Verse and Reversal: The Poetic Return to the Inner Child as Black Revolutionary Praxis

Abstract

Black revolutionary movements historically have centered the role of the Black child—as either foundation, visionary, or representation of Black liberation. The identity of any given revolutionary movement is characterized by three tenets: resistance, imagination, and love. In order for the individual to uncover the origin of these three tenets for themselves. This thesis is about the poiesis of the revolutionary—the making and re-making of the revolutionary—and in it I argue that the very process of forming revolutionary identity is poetic. I coin the phrase poetic revolutionary to capture that process, which involves tapping into the font of revolutionary soulfulness, which is one’s inner child or the voice and experience of the Black child. The literature guiding this analysis is from June Jordan’s archive hosted at Schlesinger Library, with Voice of the Children, a children’s publication edited by Jordan, as one of the most notable works. I examine June Jordan as the model of the Black revolutionary who has uncovered the language of her child, and I also examine the works of the children she worked with (whose 13– 15-year age ranges, notably, are on the cusp of the definition of childhood that I adopt in this thesis—more in Section I). I gather evidence from workshop diary entries written by Jordan and by her students, poetry excerpts from Voice of the Children, and Jordan’s own writing from her childhood and beyond to support my theory of the poetic revolutionary.