single lesson her exemplary life leaves me to ponder, it’s that the need for truth trumps all constraints, conflicting impulses, & compromises. the truth is worth more than anything.