JUST INSIDE THE DOOR
Jordan, June
JUST INSIDE THE DOOR June Jordan My Mess, and Ours Books and papers no longer pretended to pile up. Every surface stunned me with too many questions. My house was a mess. I decided to withdraw....
...two books by Kenz-aburo Oe...
...Now there was the dining room table, after all...
...I took books from their shelves and ordered them by type: novels/poetry/current affairs/reference...
...It was quiet...
...It was sunny...
...It was early morning...
...President Clinton did nothing to rescue the Muslim peoples of Bosnia from "ethnic cleansing...
...And then I began to subdivide...
...a belated report on the enslavement of seventy-two young women and girls, in Los Angeles...
...Either things fit unobtrusively into that space or they had become invisible...
...a Village Voice expose of INS "detention" of 82,000 immigrants...
...Dizzy with new information about Allied atrocities committed against the civilian peoples of Hamburg and Dresden, as well as American atrocities committed against Tokyo, Kobe, and Osaka, I felt nauseated by the jingo-lingo of popular "discussions" blossoming around me...
...several statistical descriptions of America's binge appetite for locking up more than a million other Americans...
...I alphabetized...
...I dusted...
...Nothing was loose or cluttered...
...I put business correspondence in a blue folder...
...To take a break, I Windexed this or that window...
...After five minutes of orderly bliss, I realized I was bored, and rather uncomfortable...
...I labeled...
...I picked things up...
...Everything connected to my writing went into a red or an orange folder: "poetry," "prison," "race," "family," "women," "children," "violence," "California demographics," "South Africa," "Japan," "Ireland," "Israel," "welfare," "Bosnia," "Los Angeles...
...The state keeps these babies tied—by their arms and by their legs—to little chairs that double as latrines...
...And so it came to me that I am just a very ordinary 1995 American...
...In my madness for "neat" and "clean," I may enter that frightening frontier where folks finally say, "Put it away...
...I had taken control...
...Clean them out...
...Apparently believing that "affirmative action" is the reason why California schools are no longer always or mainly "white," the governor and his friends voted to abolish affirmative action on our nine University of California campuses as an obvious—if equally deluded, and ignorant, and hateful, and doomed—sequel to their invention of Proposition 187...
...I threw things out...
...Maybe what I thought I was doing with my house is what so many Americans think they're doing with the world and with the U.S.A.—putting away the problems: locking them up, throwing them out, or pasting stupid labels on really complicated varieties of pain and aspiration so that everybody you don't know, and everybody you don't understand, will fit into a blue or an orange folder that will slide into a blue-only or an orange-only filing cabinet that some security guard will slam shut for the sake of tidy appearances...
...I brushed my dog...
...And "the left" agonized about whether or not verified genocide warrants whatever—whatever— will stop it...
...Because it was almost the fiftieth "anniversary" of Hiroshima, I began reading, or re-reading, Ronald Takaki, John Hersey, and Howard Zinn...
...There was space to my right and to my left and straight ahead: space...
...I swept...
...I got out of bed...
...and daily newspaper accounts of the current U.S...
...Congress "at work...
...I carried different sections of my personal chaos into my bed...
...In the space of ten days, I read: "Extracts from Pelican Bay," a nearby maximum-security prison...
...I put newspaper clippings in green folders...
...Everything looked clean and settled...
...Photographs documented mass graves barely covering the limbs of Muslim men and women...
...I had put them away...
...Hold him in a six-by-three-foot cell...
...I could barely lift my head...
...Tie her to a chair...
...And, then, shall we sit down and admire the space around us: all that still-life, all that vanishing connection to our humanity...
...When I did, I found myself watching, by accident, a television special about hundreds of thousands of female babies abandoned in China, where they endure (for as short a time as they may live) orphanage circumstances...
...My domestic maneuvers establish my credentials for the clean-shirt-to-the-fire brigade...
...I scrubbed...
...I walked to the windows overlooking my street...
...I had created fake attributes of fake serenity...
...I began to clean...
...I organized the video tapes...
...I had eliminated the mess...
...June Jordan, the poet, is professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley...
...Exhausted, but very excited, I moved from room to room, sitting down and eying, with expectant pride, the flagrant orderliness of my environment...
...If I wanted to do anything whatsoever besides sit around— if I wanted to read or write or fact-check or even make a phone call—I would have to disturb this still-life-by-a-wannabe-housewife situation...
...I mopped...
Vol. 59 • October 1995 • No. 10
