[In the following review, Alexander surveys the range of concerns and discusses the style of address in Jordan's essay collection Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union.]

"I am one barbarian who will not apologize," June Jordan shouts [in Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union]. (Because I can hear her voice's clarion call, I'm sure that she shouts these words, although I only read them on the printed page.) "Two weeks ago my aunt called me a Communist," she confides, acknowledging the outrage that her opinions have caused her kin. "Calling someone a Communist," she continues, "is an entirely respectable, and popular, middle-class way to call somebody a low-down dirty dog." Yes, Jordan often must have outraged her relatives because she is such an unapologetic "barbarian," so piercing in her analysis, often so provocative beyond apparent reason. Yet after all, reason prevails in Technical Difficulties, this new collection of essays. Kin-folk notwithstanding, Jordan scarcely could be considered anyone's cup of tea (warm, sweet, milky—if that's what one seeks) or even their meat and potatoes; she is, rather, the very finest bitter vetch, the best champagne or straight shot of Stoly.

Technical Difficulties is a book about America—subtitled, as it is, "The State of the Union." This is America observed and found both noble and nurturing, brutal and malformed—often at the same time—by a brilliant and mature African American scholar who has looked at our country with her own unique clarity of vision and focus. Her subjects include affectionate tributes to her own Jamaican heritage ("For My American Family") and that of those other immigrants, not the Poles, Russians, Irish, or Germans but the too-often invisible and darker-skinned newcomers whose journeys through New York harbor, past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, have been largely overlooked in our romantic imaging of the American melting-pot.

Although these less chronicled voyagers harbored dreams much like those of America's white immigrants, they came not from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, but rather from places like "Clonmel, a delicate dot of a mountain village in Jamaica." They settled their families down in black communities such as Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant that sociologists in the 1950s characterized as "breeding grounds for despair," where teachers taught Jordan "all about white history and white literature." Yet there, in her parents' "culturally deprived" home, she "became an American poet." In her essays Jordan combines love and respect with scorn and mistrust for this America where her parents—her "faithful American family"—created a new life and nurtured this "barbarian" of a writer.

In another essay, "Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams," Jordan directs her attention to an analysis of her own deliberate self-isolation and the intrusions upon it by a lifetime of memories, a single ring of the telephone, and then, violently, by a rapist. She inserts this brutal assault into her narrative with just three words, but those words carry the potency of a drop of paint splashed into a bucket of water—spreading out to infuse the entire pail with its livid pigment. Questioning "American illusions of autonomy, American delusions of individuality," she had created her own "willful loneliness," designed to nurture her own creative process. She had sought and found an isolated spot where she could ask herself such questions as "what besides race and sex and class could block me from becoming a clearly successful American, a Great White Man," only to have her illusions of Eden-like solitude shattered by violence. Her conclusion, "I do not believe that I am living alone in America," is countered by the fearful question, "Am I?"

"Don't You Talk About My Momma" and "No Chocolates for Breakfast" both traverse Jordan's familiar home ground—the lives of African American women. With wit and steel, she lashes out at men such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan who would endlessly analyze and put down her "Momma," "If Black women disappeared tomorrow," she argues persuasively, "a huge retinue of self-appointed and New York-Times-appointed 'experts' would have to hit the street looking for new jobs." Her own 1965 "Memo" to Moynihan elegantly encapsulated her opinion of these self-righteous analyzers and experts:

     You done what you done
     I do what I can
 
     Don't you liberate me
     from my Black female pathology
 
     I been working off my knees
     I been drinking what I please …
 
     But you been screwing me so long
     I got a idea something's wrong
     with you
 
     I got a simple proposition
     You take over my position
 
     Clean your own house, baby face.

"When and Where and Whose Country is This, Anyway?" continues in this vein. Fannie Lou Hamer's declaration at the 1964 Democratic Convention that "We didn't come all the way up here for no two seats," provides the essay's keynote. As an African American woman, Jordan wants to know just what she and other intruders at the great American banquet have to do to get more than just the "two seats" they have been told they deserved. In "No Chocolates for Breakfast" she reiterates her conviction that Black women have been doing for others while no one has been doing for them—with the near-perfect observation that "I can't think of a single Black woman who has a wife." Combining this point with her observations about Moynihan, Jordan revises Aretha Franklin's familiar lyrics: "Don't Send Me No Experts; I Need a Man Named Dr. Feelgood—and I could also use me a wife."

