War & Peace Quote by June Jordan

Jordan frames poetry as enlistment, not ornament: "a way of being a soldier here in this country". The line refuses the romantic myth of the poet as detached observer. She’s talking about the United States as a site of war-by-other-means, where race, gender, and state power press daily life into a battlefield. Writing becomes a discipline of survival and confrontation, a form of service when conventional uniforms are either denied or morally useless.

The sly turn is in the modesty of "for myself". It’s not self-indulgence; it’s self-preservation. Jordan hints that the most politically potent art often begins as private necessity, not public branding. She didn’t compose with an export strategy, didn’t draft slogans calibrated for international solidarity. The poems "travel" anyway, as if ideas have passports the author never applied for. That travel is the real revelation: a Black American writer recognizing that the local conditions she’s resisting rhyme with other people’s histories of occupation, displacement, and uprising.

Her surprise at Lebanon arriving late - "I didn't go... until two years ago" - underscores a gap between symbolic community and lived proximity. She’s aware of how easily cross-border solidarity can be imagined without being embodied. Yet the report that "many Arabs had memorized these poems" lands as both honor and discomfort: memory is the highest compliment, but it also means the work has been taken up for stakes beyond her control.

Translation into Arabic completes the argument. The poems aren’t merely read; they’re metabolized into another linguistic bloodstream, proving Jordan’s deeper premise: resistance literature is less a message than a tool kit, adaptable wherever people are trying to stay human under pressure.