This article is taken from the first issue of Dazed MENA. You can buy a copy of the magazine here.
“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.
June Jordan was a revolutionary poet and thinker in many ways – her anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist framework was never popular among the elite. As a Black woman, it took her decades to earn the respect of universities, publishers and to get inside institutions like The New York Times and PEN America. Yet, when she began connecting the dots to the atrocities perpetrated in Lebanon and Palestine and holding those in her life accountable, she became too much of a liability to the literary establishment. She knew this and spoke out anyway. After raising money for the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982 – wherein the Israeli-backed Phalange militia killed between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in two days – Jordan was promptly blacklisted by almost every organisation that had previously embraced her for her strong moral standing.
Writers in the imperial core, including myself, have much to learn from June. She did not herald herself as a hero or applaud her own solidarity. She was keenly aware of how complicit the cultural establishment had been in fielding legitimate criticism, and she knew that it would be hypocritical of her to hold institutions to account without confronting her own complicity and that of her friends.
On October 10, 1982, June sent an open letter to one of the most famous feminist poets of the late 20th century, Adrienne Rich. The letter was kept buried until the group Writers Against the War on Gaza rescued it from the archives of Audre Lorde and published it in full in September 2024. The two had been longtime friends, but after Sabra and Shatila – a major political awakening for June – they split paths. Adrienne staunchly reaffirmed herself as a Zionist and said she would not engage in “protest activities,” while June claimed responsibility “because I am an American and American monies made these atrocities possible.”
“Does [Adrienne] tell you why the Palestinian people live and die in refugee camps? Why they don’t ‘go home’?” June writes in the letter. “She wonders why is there so much fuss about this because evil is not a new phenomenon in the world… Her name, she says, is Jewish. You are anti-Semitic, she says, if you criticise anything and anyone Jewish.”
Palestine is a moral litmus test, and Black activists in the United States have always been the first to say this
“I now respond,” June continues. “I claim responsibility for Sabra and Shatilah because, clearly, I have not done enough to halt heinous episodes of holocaust and genocide around the globe. I accept this responsibility and I work for the day when I may help to save any one other life, in fact.”
June goes on to say that one cannot claim to be part of a people, and then abandon responsibility for what they do or don’t do. That one cannot claim to be human without assuming the responsibility of all human life.
“To Adrienne, I make this public reply: Your evident definition of feminism leaves you indistinguishable from the white men threatening the planet with extinction,” June pointedly says. “Where you raise the accusation of anti-Semitism I accuse you: I accuse you of being anti-Palestinian. More, I accuse you of being anti-life.”
June’s final words are scathing: “I refuse to assume responsibility for your actions and your inertia. I do not accept you as my people.”
It’s important to note that the concealment of this important letter was due to Audre Lorde, along with many other Black and Jewish writers, reacting to June’s tone and timing and chastising her for it. They halted the letter from being published, more concerned about tone-policing than actually reading the contents of her piece and reflecting on the uncomfortable realisation that although written to Adrienne, the letter could apply to anyone reading it.
As a writer interested in the intersection of Black-Palestinian solidarity, I have long looked up to June, and referenced her poetry to those also interested in how all systems of oppression are linked. Palestine is a moral litmus test, and Black activists in the United States have always been the first to say this. And Palestinians have always been the first to offer their solidarity to victims of police violence in America. Her poems are a soothing reminder that there are people of conscience on every corner of the globe – but it was this condemnatory letter that forced me and others to take it a step further.
