Dazed: “Unpacking June Jordan’s letter to Adrienne Rich”

A student protester at Columbia University wears a pin with the opening lines of a June Jordan poem, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo by Samaa Khullar

What we owe each other.

“I didn’t know and nobody told me, and what could I do or say anyway?”

It’s haunting how much the opening lines of June Jordan’s 1982 poem Apologies to All the People in Lebanon read as if it were written today.

“They told you to leave, didn’t they?” she sarcastically asks the slaughtered Palestinian and Lebanese people. “Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped from their hotshot fighter jets?”

June acknowledges that it was the money she earned as a poet “that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family,” but asks for forgiveness from the Palestinian and Lebanese people. She is not an evil person, she says; the people of her country “are not so bad.” For Americans to be held accountable for the horrors perpetrated with their tax dollars, well, that would just be too much to ask.

Her intention with this poem, the topics of Western apologia and complacency, is incredibly pertinent to the moment we currently find ourselves in. She knew that it was not enough for Americans to simply say “I’m sorry” – after all, what are words in the face of a bomb? Do our robotic lines of sympathy bring back the dead? Do they act as shields for people running from the quadcopter bullets? Those in the heart of the empire needed to wake up and face the fact that apologies mean nothing after a genocide is complete, and June was ready to sound the alarm.

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This article is taken from the first issue of Dazed MENA. Read the rest here.