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NIKKI GIOVANNI, POET WHO WROTE OF BLACK JOY, DIES AT 81  
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Penelope Green
December 9, 2024
New York Times
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_ Nikki Giovanni, as a writer, she tackled race, gender, sex,
politics and love. She was also a public intellectual who appeared on
television and toured the country. _

The poet Nikki Giovanni at Philharmonic Hall in New York in 1973. She
performed there in front of a full house to celebrate her 30th
birthday., Photo credit: Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times

 

Nikki Giovanni, the charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist,
children’s book author and professor who wrote, irresistibly and
sensuously, about race, politics, gender, sex and love, died on Monday
in Blacksburg, Va. She was 81.

Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of lung cancer,
said Virginia C. Fowler, her wife.

Ms. Giovanni was a prolific star of the Black Arts Movement, the wave
of Black nationalism that erupted during the civil rights era,
propelled by her, the novelist John Oliver Killens
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the playwright and poet LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka
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and the poets Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange
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Sonia Sanchez, among others. Like many women in the movement, Ms.
Giovanni was confounded by the machismo that dominated it.

Yet she was also independent of the movement as a celebrity poet and
public intellectual who appeared on television and toured the country.
She was a riveting performer, diminutive at 105 pounds — as
reporters never failed to point out — her cadence inflected by the
jazz and blues music she loved, her timing that of a comedian or a
Baptist preacher. She drew crowds wherever she appeared. She said her
best audiences were college students and prison inmates.

In 1972, when she was 29, Ms. Giovanni sold out the 1,000-plus seats
at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, reading her poems alongside
gospel music performed by the New York Community Choir.

 
Ms. Giovanni with Melba Moore at Philharmonic Hall in 1973.  (Photo
credit: Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times)
Soon after, for her 30th birthday, she sold out Philharmonic Hall (now
David Geffen Hall), all 3,000 seats, where she was joined by Melba
Moore and Wilson Pickett
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who sang gospel numbers with the same choir that took part in her
earlier show. The audience joined in, too, with gusto, The New York
Times reported
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especially when she read one of her best-known poems, a stirring paean
to Black female agency called “Ego-Tripping,” which generations of
Black girls have performed at school. It begins:

_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_

And it concludes, triumphantly:

_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 …_

By 1971, Ms. Giovanni had already published a memoir, “Gemini: An
Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of
Being a Black Poet.” Fiercely intelligent, she never lacked
confidence, never suffered fools and was, in her youth, a fan of Ayn
Rand, that apostle of individualism. In her memoir she wrote about the
contradictions and false pieties of the Black Power movement, her
scrappiness as a child and her ambivalence about gender relations. She
was not convinced that men and women were meant to live together.

“Maybe they have a different thing going,” she wrote, “where
they come together during mating season and produce beautiful, useless
animals who then go on to love, you hope, each of you.”

Her poem “Housecleaning” made the point succinctly:

_i always liked housecleaning_
_even as a child_
_i dug straightening_
_the cabinets_
_putting new paper on_
_the shelves_
_washing the refrigerator_
_inside out_
_and unfortunately this habit has_
_carried over and I find_
_i must remove you_
_from my life_

In her early years, much of her poetry was boldly militant, as she
addressed the horrors that had galvanized the civil rights movement:
the murders of Emmett Till, the four Black girls in the Birmingham
church bombing and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “No one was
much interested in a Black girl writing what was called ‘militant’
poetry,” she wrote in “Gemini,” so “I formed a company and
published myself.”

To mollify the church ladies she had grown up with — particularly
her beloved grandmother, who might be put off by her incendiary work
— she recorded an album, “Truth is on its Way” (1971), with the
New York Community Choir.

“I wanted something my grandmother could listen to,” Ms
Giovanni told Ebony magazine in 1972
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“and I knew if gospel music was included, she would listen.”

Along with “Ego Tripping,” the album included another enduring
hit, “Nikki-Rosa,” which ended with:

_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_

Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. was born on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville,
Tenn., to Yolande (Watson) Giovanni and Jones Giovanni, known as Gus.
Her older sister, Gary Ann, nicknamed her Nikki. Soon after her birth,
the family moved to Cincinnati, where Yolande and Gus began working as
house parents in a school for Black boys, earning only one salary
between them. Later, they would each teach grade school.

Nikki’s father was abusive toward her mother. It enraged her, as did
her mother’s acceptance of it.

By 15, “I was either going to kill him or leave,” she said later,
so she moved to Knoxville to live with her grandparents. She graduated
early from Austin High School (now Austin-East Magnet High School),
where her grandfather taught Latin, to attend Fisk University, the
historically Black college in Nashville, where, after a hiatus of a
few years, she earned a bachelor’s degree in history with honors in
1967.

She had been thrown out for leaving campus without permission, and for
protesting other campus rules. Becoming a debutante was not among her
aspirations (she later wrote a poem about it), which made her an odd
fit among Fisk’s sorority sisters.

But when she returned to resume classes, the climate had changed; she
studied with Mr. Killens, a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild;
helped restart a chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee; and began to write.

Ms. Giovanni attended the University of Pennsylvania’s School of
Social Work on a Ford fellowship, but dropped out. She was not cut out
for social work. The dean arranged for Ms. Giovanni to receive a
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to attend Columbia
University’s School of Fine Arts, but she soon left to write full
time.

