“Growing Up or ? – Wisdom from Nikki Giovanni”
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Rev. Bruce Southworth – Senior Minister
The Community Church of New York
Unitarian Universalist
Nikki Giovanni, age 32, wrote:
… poetry is song … is joy... the insistent message
that life is precious….
“Life is precious”, she says,
{that} is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say.i
How to introduce someone so voracious as poet, essayist, activist, and teacher
Nikki Giovanni? She slyly titles one of her most luminous affirmations “Ego Tripping
(there may be a reason why).”ii
I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad…
I am a beautiful woman…
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission
I mean... I ... can fly
like a bird in the sky...
She wrote this poem in 1970 at age 27 not long after the birth of her son
Thomas. Black and beautiful, emerging out of the Black Arts and Black Empowerment
Movements of the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni was, and is, a siren and summons of political
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liberation and personal freedom… a voice of many moods and simple dreams of
honesty, growth and connectedness…. Life is precious.
At the outset, please know I am more than duly warned by her about the
enterprise this morning of spiritual growth and theology through biography. One of her
signature poems appeared in 1968 in her self-published volume titled Black Judgement.
It is titled “Nikki-Rosa”, her childhood nicknameiii:
childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you're Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath…
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father's pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
And though you're poor it isn't poverty that
concerns you
and though they fought a lot
it isn't your father's drinking that makes any difference
but only that everybody is together and you
and your sister have happy birthdays and very good
Christmases
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they'll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy
I probably first read Nikki Giovanni’s poetry in college… perhaps lines like
So let us work
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For our day of Presence
When Stokely {referring to Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael} is in
The Black House
And all will be right with
Our Worldiv
In another poem, she offers this advice:
There is a new game I must tell you of
It’s called Catch the Leader Lying
(and knowing your sense of the absurd
you will enjoy this)...
And you will understand all too soon
That you, my children of battle, are your heroes
You must invent your own games and teach us old ones
how to playv…
Then, one in many anthologies is simply titled “The Funeral of Martin Luther
King, Jr.”vi:
His headstone said
“Free at last, Free at last”
But death is a slave’s freedom
We seek the freedom of free men
And the construction of a world
Where Martin Luther King could have lived
and preached non-violence.
I was also intrigued that Nikki Giovanni had been born in 1943 in Knoxville,
Tennessee where I grew up. She writes in numerous brief essays about her time spent
there, often visiting her grandparents after her family had moved to Cincinnati and
returning to live with them at age 15. When she describes Austin High School, Vine
Street downtown, the urban renewal/removal project that tore down hers and other
neighborhoods, and the Cal Johnson Center and Park, I see them in my mind’s eye and
shudder at the segregation and cruelty.
Nikki Giovanni entered Fisk College in Nashville early because of high test
scores, and by virtue of that actually never received a high school diploma. She writes
I decided to become a writer because people said I was a genius
and then asked what I would become. And I couldn’t see anywhere to go
intellectually and thought I’d take a chance on feeling. I didn’t want to get
married (and never did), buy a five room house in Madisonville and have
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lunch at Caproni’s as my big event of the month. I could see becoming a
bored, alcoholic…. And wondering at thirty-five what I’d done with my life.
The second greatest thing that happened to me was getting kicked out of
Fisk because I had to deal with my life. I could (have) gone back (after
Christmas first year), join Delta (as all the other women in my family did),
marry a Meharry (med school) man and go quietly insane; or I could go on
to live. After knocking around and sponging off my parents for a while I
went back to Fisk as a woman – not a little girl just being good like
everybody said.vii
As in one of our readings, her life goal is to keep growing, changing, and
learning.
She majored in history, joined a writer’s workshop and was active with SNCC,
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Her activism started early at age 17
when she participated in lunch counter sit-ins in Knoxville in 1960, and I now realize that
she and my mother were comrades in those struggles, from quite different sides of
town.
Nikki Giovanni reports, “When I graduated from college in 1964, the only true
credential I had for a job was I was pretty good at picketing. As many have since
learned, being a sixties person does not serve as a qualifier. It does mean, most times
though, that you are a believer.”viii
After college, she went on to the University of Pennsylvania for just one year of
its Masters in Social Work program. As her mentors identified (and she knew), she had
problems with authority and institutions, and as a terrific writer, they assisted her to get
a scholarship to Columbia University’s MFA writing program.
After one year, she had her second volume of poems published with glowing
notice in the NY Times in April 1969. She was 26. The Amsterdam News named her
one of the “10 Most Admired Black Women.” She taught first at Queens College, then
Rutgers. She continued her poetry with another volume, plus one of the first anthologies
of Black women poets. In 1970, Ebony magazine named her Woman of the Year as a
now established literary figure: The same award the next year by Mademoiselle. She
continued to write poems, essays, and children’s stories, record her poems, conduct
interviews, and appear regularly on Soul! – a PBS program.
