Soldier: A Poet's Childhood - A Poet's Childhood - E-book - ePub

A profoundly moving childhood memoir by one of the most widely acclaimed Black American writers of her generation     Captured with astonishing beauty, through the eyes of a child, Soldier paints the battleground of June Jordan's youth as the gifted daughter of Jamaican immigrants, struggling under the humiliations of racism, sexism, and poverty in 1940s New York. "There was a war on against colored people, against poor people, " Jordan writes, and she watches her mother turn inward in her suffering, her father lashing out, often violently, against his own daughter.
She learns to harden herself, to be a "soldier, " while preserving a deep capacity for love and wonder. Poignantly exploring the nature of memory, imagination, and familial as well as social responsibility, Jordan re-creates the vivid world in which her identity as a social and artistic revolutionary was forged.