She self-published her first two books, “Black Feeling Black Talk”
and “Black Judgment,” in 1968. Her son, Thomas, was born in 1969:
“I had a baby at 25 because I _wanted_ to have a baby and I
could _afford_ to have a baby,” she told Ebony magazine with
vehemence. “I didn’t get married because I didn’t _want_ to
get married and I could _afford_ to not get married.” She never
publicly identified the father.

 
Ms. Giovanni with her 2-year-old son, Thomas, in their New York
apartment in 1972. “I had a baby at 25,” she said, “because I
wanted to have a baby and I could afford to have a baby.”  (Photo
credit: John Rooney/Associated Press)
But she did need to hustle. She hit the lecture circuit, and she began
appearing regularly on “Soul!,” the Black culture program that
aired on public television from 1967 to 1972.

For one segment, she conducted a captivating two-hour interview with
her hero James Baldwin, which was filmed in London and ran as a
two-part special in 1971. She was 28 and Mr. Baldwin was 47. It was
astonishing, as The New Yorker put it
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“Two of the most important artist-intellectuals of the twentieth
century were engaged in intimate communion on national television.”

Wreathed in plumes of cigarette smoke (it was the 1970s), she asked
Mr. Baldwin about her father, who was, in her estimation, emblematic
of so many Black men: What to do about a man who is mistreated in the
world and comes home and brutalizes his wife? Where did that leave his
daughter?

“I’m afraid of Black men,” she said, adding, “It’s a cycle
and it’s unfortunate because I need love.”

Later in their conversation, she said, “There has to be a way to do
what we do and survive, which is what seems to me to be missing.”

“Sweetheart,” Mr. Baldwin answered. “Sweetheart. Our ancestors
taught us how to do that.”

(Parts of their exchange can be see in the 2023 HBO
documentary “Going to Mars
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Project,” written and directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle
Stephenson.)

Ms. Giovanni held teaching positions at Rutgers University and Queens
College before Ms. Fowler, then the associate head of the English
department at Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, recruited her in 1987 to
be a visiting professor. She and Ms. Fowler were a couple ever since.
Ms. Giovanni earned tenure a few years later, and along the way Ms.
Fowler became a scholar of her work, editing her collections and
writing her biography, “Nikki Giovanni” (2013). They married in
2016, and both retired in 2022.

Ms. Giovanni called Ms. Fowler her bench, as she explained
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Elizabeth Harris of The New York Times in 2020.

“Everybody needs a bench, and in order to get a bench, you have to
be one,” she said. “I could say love, but you get tired of hearing
about love.”

That said, she wrote many enticing love poems, including one that
began, “I wrote a good omelet … and ate a hot poem … after
loving you.”

Hilton Als, the cultural critic and New Yorker writer, said in a phone
interview that when he first heard Ms. Giovanni perform in the early
1970s, he was struck by her forceful presence and the story she was
telling, about a strong Black woman and the home that sustained her,
epitomized in her poem “My House.”

_i mean it’s my house_
_and i want to fry pork chops_
_and bake sweet potatoes_
_and call them yams_
_cause i run the kitchen_
_and i can stand the heat_

“It was a voice you didn’t hear a lot then, this desire for
home,” Mr. Als said. “Later, as she ditched the Black nationalist
rhetoric, she became more herself. She was saying something really
profound to me, a member of the gay community and the Black world and
whatever. She was the first warrior in terms of talking about queer
love — not specifically, but it was there.”

 
Ms. Giovanni taught at Virginia Tech for many years. In 2007, she
delivered the closing remarks at a convocation to honor the victims of
a shooting rampage there.  (Photo credit: Steve Helber/Associated
Press)
A traumatic footnote to Ms. Giovanni’s academic career came in 2007,
when a senior at Virginia Tech fatally shot 32 people and himself. The
young man, Seung-Hui Cho, had been a student of Ms. Giovanni’s. She
had objected to his behavior in class, which frightened her other
students, and asked him to either stop or leave. He declined to stop,
and afterward was taught privately by the department head. Ms.
Giovanni spoke at a memorial for the murdered students, reciting a
poem she wrote called “We Are Virginia Tech.”

“We are better than we think,” she said, “but not quite what we
want to be.”

Among many honors, Ms. Giovanni received seven N.A.A.C.P. awards and
31 honorary doctorates. A scientist who was a fan, Robert James Baker,
named a species of bat after her, the Micronycteris giovanniae.

She was the author of more than 30 books, many for children and three
of which were best sellers. A new volume, “The New Book: Poems,
Letters, Blurbs, and Things,” is expected to be published next year.

 
Ms. Giovanni in 2020. “I recommend old age,” she said.
“There’s just nothing as wonderful as knowing you have done your
job.”  (Photo credit:  Shaban Athuman for The New York Times)
In addition to Ms. Fowler, Ms. Giovanni is survived by her son,
Thomas, and a granddaughter.

“I really like what the young people are doing,” Ms. Giovanni told
The Times in 2020, reflecting on the Black Lives Matter movement and
the work of her students, “and I think my job is to be sure to get
out of their way, but also let them know, if it means anything to
them, that I’m proud of them.”

“I recommend old age,” she added. “There’s just nothing as
wonderful as knowing you have done your job.”

_[PENELOPE GREEN is a reporter on the Obituaries desk of The New York
Times._

_"I write stories about individuals who have made their mark on our
culture, illuminating the lives of those who have impacted the world
in often unusual ways. Some are newsmakers, like Mary Quant
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bigot, or Betty Rowland
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