There has been so much rain. It's been a week full of it. I have no idea why I can't find my signed copy of A Good Cry by Nikki Giovanni but that's what the sky's been doing. On Monday night, I snuggled into bed with the idea of going to sleep but before I did that, I opened up to Facebook on my phone, not exactly the best winding down activity there is. But I did that thinking I'd scroll for a few minutes and then shut my mind off to sleep, except that the first post I saw told me that Nikki Giovanni had become an ancestor. I was done with Facebook then. I had just enough in me to change my profile picture to one of her and write a few words so I could go off to dreamland.
On the cover of A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter, Giovanni poses against a solid black background, her face turned slightly to the left with a big smile. I remember the night I saw her read from what at the time was her latest collection of poems. I had seen her read twice before at Union College but this night, she was at UAlbany for the 50th Anniversary of the Africana Studies Department, the same department I attained my Masters degree from. She stood up on an elevated stage in front of a very full audience. I watched in awe like I was experiencing a Nikki Giovanni reading for the first time although I wasn't. She told us stories. She made us laugh and hum. She shared for maybe forty-five minutes and shared maybe three poems. I thought to myself how I didn't lack for anything. For me it was a masterclass in engaging an audience, how to seamlessly fall into reading a poem after brilliantly telling us the story of a poem without giving the poem away. I don't know why I didn't have a picture with her from the other times I'd seen her but I got one that night.
Growing up, there weren't too many Black poets I latched on to reading mostly because I didn't know who they were. I read lots of Maya Angelou and loved her. (I also saw her at Union College. Whoever's booking there, knows what they're doing clearly.) But when I started diving into the Black Arts Movement, I found works by Black authors that shaped me as a writer and more than that, taught me about myself. I started reading June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison and Nikki Giovanni. Angelou taught me to celebrate myself. Jordan helped me understand the call of activism in my work. Shange showed me I could heal. Morrison challenged me to do language unapologetically and write the book I hadn't read yet. And Giovanni reminded me not to overthink it, to laugh a little while doing it. What freedom is there in this work without joy? It's so easy to lose the essence of the poem to being overdone. There's beauty in simplicity. There's power in beauty especially when it comes from a place where none is expected.
Early in my time competing in poetry slams, I wrote a poem called "I cry for little Black girls" back in 2010. At the time, it was known as my 'signature poem', the poem that always scored well or always got requested when I featured somewhere. I did that poem at the 2012 National Poetry Slam in Charlotte and then I did it less until I stopped performing it altogether. But there's a line in the poem where I say, "I cry for little Black girls who will never write tree poems/because there are no trees outside/ just concrete/and like Nikki Giovanni, they will look up at the sky/see grey and realize these are not poetic times at all." It's a reference to one of my favorite Giovanni poems, "For Saundra". She could have written that poem last week for how timelessly relevant it still is. I cannot tell you how often I wanted to write about trees or about flowers only to have the poem become a memorial, a call to action, a staunch reminder of privilege or lack of it while creating toward freedom. I came back to "For Saundra" when I wrote "Red Leaf Tree in Summer" and now that I think of it, my poem, "Painting Flowers at a Time Like This" although it is written after Hanif Abdurraqib's "How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This", my poem is in that same vein.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband was at a used bookstore in Northampton. Whenever he finds something he thinks I'll like, he sends me a photo and asks if I want it. On this trip, he found a book called Deye Mon (Behind the Mountains), a collection of poems and photography from and about Haiti written in Kreyol and English. He also found a 1983 edition of My House by Nikki Giovanni. I said yes immediately. I was excited to peruse through poems written in my native tongue and if that wasn't enough, the second find was by one of my favorite poets and an edition published the year I was born. I don't know. Now I think the universe was trying to tell me something. We don't often get to meet our literary heroes. I'm grateful that I've met a few of mine. What a gift! In the top right corner of the title page where one likely finds the modified price for a book in a used bookstore, instead of a number, someone wrote in all capital letters and an exclamation point, the word FREE!
That's how I imagine Giovanni living and beyond, a spirit free like a bird in the sky.
In the forward of My House, Ida Lewis recalls a conversation with Giovanni about why Aretha Franklin worked the way she did, "why she keeps the pace up," and Giovanni says, "Because here you have some people who've never gotten what they asked for--nothing--and they ask for you, that you would make them feel better or help them understand, plus they give a lot to you, you know? I guess love is the word. Because you love them you try and you hope they try." Today, the sun is out although flurries are dancing in the wind. I don't have a record player but I've got a vinyl copy of "Truth on Its Way" sitting on top of one of my bookshelves. I open My House to page 36 to a poem called "When I Die." The closing lines read:
and if i touched a life i hope that life knows
that i know that touching was and still is and will always
be the true
revolution
Through the stars and wherever your spirit is flying now, thank you, Nikki Giovanni for touching my life, for touching many lives, for loving on us, for giving us laughter and truth, for lessons to live by and for a language to be free.
Thank you for reading!
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D. Colin
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Thank you for this. Beau