Writers, journalists, poets, artists and cultural workers must admit that we are all self-congratulatory to an extent. We like to pat ourselves on the back for documenting the moral dilemmas of our time, but few are brave enough to reflect on how we might also be contributing to ethically bankrupt systems in the process. In the spring, while a journalism student covering the encampments at Columbia University, I was happy to see that the Pulitzer Board issued a statement in support of me and my peers. However, this premiere journalism institution had said almost nothing of the 170+ media workers in Palestine and Lebanon who had been killed since October 2023, the most journalists killed in any war in modern history. Why should me and my peers pat ourselves on the back for “risking arrest” when there are journalists and photographers in Gaza who are risking their lives? Why, for a month, was every major mainstream outlet clamouring to cover the encampments, seemingly uninterested in the escalating invasion of Rafah that was happening at the same time? As a Palestinian journalist, I earnestly tried to cover this story to the best of my ability, but I was part of the reason that stories on the ground were overshadowed. The students wrote on posterboard: “Eyes off our lawn: All eyes on Gaza,” and yet we still lost sight of all of it.
In the months since graduating, I have been extremely disappointed in many of my colleagues, my former professors and even many of my friends for their lack of interest in a genocide that is only getting worse by the day. How can we stare so much death and destruction in the face and decide that our careers and our comfort are more important? I have had many closed-door conversations with people I used to look up to where they apologised for my people’s suffering, then, in the same breath, told me they are not in a position to speak about it, lest they lose their job, their tenure, their social following. But what is the point of climbing the career ladder, of being strategic, when we can lose our seat at the table if we question those in power?
I read June Jordan’s letter and there was a clarity in her voice, a conviction, that was incredibly refreshing but also intimidating. The person she was publicly calling out had been a friend, a person she had once loved; it forces us to look at the actions of those closest to us, our friends, family and our own actions, and point out how we are simply not doing enough. A call-out is an act of care in its own strange way – it tells the person, “I believe that you are capable of change. That you are better than this.” You do not call out someone that you’ve already given up on. To be asked to do more for each other is to be loved.
What does one do with endless videos of mothers wailing for their martyred children and slideshows of dismembered human flesh?
Before writing this, I spent days in a dissociative state. I had just watched 19-year-old Shaban al-Dalou’s last strained movements in his hospital bed, his arm attached to an IV drip, as he burned alive with his mother at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah. Shaban was just days away from his 20th birthday. He was the eldest son in his family and had spent months filming videos pleading with the world to help him and his family evacuate Gaza, but he wasn’t able to raise enough money. Shaban had memorised the Quran at such a young age, was top of his class in engineering, and spent the entirety of the genocide trying to better himself and take care of his family. “He loved his mother the most,” Shaban’s father told Al Jazeera. “Now, he’s been martyred in her arms. We buried them in each other’s embrace.”
Shaban’s martyrdom was a breaking point for me and many other young writers. I had spent the year criticising others about not doing enough, but faced with that video, hearing those screams, the only thing I could think of was how complicit I was in all of this. How complicit we all are and how almost nothing has changed after a year of some of the most grotesque crimes against humanity ever documented. A live-streamed genocide, which expanded into Lebanon and Syria, and we sat back pondering, writing, teaching, publishing and posting, but not really sitting with the grief, with the sheer terror, at all.
After we sit with it, where do we go? What does one do with endless videos of mothers wailing for their martyred children and slideshows of dismembered human flesh? There is a voice that tells us to switch off; to stop reading and watching and witnessing all of it. The same voice tells us our efforts, whether they be protests or boycotts or journalism, are useless. But those of us in the diaspora don’t have the privilege of becoming nihilistic; it does nothing to serve those being slaughtered in Gaza and Lebanon, and it serves as a comfort that we do not get to indulge in right now, not while the genocide rages on. We, as writers, do not get to abandon our responsibilities to those suffering. We do not get to pretend that our work is done; that we are not complicit every day we fail to stop this, especially if we live in the imperial core.
Just as June Jordan declared responsibility for Sabra and Shatila, I too claim responsibility for Deir el-Balah. For Rafah. For Jabalia. For Khan Younis. For Beit Lahiya. For Gaza City. For all of the massacres we never saw. And I implore everyone reading to question what they need to claim responsibility for, who they have yet to call out and what they are going to do to fix that.
“I accept this responsibility and I work for the day when I may help to save any one other life.”
