I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies by June Jordan

I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies

by June Jordan

Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of The People’s Republic of Angola: 1976

1

I will no longer lightly walk behind

a one of you who fear me:                                    

Be afraid.

I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits

and facial tics

I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore

and this is dedicated in particular

to those who hear my footsteps

or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery

cart

then turn around

see me

and hurry on

away from this impressive terror I must be:

I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon

surrounded by my comrades singing

terrible revenge in merciless

accelerating

rhythms

But

I have watched a blind man studying his face.

I have set the table in the evening and sat down

to eat the news.

Regularly

I have gone to sleep.

There is no one to forgive me.

The dead do not give a damn.

I live like a lover

who drops her dime into the phone

just as the subway shakes into the station

wasting her message

canceling the question of her call:

fulminating or forgetful but late

and always after the fact that could save or 

condemn me

I must become the action of my fate.

2

How many of my brothers and my sisters

will they kill

before I teach myself

retaliation?

Shall we pick a number? 

South Africa for instance:

do we agree that more than ten thousand

in less than a year but that less than

five thousand slaughtered in more than six

months will

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

I must become a menace to my enemies.

3

And if I 

if I ever let you slide

who should be extirpated from my universe

who should be cauterized from earth

completely

(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the                  

terrorist degree)

then let my body fail my soul

in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I 

if I ever let love go

because the hatred and the whisperings

become a phantom dictate I o-

bey in lieu of impulse and realities

(the blossoming flamingos of my                  

wild mimosa trees)

then let love freeze me

out.

I must become

I must become a menace to my enemies.

From Wikipedia: "António Agostinho Neto Kilamba (17 September 1922 – 10 September 1979) was an Angolan communist revolutionary, politician and poet. He served as the first president of Angola from 1975 to 1979, after leading the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) during the war for independence. He led the MPLA during the beginning of the Angolan Civil War, which began in 1975 and lasted until 2002. An author of several books, he is considered Angola's preeminent poet. His birthday is celebrated as National Heroes' Day, a public holiday in Angola."

First, let's just take a moment to really appreciate this poem's amazing title. June Jordan so often has titles that force you to get to that poem ASAP and read, and this is certainly one of those. Jordan wisely repeats the line twice in the poem--just enough, I think--and ends the poem with it, bookending the poem.

Jordan also separated this poem into three parts--it is very dense, and it needs that space.

The poem starts with fear--not on the part of the speaker, but his acknowledgement that people fear him as he walks behind them. Gender, race, politics, living situation, all of these, something else? The poem is dedicated to a black man, and that is certainly something that happens--a black man walking down a street, and a non-black person crossing, or speeding up, or ducking into a shop. The speaker says that he will soon be acting in ways that will purposefully make people fear him; his past attempts to get his message out there have been ignored. He is being driven to this--if his fate, just from how he looks is to instill fear, then his actions are going to do so.

I love the metaphor of the lover trying to make a call as the noise of a subway car makes her message meaningless. The image itself is perfect, but beyond that is the sense of frustration and futility and waste--Jordan conveys those emotions without stating them.

Except for the repetition of the title as the last line, the second second consists of questions. The way these are worded make them read two ways: the speaker is questioning himself or the speaker is questioning us. (And, yes, I do love questions in poems, especially questions that are never answered.)

The speaker makes clear here that he is not a violent person--he will have to teach himself how to be, how to retaliate for the slaughter of black people. He uses South Africa as a grim example; in 1976, the Soweto Uprising saw police firing on students who were protesting. Throughout that entire year, hundreds were killed and thousands were wounded, many of them children. Even with this knowledge of how awful South Africa was during this year, the speaker still questions himself and he does so in all caps, which is not common in poetry, making it triply in the reader's face.

WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

Is the speaker upset that even these numbers cannot make him innately ready for violent retaliation? Or is this more existential, as in, what do those people see in me that is so awful they murder my kind? Both?

"I must become a menace to my enemies." He never threatens violence or pay-backs, only menace. In this country, that word conjures up two very different things: Dennis the Menace and the term "menace to society," used by politicians and police for any number of things (drugs, guns)/people (Dutch Schultz, gangs), particularly in the early-mid part of the 20th century. (It was also a movie, Menace II Society, in 1993, that explored issues of race and crime, relating it to the use of the pharse in America.) It is a great word, and like the use of all caps, rare in poetry. It is a big word, and those connatations cannot be ignored. But here, it fits. It is vague in that it allows us to imagine the speaker as still sorting out what he is going to do.

The third section has the speaker repeating himself, as if stuttering from intense emotion. And no wonder, because he is as hard on himself as he is those enemies. It is not only words and phrases that are repeated, but also the form in the two stanzas; even the use of parenthesis and indentation is repeated.

"if I ever let you slide" is as threatening as he gets, but the threat is at himself (extirpating and cauterizing are two more words rarely--ever?-- seen in poems). If his enemies are not exterminated, he thinks he should die: "let my body fail my soul."

But in the next stanza he talks about love. If he ever gives in to the hatred, in spite of his own impulse, then he should have no love. "the blossoming flamingoes of my wild mimosa trees" is such a gorgeous image here, full of beauty and tenderness and love. But even those birds and those trees cannot hold him back, although he stumbles a little and must repeat "I must become."

The poem ends with the title, as I have already said.

The Angolan War for Independence lasted from 1961 to 1975. This war ended in January, when Portugal and various leaders of Angolan factions signed the Alvor Agreement. However, the Civil War started that May; the War for Independence had accentuated animosities between various ethnic and political groups in the country.

The Angolan Civil War lasted for 27 years, from 1975 to 2002. The war displaced over a million people, devastated the country's infrastructure, and was responsible for between 500,000 and 800,000 deaths.

Angola is currently a poor country, although its economy is improving. Life expectancy is low and infant mortality rates are high. The factions of the past continue to be issues, and some U.S. companies have instigated and/or aided corruption in the country.

This poem by June Jordan is one of my favorites of hers (I have a lot). The metaphors, phrases, use of form and repetition, the questions, the voice, and the suggestions rather than blatant statements are the things that draw me to this poem.

You can go to TripAdvisor for more gorgeous pictures, but here is Kalandula Falls in Angola, taken from that website.