“You sound like a poet.”
I accepted admission three months later, on April 16, the day that Tech — and the world — was surprised by horrific violence dedicated by a pupil Nikki had banned from her class. Whereas reporting about that pupil killing 32 Hokies and himself and wounding 17, I made a decision I might imagine in her religion in my Southern-bred listening and wordcraft to make a profession of writing poems knowledgeable by my journalism coaching, her take-no-prisoners honesty and boundless compassion my compass. By some means, she knew I’d additionally gained the instruments I wanted by, like her, observing the ladies and the lads in Baptist church buildings step out on religion to share their testimonies.
“The answer is always yes,” she’d intone after I’d name. “You can always change your mind later if it’s not working out.”
This infectious, uncompromising religion in humanity’s potential to decide on good and embody the facility of divined phrases made flesh, coupled with unapologetic self-possession and a generosity of spirit, heralds our Nikki as arguably America’s most accessible voice and definitely one of the crucial prophetic of this millennium. For Nikki, who died Monday at 81, our future relies upon upon our willingness to study from on a regular basis Black of us’ refusal to simply accept status-quo cruelties as incontrovertible realities. Repeatedly, her poems land on religion because the gas to catapult us to a yonder she’s dreamed of exploring since her girlhood in Knoxville and Cincinnati.
You could be questioning why so many from all walks of life are grieving so intensely this week. It’s that tales like mine are directly exceptional and ubiquitous. We’ve watched Nikki appoint, anoint and empower so many, all the time saying sure and eager to know: Who ought to the world be studying, watching and listening to subsequent? As we, her colleagues and literary youngsters, gave her the early works of Terrance Hayes, Jericho Brown, Remica Bingham-Risher and others identified primarily in tutorial circles on the time, she known as them into her orbit, too, placing the on a regular basis folks she’s engaged for 3 generations on discover to look out for who’ll subsequent storm the citadel and put a mirror as much as the bare emperor whereas shimmying and wisecracking as solely the folks can. Take a look at what our grandmothers’ prayers have wrought, she beamed in anthologies she curated and large group readings she coordinated to offer writer-friends Angelou, Toni Morrison and E. Lynn Harris and actors Ruby Dee and Novella Nelson their flowers whereas they lived and to consolation these left behind when beloved poet Lucille Clifton departed too quickly.
Nikki Giovanni, second from left, on the unveiling of the Maya Angelou stamp in 2015. Together with her are, from left, Howard College professor Eleanor Traylor, First Girl Michelle Obama, Postmaster Common Megan Brennan, Oprah Winfrey and artist Ross Rossin.
(Jacquelyn Martin / Related Press)
Wherever Nikki alights is an area to chuckle, play the handfuls (ideally over bid whist), have a good time and, sure mourn and sing with these and different giants. And she or he’s introduced alongside as many people who would belief her to prepared the ground she’s blazed unassumingly, Ginney at her aspect, their love a mannequin for our beleaguered LGBTQIA youths, unashamed however fiercely protected till it was time for the world to know. “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” which received an Emmy this 12 months, leaves few related questions unanswered, so for those who’re simply paying attention to the Nikki rocket ship, begin there to fine-tune your individual voices.
Nikki cherished a great track, ideally jazz, with some Champagne and a meal seasoned with the lavender she grew in her backyard. However let’s not overlook: She was down with hip-hop when Kendrick Lamar Duckworth was a tot and others decried the music as earworm “gangsta rap” that might kill and destroy, not impress, the approaching era for whom he — like she — is a people hero. “I’m a thug,” she’d inform anybody who would pay attention, exhibiting off the “Thug Life” tattoo emblazoned on her left arm after Lamar’s predecessor, Tupac Shakur, was murdered in 1997, simply as hip-hop started topping pop charts and commanding the zeitgeist. In a single memorable second in 2013 I’ve been replaying to listen to her alto lilt and girlish chuckle, she tells tastemaker radio DJ Sway Calloway she’s fortunately directly “a little, old lady” and all that “I’m a thug” encompasses. For individuals who would possibly change into prodigal, selecting to go our personal method, Nikki is all the time ready with seats at her welcome desk once we’re able to embrace the great sense she and different elders and ancestors impart.
For, like poets Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks and one other singular supernova, Prince, the latter two of whom shared her birthday, Nikki has all the time communed with like-minded iconoclasts and what she known as “space freaks,” those that perceive that our songs of rage, rapture, irreverence and craving are our biggest, Blackest weapons. From her earliest collections “Black Feeling, Black Talk,” and “Black Judgement” within the late Sixties to her most up-to-date ones, “A Good Cry” (2017) and “Make Me Rain,” revealed in 2020, that annus mirabilis of pestilence and prosperity, her refusal to give up to despair saved her going — and present.
Once we phoned for that 2007 interview, she was selling “Acolytes,” which she’d written as first her mom, then her sister and aunt, lay dying inside months of each other. Amid her personal journey with sickness, together with the one which’s ended her bodily journey on this aspect of ceaselessly, Nikki has present in grief and ache an exacting readability to declaim that religion, just like the unconditional love she provides to those that select her again, solely dies once we cease believing. Anticipating our grief, she leaves us this dialog on unconditional love’s liberating energy with the New Yorker’s Doreen St. Felix and host Bianca Vivion and her biographical documentary for example of how you can reside a freer lifetime of fixed evolution, its title drawn from a poem in “Acolytes,” “Quilting the Black Eyed Pea,” wherein she presaged “we’re going to Mars” lengthy earlier than billionaires contemplated colonizing outer house.
Now it’s our flip to hitch Nikki’s track as her spirit, lastly boundless and totally free, soars into the cosmos. At the same time as Octavia Butler’s dystopian imaginative and prescient in “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talent” unfolds, with the unhoused and most weak criminalized and Earth’s hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis giving us a tough look within the mirror of what we’ve executed, we must always not run from worry of what we’re compelled to face. Nikki’s poem “Fear: Eat in or Take Out,” which she learn throughout a 2017 TED Discuss, teaches us “to distill fear,” relatively than let any powers-that-be persuade us to combine our worry with the hate that empowers them to divide and conquer us all. We should, as Nikki informed us in that TED Discuss, “learn to distill fear,” relatively than let any powers-that-be persuade us to combine our worry with the hate that empowers them to divide and conquer us all.
Defying the unconscionable indignities that loom, I’ve been clinging to Nikki’s voice, and it’s in all places, y’all.
Seek for her on-line and heed her name: Take your smile and your like to the folks who love you. You and also you and also you sound like a poet, too.
L. Lamar Wilson, the 2024-2025 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford College, is a professor of inventive writing, literature and movie research at Florida State College. He’s the creator of “Sacrilegion” (Blair, 2013) and the affiliate producer of “The Changing Same” (PBS/POV Shorts, 2019), a collaboration with Rada Movie Group, the director-producers of “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.”
