Nikki Giovanni was born on the wrong side of the tracks, in Knoxville, Tennessee, on Mulvaney Street, during the era of segregation. Now 80, she remembers her childhood in a red-lined neighbourhood, demarcating a cordon sanitaire separating it from prosperous white suburbs. “My grandfather was a Latin teacher. He’d sit on the porch [after school] and people would come by saying ‘Evening ’fessor’. Reverend Abrams lived on the other side of our street and Mrs Abrams raised chickens. We built a church and there was a real community but now … ”
Now, the neighbourhood has been taken over by gentrifying middle-class white people, a development that Giovanni, barely masking her fury, struggles to find a word to describe, before settling on “unfair”. More words will come in her forthcoming memoir, A Street Called Mulvaney.
That memoir, and a new Penguin Modern Classics collection Poems: 1968-2020, mark the culmination of an extraordinary career. Giovanni, who emerged as a politically engaged writer wedded to the cause of civil rights in the 1960s, has spent more than five decades in the public eye; as an activist, public intellectual and innovator, she has performed with actors and musicians, even an 80-strong choir. But at the centre of her creative life is a poetry that is personal, live and direct, like an urgent bulletin from the pulpit of her mind. It is often conversational, without rhyme and largely without capitalisation. Giovanni’s prodigious output, captured in the new collection, explores the interplay of race, gender, music, all-consuming love, and the African American experience, as seen in the opening of one of her best-loved poems, Nikki-Rosa, from 1968:
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
The poet, who characterises herself as “unfriendly but polite”, has been known to answer an unwelcome interviewer’s question with: “I have nothing more to say on that.” Early in our Zoom call, she tells me: “Remember, the door is always open, if you don’t like what you’re hearing you can always walk away.” Later, she confesses that her writing has sometimes been indicative of her frustration about the unreconstructed forces at large in the US and the glacial speed of societal change. “I’ve written some mean poems in the past and it’s dawned on me that I still have a lot of anger,” she says when we discuss You Talk About Rape (for donald trump) and the reality that black women have been raped ever since the Europeans began the transatlantic slave trade. “I used to think I’m mellowing,” says Giovanni, “you know, getting to be an old lady and I’m really cool. And then I realised, no, there’s still quite a bit of anger.”
In her youth that anger was most keenly felt when she witnessed domestic abuse, as she writes in her 2017 poem Baby West:
All I knew then
Was the sound
Of my father hitting
My mother every Saturday
Night until I heard
Her say ‘Gus, please
Don’t hit me.’
And I knew my choice:
Leave or kill him
Giovanni left, and in 1968 she headed for New York where she briefly attended Columbia University. Though it was a difficult period, she defied detractors by privately publishing her first collection, Black Feeling, Black Talk, using a loan from her grandmother. Later that year, she made her way to the Birdland jazz club, fuelled by the idea of negotiating with the gangster/manager to hire the venue on a quiet Sunday to launch her second collection, Black Judgement. It was agreed that if she filled the club with at least 100 people she would get it for free; just one person fewer and she’d forfeit, owing him $500. “That seemed reasonable,” says Giovanni. “I walked back up the steps on the street to Broadway. And then it dawned on me: I just shook hands with a guy who murders people.”
The launch party was a success, and an example of the lateral thinking that would later see Giovanni collaborate with the New York Community Choir. The resulting album, Truth Is On Its Way (1971), included the poem Nikki-Rosa, which alluded to Rosa Parks and the merging of Giovanni’s personal and political life.
Rosa Parks – a talismanic character for Giovanni – figures prominently in the Penguin collection. The poet traces a line to the activist (who was arrested in 1955 when she refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger) from the Pullman porters, who served stoically and with good cheer on America’s segregated train lines and who acted quietly, without detection, as messengers and outliers of the civil rights movement. As Giovanni writes in her 2002 poem Rosa Parks: “It was the Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett [Till] to his grand uncle and it was Mrs Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not being able to stand it. She sat back down.”
Another talisman for Giovanni is James Baldwin, who appears in last year’s documentary about the poet, Going to Mars. Archive footage taken from a 1971 episode of Soul! shows Giovanni, 28, in conversation with Baldwin, nearly 20 years her senior, both of them speaking forcefully and admiringly as equals. In one exchange she refuses to concede to Baldwin’s assertion that her wife-beating father is worthy of compassion. Similarly, she recalls, “I couldn’t change his mind about his father, [who] was not a nice guy, and he was not kind to Jimmy. You don’t change minds; you just finally realise you can open up. You don’t have to hide it.”
In Baldwin’s centenary year, his voice still resonates, she says. He’d have plenty to say about the “weaponisation” of history, as seen in Florida where the board of education has set new standards that require middle school students, for example, to be instructed in “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”. I ask Giovanni what she makes of this aspect of America’s culture wars, which has also led to a rise in school book bans in the US. She scoffs at the faux revisionist argument advanced by the right that society’s duty of care towards children means they shouldn’t be exposed to the trauma of slave history in their classrooms.
“Oh, that is the dumbest shit ever. People are fools. I’m living in the state [of Virginia] right now, where the governor is a fool. You have people going into school shooting kids. You got nothing to say about any of that, but you don’t want to teach kids about slavery!”
Although she is affronted by the bigotry, Giovanni says she’s also sanguine about the limits of her power to change her country’s direction. “I tell young people, ‘You have to do your job. Don’t sit around whining about what wasn’t done.’ My generation in America, we could fight segregation because we could beat segregation, and we did. We cannot beat racism. And so, somebody else is going to have to fight the battle of racism, because it’s not our battle. We got rid of segregation. We cleared it. We cleaned that window. You can look out now.”
Yet Giovanni continues to push the boundaries of her artistic life. As well as her memoir, she is collaborating with the tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson on a series of old film songs and poetry for a forthcoming album called Javon and Nikki Go to the Movies. No, she says, her work is not nearly done. “I’m not tired yet. What does the old spiritual say? No ways. I don’t feel no ways tired.”
• Nikki Giovanni, Poems: 1968-2020 will be published by Penguin on 7 March.
