Born in Knoxville, Tennessee on June 7 1943, Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni became one of America’s most influential literary writers. Evidence of this can be seen in her 2002 anthology, Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea; poems and not quite poems, where her humanitarian passion couples with her interest in history to develop a consistence theme.
Growing up close to her grandmother in Lincoln Heights, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, exposed her to the post Harlem renaissance culture that shaped her early career. Another influencing force to her concisely raw voice is Giovanni’s education at Fisk University (1960-1967), a prestigious black college in Nashville, Tennessee. Her schooling there coincided with the university’s own black renaissance, influencing her ideals of raising political and spiritual awareness, particularly (though not restricted to) in relation to the plights and rights of black people. Giovanni’s first expressions took root in her college job as editor of the campus literary magazine, participating in the Fisk Writers Workshop, and in her work to restore the Fisk chapter Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) ( Poets.org). She graduated with honors and B.A. in history, giving her a strong platform to build her voice by using her literary skills and history’s credibility.
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Giovanni’s early work caught the public’s attention with her marriage of controversial issues and unrefined style of poem and prose. Her first published volumes were in response to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Robert Kennedy. It was in her books: Black Feeling, Black Talk (1967) and Black Judgment (1968) that she established her early voice of jarringly raw reality-ism that became a prominent voice in the African-American community. This period of publication for Giovanni can be categorized as the post- college and pre-motherhood era of her life. Her work reflects her life experiences, from travels to Europe and Africa, the birth of her son Thomas Watson Giovanni, on August 31, 1969, to her battle and survival of breast cancer that started in 1995. The transformation of her voice polishes away the roughest of the jagged-edged words of her early work with time, crossing over from the 20th to the 21st century with a deeper style that still retains its sporadic doses of harsh reality, laments of personal loss. Scattered with socio-political controversies capable of capturing and maintaining the public’s attention, Giovanni’s latest publication, Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (Poems and not quite poems) (2002) exhibits this tone through poems and prose that remember the reality of the Civil Rights, the effects of 9/11 on American society, alongside her own personal trials in life. The works in this anthology maintain the common theme of calling upon the past in order to look to the future, through a lens of humanity issues pertaining to past, present, and future societies. Giovanni calls the audience to remember specific historic events pertaining to the Civil Rights movement and the 9/11 attacks, and then takes that energy of enduring hope and uses it in her poems about her personal struggles pertaining to her fight with breast cancer and the loss of her grandmother.
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A selection of this anthology that strongly supports this theme is, “Another Aretha Poem”(36), which pulls significant events from the Civil Rights era with the purpose of bringing humanitarian focus to the audience. “Another Aretha Poem” is the twentieth piece in Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. This poem is a free-verse piece that consists of seven stanzas, eight single lines, and one couplet, with a total count of fifty-two lines in all. The overall style is that of enjambment and selective line placement and capitalization, with an overall theme of the Civil Rights Movement starting with the Great Migration of African-Americans in the early 1900’s to current times. Giovanni’s focuses are influencing people and events in a historical context, which when analyzed alongside the enjambment and overall structure of the poem unveils the correlations between the different contexts. Giovanni’s love and knowledge of history and English knit together smoothly and with the strong voice of her call to remember certain aspects of the Civil Rights movement.
She does this through reference to the Great Migration, racism in the 1920’s music business, Brown vs. Board of Education, Gwendolyn Brooks, the role of religion among African-Americans, Emmitt Till, and the bloodshed at the bus terminal in Nashville, Tennessee as a result of the freedom rides. “no. not tired. sick and tired. asking the Lord for strength. asking/ the Lord to guide her feet. tired of her people being killed./ tired of 14-year-old boys being castrated. tired of not being able to/ stop it. no sir. I’ll sit today. this evening. Right now. I shall not be/ moved. no sir.”(pg.37, lines 35-40) Giovanni’s use of the adjective “tired” gives this particular stanza a passive tone, which conflicts with the aggressive content of mass murder and 14-year-old boys being castrated.
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This particular technique keeps the content of the poem from becoming over-bearing to the reader, thus making her work more effective by accomplishing her goal of raising awareness by remembering without alienating her audience. The gradual transformation of Giovanni’s style is said to be partly attributed to her becoming a mother. Giovanni gave birth to her only child, Thomas Watson Giovanni, on August 31, 1969,(ohioana-authors.org) while visiting Cincinnati, Ohio for Labor Day Weekend. She later stated that she had a child out of wedlock at twenty-five because she "wanted to have a baby and she could afford to have a baby" and because of her conviction that (marriage) as an institution was inhospitable to women and would never play a role in her life. After her son's birth, Giovanni rearranged her priorities around him and has stated that she would give her life for him. "I just can't imagine living without him. But I can live without the revolution, without world socialism, women's lib...I have a child. My responsibilities have changed." (Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, University Press of Mississippi [December 1992], p. 66) This turning point in her life still did not stop her from producing award winning works that pertained to these issues, as seen in Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea.
“Desperate Acts (For 9-11)” (45), gives a more concise and compact example of her ability to take events from the past and relate them to the future through a humanitarian’s eye. The poem is composed of eleven lines in four short stanzas that allude to the difficulty of embracing empathy in the face of violence from others, and the ability to accept that life contains painful hardships. “It’s easy to strike back/But hard to understand” (lines 10-11) is the last couplet in the poem and delivers a message that is versatile enough to pertain to many of the historic and current issues in which Giovanni writes.
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Bibliography
· Nikki Giovanni’s Official Website, Biographical Timeline ; http://nikki-giovanni.com/timeline.shtml
· Giovanni, Nikki; Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (2002); HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022
· Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, University Press of Mississippi (December 1992), p. 66
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