"My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant"
About this Quote
Family mythology usually comes in clean categories: the sainted parent, the damaged parent, the absent parent. June Jordan refuses that comfort. “He was my hero and my tyrant” is a ruthless double exposure, forcing admiration and harm to occupy the same frame. The line’s power is in its refusal to moralize. Jordan doesn’t ask for permission to love; she doesn’t ask for forgiveness for naming domination. She just tells the truth in a syntax as tight as a clenched fist.
The earlier triad - “intense, passionate and over-the-top” - sounds almost like praise until “tyrant” snaps the mood into place. “Over-the-top” is especially sly: it’s casual, even faintly comic, a phrase you’d use for a flamboyant dinner guest. Applied to a father, it becomes a warning label for volatility and control. Jordan signals that charisma can be a delivery system for coercion.
The subtext is about power, not personality. “Hero” implies a child’s dependence on a larger-than-life figure; “tyrant” reveals the cost of that dependence when the household runs on one person’s emotional weather. That pairing also sketches the psychic trap: to survive, the child learns to read the tyrant closely, which can harden into reverence.
Context matters with Jordan: a Black feminist poet and essayist whose work interrogated authority, violence, and intimacy as political facts. This line isn’t memoir as confession; it’s memoir as diagnosis. It shows how private rule preps you to recognize public rule - and why liberation has to begin at home, in language tough enough to hold contradictions without flinching.
The earlier triad - “intense, passionate and over-the-top” - sounds almost like praise until “tyrant” snaps the mood into place. “Over-the-top” is especially sly: it’s casual, even faintly comic, a phrase you’d use for a flamboyant dinner guest. Applied to a father, it becomes a warning label for volatility and control. Jordan signals that charisma can be a delivery system for coercion.
The subtext is about power, not personality. “Hero” implies a child’s dependence on a larger-than-life figure; “tyrant” reveals the cost of that dependence when the household runs on one person’s emotional weather. That pairing also sketches the psychic trap: to survive, the child learns to read the tyrant closely, which can harden into reverence.
Context matters with Jordan: a Black feminist poet and essayist whose work interrogated authority, violence, and intimacy as political facts. This line isn’t memoir as confession; it’s memoir as diagnosis. It shows how private rule preps you to recognize public rule - and why liberation has to begin at home, in language tough enough to hold contradictions without flinching.
Quote Details
| Topic | Father |
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