Moving along from the experts to the icons, Jordan tries to develop a revised perspective on a deeply admired but nonetheless flawed Martin Luther King in "The Mountain and the Man Who Was Not God." "Any time you decide to take on a mountain," she observes, "you just better take good care." (Take on Dr. King? No wonder her aunt called her a Communist.) But Jordan only wants to demythify King, not dishonor him, and she urges us to remember and revere others as well. She recalls "Jo-Ann Robinson, Diana Nash, Rosa Parks, Ruby Doris Robinson, Septima Clarke, Bernice Reagon, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and, of course, Angela Davis"—all of them stalwarts of the civil rights movement—calling them "just a handful of the amazing components of The Invisible Woman whose invisibility has cost all of us an incalculable loss." As they struggled in the movement without the continuing domestic support enjoyed by men such as King, who knows how often Hamer and Parks might have thought "I could also use me a wife"?

Jordan tackles and dissects familiar themes: family, race, neighborhood ("two-and-a-half years ago," she writes, "I … returned to my beloved Brooklyn where, I knew, my eyes and ears would never be lonely for diversified, loud craziness and surprise"), the love of men, women and children, the mutable American Constitution, education, creativity and politics (of nations and of sexuality, the "correct" and the "incorrect"). For many years she has been a teacher and writer, with several books of essays, including Civil Wars, Moving Towards Home and On Call, to her credit, as well as collections of her poetry, including the less well-known Who, Look at Me?—poems for children about African American artists and their work. These new essays, though they cover a variety of topics, come together into a unified and consistent whole. Adapting the Cubists' technique of viewing a subject from many different perspectives at once, Jordan sees all sides and then reassembles the fragments into a consistent, if multifaceted, whole. One should not say Technical Difficulties is "better" than what preceded it, but it is surely "more," and though a little of Jordan's well-muscled prose goes a long way, in this case it is also true that "more is better."

June Jordan has a prolific intellect and a vast reservoir of extraordinary and broad-based knowledge, yet her writing maintains its solid grounding in everyday experience. (The frustrating disempowerment of Black women, for example, is captured in the impossibility of getting a taxi on a rainy afternoon.) The luminous accessibility of these essays keeps them well clear of the murky pits of obfuscation that trap those scholars who write for the purpose of garnering accolades from others in the academy. Jordan's is an intricate and often jarring patchwork collage of Americans and American life. Attempting in her "Alternative Commencement Address at Dartmouth College" to define this "American," puzzling over how to characterize that slippery and complex essence, Jordan observes that "He was not supposed to be an Indian. He was not supposed to be a She. He was not supposed to be Black or the African-American descendant of slaves. And yet, here we are, at our own indomitable insistence, here we are, the peoples of America."

"Finding the Haystack in the Needle" is one of the more intriguing titles I've come across recently, but it surely fits the skewed perspectives, insolent assumptions and refreshing ambiguities of Jordan's work. "Why would you lose the needle in the first place?" she wonders. Perhaps we have worried too much about that minuscule, even insignificant, needle, while failing to notice the importance of the hay: "How come nobody's out looking for that common big messy thing: that food, that playground that children and lovers enjoy?" she asks, and now, so do I. And hungry as I sometimes find myself, I look forward to more of Jordan's intellectual "food" and more recess time spent in her "playground."

Jordan vigorously rants at our familiar "emperors," from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. She reminds us of the meaty, but non-mainstream, substance that has been deliberately omitted and obscured from our educational, cultural and political lives. I look to her not only to rail at the way things have been ("if you're not an American white man and you travel through the traditional twistings and distortions of the white Western canon, you stand an excellent chance of ending up nuts," she says) but to knock our white, male-centered world cockeyed from its moorings and provide more of the revised visions that we need.

For my next feast, I would like to order from June Jordan a little less Dr. Spock and more Dr. May Chinn; less Martin and more Fannie Lou; less Jesse and more Sojourner; less Clarence ("whose accomplishments as former head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission do not cleanly distinguish him from David Duke") and more Anita; less Thomas Jefferson and more Sally Hemings—and more Aretha, more Marys (Magdalene, Church Terrell, McLeod Bethune and many others come to mind) and more Josephines (both Empress and Baker, perhaps) as well.

I admire what you've given us here, Ms. Jordan. It's quirky enough to make us giggle out loud, and then in turn it's heart-wrenchingly sad. It's always provocative. To employ the new jargon, you're really "pushing the envelope." It's great stuff—but please, come back soon and feed us some more.