http://www.tnhonline.com/an-in-depth-conversation-with-nikki-giovanni-1.1115347
By Alexandra Churchill
February 4, 2010
Nikki Giovanni sits reclined in her chair on the Strafford Room stage
with a coffee and a smile. She is a 67-year-old African American
woman with big opinions, a big heart and a long and illustrious
history. She has published best-sellers, earned multiple literary
awards and was dubbed in the sixties as the "Princess of Black
Poetry." She had a 20-year friendship with Rosa Parks and has
followed in the footsteps of Dr. King's exemplary social activism by
pursuing the dream for a freer, more equal America through her power
and passion for poetry.
She opened the dialogue with a reading of her poem "Tennessee by Birth."
Her Grammy-nominated voice, silky and passionately-punctuated, moved
through the room and instilled the sense of power and struggle that
was an unequal America prior to the Black Civil Rights Movement,
"I'm a native Tennessean. I was born there. During the age of
segregation. When you couldn't go to the same amusement park. Or the
same move theatre. When the white guys would cruise up and down the
streets and call out to you. When the black guys were afraid of being
lynched. But we went to church each Sunday. And we sang a precious
song. And we found a way to survive. Anything can survive. But to
thrive. And believe. And hope."
Focusing on the written word as a medium for social activism, this
year's Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration, marked as the 20th
anniversary for the university's recognition of the late Dr. King and
Black History Month, titled the series of events, "Art as Struggle
and Exultation."
Giovanni proved to be sassy, frank and outspoken, and won over the
crowd with her humor and honesty, joking about everything from the
media scandal surrounding Tiger Woods and the GObama movement of the
2008 election.
Giovanni sat down yesterday afternoon with Associate Professor of
English David Rivard for a critical yet easygoing conversation from
modern politics and social activism to her history with the Black
Arts Movement in the Harlem Renaissance. Above all, she strongly
believes in the power of art to transform people's lives.
"We were just poets reading poetry," said Giovanni simply. "I don't
think that anybody thought we could change the world but we thought
if the world was going to change we should celebrate it. Nobody said
I'm gonna write the great American poem but we did say that whenever
we wrote, we would write an honest poem. And I think the one thing
that comes out of the Black Arts Movement is that we are an honest
group and that cannot always be said. And that's important to us. Its
important to me."
The conversation between Rivard and Giovanni took place on the stage
of the Strafford Room before a full audience of students, faculty and
the outside community.
Rivard: You've spent a life of witness to history on both a large and
small scale. What are the stories that you have been witness to?
Giovanni: I think that my generation, the 60s, were good people. What
we did was to essentially inhale all the opportunity around us and as
we exhaled we realized the change was what we were going to have to
do. So we had a great man that was born in '23 who would go on to
fight the fight for Brown v. Board of Education, but we were finally
going to win it. And this was going to be important because we had
taking baby steps. Then Mississippi got crazy and murdered Emmett
Till in one of the worst ways in the world and his mother was brave
enough to open the casket and say look what they did to my boy. You
need to see what they did to my fourteen-year old son and that must
have taken just an incredible amount of courage for her to do that.
That of course is going to impact tremendously on Rosa Parks. Rosa
Parks is finally going to say, "No, enough. This is over. Stop. Not
on my watch." She was the first sit-inner when we got to college. So
when we got to college in '60, we've got the four young men in
Greensboro to sit down and the sit-in generation. We were going to
change the world.
Rivard: You have made your life out of your achievements, which is a
hard thing to do in any time, but particularly in the fifties and sixties.
Giovanni: I think the main thing for anybody is to know what's
important. The first thing is who I love. The second thing is my
work. Everything else falls out of that. Once you know who you love
and love what you do, everything else truly falls into line. I know
that the universe loves me and I think the universe wants to give me
an opportunity to let other people help me. The reason I can breathe
the air or drink the coffee or enjoy the sunset is that I'm a decent
poet. And if I wasn't that then I'd have to find another way to
justify my existence. My priorities are very clear.
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