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J. T. Roane, Tiya Miles. Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 521–522, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae645
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Extract
In a poem as powerful and resonant today as it was when she first composed it, June Jordan spoke of the power of the outdoors to help reorient our social and political outlooks in dismaying times. In “For Alice Walker (A Summertime Tanka),” Jordan uses the thirty syllables of this Japanese form to convey the mounting dismay and disorientation she felt about the geopolitical situation, including ongoing violence against girls and women, ecological devastation, and conflict, war, and genocide precipitated by the forces seeking to control the mineral abundance of Congo to the detriment of its people.
Despite her feeling that these problems had grown seemingly unsurmountable, the poem turns as her lifelong friend, fellow Black woman writer Alice Walker, redirects Jordan’s attention to their surroundings. Hiking together, as Jordan often did with many of her friends, they were standing in a redwood forest grove in Northern California. According to the poem, Walker called on Jordan to overcome her sense of dismay and political paralysis by focusing on the grove and then on one mighty tree.