Among many honors, at age 29, Nikki Giovanni became the youngest honorary
degree recipient from Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest Black college. Then a
year later in 1973, she was the Woman of the Year for the Ladies Home Journal…!
Even as she raised her son, she was in constant demand as a speaker, and finally
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settled into an English professorship at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, VA in
1989. She is now a University Professor, the highest accolade.
Her themes are wide-ranging, certainly about the role of Black women and
racism in society. She wrote:
What I’m gonna say one more time is I’m
oppressed by crackers
and that’s what I’ve gotta deal
with.ix
Her affirmations of personal integrity and strength mark her work. In one poem,
a man speaking to a woman says,
you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu
so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
And I’ll show you a hungry person.x
Her affirmations of human and especially Black pride continued, even as she
wrote of family life and those connections. When she describes a grandmother and a
grand-child, she laments how difficult even these relationships can be (far different from
the powerful relationship she had with her own grandmother) and reports,
and neither of them ever
said what they meant
and I guess nobody ever does.xi
Remember the subway series…. Poetry in Motion, with wonderful poets as our
transit companions?
One of Nikki Giovanni’s was “Winter Poem”… showing a lyrical mysticism:
once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flowerxii
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And I love her Love poems, for example,
when I nap
usually after 1:30
when the sun comes
in my room then
hitting the northeast
corner
i lay at the foot
of my bed and smell
the sweat of your feet
in my covers
while I dream.xiii
And from “Everything Good is Simple”xiv:
All good things are good: poetry… patience… a ripe tomato
on the vine… a bat in flight… the new moon … me in your
arms… things like that
Love and honoring of family… she writes,
I am a mirror
I reflect the grace
Of my mother
The tenacity
Of my grandmother
The patience
Of my grandfather
The sweat
Of my great-grandmother
The hope
Of my great-grandfather
The songs
Of my ancestors
The prayers
Of those on the auction block
The bravery
Of those in middle passage
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I reflect the strengths
Of my people
And for that alone
I am lovedxv
Five years ago, there was a terrible tragedy at the Virginia Tech campus in
Blacksburg when a disturbed student killed 32 others and wounded 25 more, before
committing suicide. Nikki Giovanni had two years before had the young man in a class
and reported how troubled he was, and the class dwindled from 70 to 7. Alternative
arrangements were made for him to have a private tutorial with another professor, who
also became scared at times…. warning signs in retrospect.
She was among the speakers at the student convocation that followed, and these
were her words on that day that by all accounts blessed, comforted, and united.
We are Virginia Tech.
We are sad today,
We will be sad for quite a while
We are not moving on
We are embracing our mourning
We are Virginia Tech
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly
We are brave enough to bend to cry
And we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again
We are Virginia Tech
We do not understand this tragedy
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does the child in Africa
Dying of AIDS
Neither do the Invisible Children
Walking the night away
To avoid being captured by the rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community
Be devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking
For fresh water
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© 2012 Rev. Bruce Southworth
Neither does the Iraqi teenager dodging bombs
Neither does the Appalachian infant killed
By a boulder
Dislodged
Because the land was destabilized
No one deserves a tragedy
We are Virginia Tech
The Hokie Nation embraces our own
And reaches out
With open heart and mind
To those who offer their hearts and hands
We are strong
And brave
And innocent
And unafraid.
We are better than we think
And not quite what we want to be
We are alive to imagination
And open to possibility
We will continue
To invent the future
Through our blood and tears
Through all this sadness
We are the Hokies
We will prevail
We will prevail
We will prevail…
[We are Virginia Tech.]xvi
Nikki Giovanni is one of Oprah’s “25 Living Legends”, the author of over 30
volumes of poetry, essays and children’s stories.
She is an avid sports fan. She speaks of passion when she “Stepped on that
third rail” and of safety and in one poem about a “Drunken Phone Call”; another gentle
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one about dancing…. And social witness and justice for Huey Newton of the Black
Panthers… killed by the government out of fear… and as she says, “ascending to his
rightful place … forever… in our hearts.”xvii
Nikki Giovanni also protests, “I don’t do duets”xviii even as she awaits her
partner’s return.
A few more edibles, food for the spirit:
"Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts"xix
“The writer’s life is, I think, a good life. Whether the glass is half full
or half empty, we do not cup our hands, letting the essence of life
dribble through our fingers. We walk boldly to the fountain and
drink deeply.”xx
“I hate diet soda, seat belts, anti-smokers, pro-lifers, and stupid
people who think they have any right to tell me how to live. I have
no need to control anyone and will not be controlled. I believe that
if I keep examining my life and what I think and feel, I will have
added one, teeny, tiny bit of truth to this planet I call home.” xxi
She had a child, as a single mother, by choice, as she says,
because she wanted to and could afford to at age 26.
