National Black Lesbian Conference 2003
April 11-13, 2003 -- Los Angeles

 


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ZUNA NBLC April 11th - 13th 2003

Nikki Giovanni

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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 BluesBlues 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?

The question is "should medicine be a commodity?" My answer to that is no. I have personally had a lung tumor, so I have had cancer. The medicine has to be made available. I am very fortunate in that I had good doctors and I was able to get what I needed and I am still alive. A lot of people who had encounters with cancer when I did are dead. My position is that medicine is not a commodity. Medicine is not Coke, or Pepsi or Miller Genuine Draft, medicine is a life force that must be available to everyone who needs it no matter where we are or what our circumstances are. Before you say, well how would they pay for it, nobody ever says how do we pay for war. It just gets done. So I don’t want to hear that in life giving medicine. --Nikki Giovanni

Source: 
February Newsletter

Poet Nikki Giovanni's art not for sissies -- BY LAURA PULFER The Cincinnati Enquirer http://enquirer.com/columns/pulfer/1999/06/03/lp_poet_nikki_giovannis.html

 http://www.dreamscape.com/jimmymac/cancer.htm

Black is Black -- poet/author Nikki Giovanni speaks her mind on Tupac, Decatur and Columbine. take it or leave it, she says.  by makeda scott
http://www.horizonmag.com/1/nikki-giovanni.asp
 

Poems

The December of My Springs

In the december of my springs
i long for the days
i shall somehow have
free from children and dinners
and people I have grown stale with

this time i think i'll face love
with my heart instead of my glands

some say we are responsible for
those we love; others know we are
responsible for those who love us

so i sit waiting for a fresh thought
to stir the atmosphere
i'm glad i'm not iron, else
i would be burned by now.
-- Nikki Giovanni

Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day

Don't look now
I'm fading away
Into the gray of my mornings
Or the blues of every night
Is it that my nails
keep breaking
Or maybe the corn
on my secind little piggy

Things keep popping out
on my face
or
of my life

It seems no matter how
I try I become more difficult
to hold

I am not an easy woman
to want
They have asked
the psychiatrists . . . psychologists . . . politicians and social workers
What this decade will be
known for

There is no doubt . . . it is
loneliness
-- Nikki Giovanni

 

 

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Quotes

"Do something with your life! You will find that what you have coveted is not worth coveting. There is a limit to what material things can do."  --Nikki Giovanni

 

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