Who Is She?
Nikki Giovanni
Light The Candles
Strong and animated, always outspoken, and a
sister who personifies the words, “keeping it real,” Nikki
Giovanni – you either love her or you hate her. There’s no
in-between. She makes no apologies for her beliefs. Nikki has
recovered well from her battle with lung cancer and her latest
project relates to her experience as a cancer patient. Her
plan, she says, is to negotiate a truce with her cancer. “I'd
like an agreement that we will live together for another 30
years.” Her next book will be about what she calls her
“cancer encounter.”
After lung cancer forced
the removal of part of a lung and several ribs, Nikki Giovanni
appears fine. A creative writing instructor at Virginia
Polytechnic University in Blacksburg, Virginia, she continues to
travel and speak across the country.
“We've tried to get her
to stop smoking,” says one friend of Giovanni but despite
the warnings, Giovanni has gained a reputation as a militant
regarding smokers' rights. “I always try to be useful (and)
I would never say, ‘Don't smoke,’” she said in an interview
with the Atlanta Constitution and Journal. “But if you're
smoking, you really should get a chest X-ray; that's what saved
my life.”
For more than 30 years,
she has been the exquisitely angry voice of black folk, the
woman the New York Times calls the “Princess of Black Poetry.”
Now, the Washington Post says she's a “venerable lioness.” Her
son, Thomas, is now an attorney with a very fancy New York law
firm.
Born Yolande Cornelia
Giovanni Jr. in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1967 she received a
bachelor’s degree from Fisk University, where she helped to
re-establish a chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). Since 1968, Giovanni has inspired readers and
critics alike. She’s published nearly 20 books and received a
host of honorary doctorates, many awards and been named “Woman
of the Year” by three different magazines – Ebony (1970),
Mademoiselle (1971), and Ladies’ Home Journal
(1972).
Giovanni’s work exhibits a
strong connection between literature and politics. In 1967 she
was actively involved in the Black Arts movement, a coalition of
African-American intellectuals who wrote radical poems to raise
awareness of Black rights and the struggle for racial equality.
These early beginnings still have a strong presence in her work.
In her book, Sacred Cows, Giovanni speaks about the civil
rights movement, and how people had begun to lose their belief
in struggle, choosing instead to believe that society would
reform itself by magic. “I just think that we began to believe
there were no consequences,” she said.
Giovanni is currently
touring with her latest book, Blues for All the Changes
(William Morrow, $15.) Blues is about Jackie Robinson and road
rage and Kenneth Starr and expanding thighs and modern slavery
and Tupac Shakur. She writes movingly about the wildlife around
her home and her pitched battle with developers who would “come
with their real live Tonka toys and cut a hill down to white boy
size.”
Her current book of
poetry, Blues: For All the Changes, has a different feel
than her previous writings. During a telephone interview
Giovanni was asked if she felt her voice had mellowed over the
years. “It depends on who’s reading me. Because some people,
you know, they would look at the earlier books and say it’s
really militant. But if you look at Blues – Blues
really has a lot to say. I think I’m saying what I need to say
in a way that makes sense to me. I don’t have to judge
[whether] it’s mellowed or not.”
On the issue of race
relations, Giovanni says that she’s not a narrow-minded
chauvinist but rather, concerned
with the entire world, with an eye to African-American people
and culture. “The racial situation is a whole lot better than it
was 100 years ago. Can it be better than it is? Yes. But it’s
not as bad as it could be,” she told me.
Giovanni’s stance on
racism? That the Black community needs more long-distance
runners and people to do the daily work.
She often wears a
man’s-style suit with an oversized tie (“Everybody I know who’s
powerful wears a tie and I want to be powerful,” she later
explained.)
At one visit to a
Baltimore bookstore in 1999, Giovanni appeared wearing a
man’s-style gray suit with a blue shirt and an oversized tie
(“Everybody I know who’s powerful wears a tie and I want to be
powerful,” she later explained.) She is often described as
short, with striking blonde hair, and always a huge welcoming
smile. At this meeting, Giovanni shared her long, uphill fight
against lung cancer. She explained how she felt when she was
first diagnosed with cancer to the eventful day when her tumor
was removed. She expounded on the meaning of life, and reminded
the audience not to take life for granted, remembering how she
had watched a mother and father robin raise their baby birds
only to eventually see them die when the land was redeveloped.
In fact, the notion that all life is precious seems to be the
moving force behind her book Blues. Animals and humans
are very much alike; we all fight hard to live, and all
struggles for existence should be acknowledged and respected.
In each poem she read, she interwove the importance of life by
telling a story. Giovanni exhibits a strong love for many
facets of this world: the human race, nature, Black people and,
in particular, the youth of today.
When Giovanni was asked
about Columbine and how many people felt rap played a large role
in the violence that occurred there, Giovanni objected. “That’s
a lie – skinheads played a role in the violence that happened
there. And that’s what makes you mad. That’s exactly what
makes you mad because nobody wants to take responsibility.
Those skinheads taught them and grown women bought guns for
them. What kind of sense does that make? Grown people buying
guns for children.”
Children play a central
role in And How Could I Live On. Dedicated to the late
Betty Shabazz, it speaks to the horror Shabazz must have felt,
being burned alive by her grandson, who bore the name of her
late husband, Malcolm X. Giovanni was moved to tears, as she
remembered Shabazz’s greatness.
“Shabazz was a wonderful
woman with an extremely big heart,” Giovanni said. In the poem,
Shabazz cries out for Malcolm to come and take her away because
she could not bear to live with the memory of knowing what her
grandson had done to her. The larger message in the poem is
about how much things have changed today. Shabazz’s
grandson is a reflection on the present- day generation, and on
how children are being raised. With children killing
other children, their parents and then themselves, the question
Giovanni begs us to examine is: Where are we going as a society?
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