“I was… a sixties person and continue to be today because I
actually believe in the people. That was never just rhetoric to me,
though it has often been my undoing. Believing in the people is
dangerous, because the people will break your heart.”xxii
“The spirituals… (with their witness and hope) teach us that the
problem of the twentieth century is not the color line (as DuBois
said). The problem of the twentieth century is civilizing white
people.”xxiii
“We seek to expose the unacceptable and to celebrate the
wonderful…. Our destiny is a better universe where we can live
together in peace and understanding.”xxiv
“I bring my best when I try to share…. We are less lonely when we
connect. Art is a connection. I like being a link. I hope the chain will
hold.”xxv
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Provocations…. Life’s Spirit…. Hopes and Dreams and Activism … A Life of
Spirit and faith.
Looking back and forward too, Nikki Giovanni wrote Gemini in 1969 and calls it a
“fictionalized autobiographical account of my first twenty-five years.”xxvi She concludes
one of her essays titled, “On Being Asked What It’s like to Be Black.”
I was trained intellectually and spiritually to respect myself and the
people who respected me. I was emotionally trained to love those who
love me. If such a thing can be, I was trained to be in power – that is, to
learn and act upon necessary emotions which will grant me more control
over my life. Sometimes it’s a painful thing to make decisions based on
our training, but if we are properly trained we do. I consider this is a good.
My life is not all it will be. There is a real possibility that I can be the first
person in my family to be free. That would make me happy. I’m twentyfive years old. A revolutionary poet. I love.xxvii
… “Life is precious.”
***************
Readings from the Writings of Nikki Giovanni
(1)
I like to think I've grown and changed in the last decade. How else could
I ask people to read my work or listen to me? It would have been pointless
for a girl born in Knoxville, Tennessee, reared in Cincinnati, Ohio, to have
lived in New York and traveled the face of this earth not to have changed.
That would have be an ultimate betrayal of the trust people put in any writer. I
should hope there will be a body of work by Nikki Giovanni that's not just
consistency of unformed and untested ideas that I acquired somewhere in my
late teens or early twenties. I seek change for the beauty of itself. Everything
will change. The only question is growing up or decaying. We who are
human have a great opportunity to grow up and beyond that. Our grasp is not
limited to our reach.xxviii
(2)
I took a test recently in one of the popular magazines [continues]… I just
think things should mean something and I get confused when there is no
meaning to be found. We waste too much, we humans, because we refuse to
recognize that there is a possibility of order and things making sense and we
as a planet doing better.xxix
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(3)
You always think the ones you love will always be there to love you. I went
to my grandfather’s alma matter and got kicked and would [continues]……
Grandpapa died in April and I was glad it was warm because the hated the
cold so badly.xxx
Opening Wordsxxxi
How can there be
No Heaven
When rain falls
gently on the grass
When sunshine scampers
across my toes
When corn bakes
into bread
When wheat melts
into cake
When shadows
cool
And owls
call
And little finches
eat upside
down
How can there be
No Heaven
When tears comfort
When dreams caress
When [smiles bless]....
i
“Poetry,” The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, 221-222.
125-6.
iii
53.
iv
“From A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When all Else Fails,” 17.
v
“Poem for Black Boys”, 45-46.
vi
51.
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ii
vii
Gemini, in The Prosaic Soul of Nikki Giovanni, 187.
Racism 101, Prosaic Soul, 506.
ix
“Oppression”, Collected Poetry, 128.
x
“Poem for a Lady Whose Voice I Like,” 135.
xi
“Legacies,” 143.
xii
148.
xiii
“When I Nap,” 159.
xiv
Bicycles, Love Poems, 49.
xv
Ibid., “I Am A Mirror,” 48.
xvi
Ibid., 107.
xvii
Ibid., 62.
xviii
Ibid., “Duets,” 81.
xix
“Of Liberation,” Collected Poetry, 44.
xx
Racism 101 in Prosaic Soul, 538.
xxi
Racism 101 in Prosaic Soul, 547.
xxii
Racism 101 in Prosaic Soul, 421.
xxiii
Racism 101 in Prosaic Soul, 427.
xxiv
Racism 101 in Prosaic Soul, 492.
xxv
Sacred Cows … And Other Edibles in Prosaic Soul, 254.
xxvi
Gemini in Prosaic Soul, 8.
xxvii
Gemini in Prosaic Soul, 48.
xxviii
Sacred Cows…. in Prosaic Soul, 263.
xxix
For the full text of the reading, see Sacred Cows in Prosaic Soul, 245-6.
xxx
For the full text of this reading, see: “400 Mulvaney Street,” in Gemini, in Prosaic Soul, 13-15.
xxxi
“No Heaven”, Bicycles, 22.
viii
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