How Nikki Giovanni's Black American consciousness changed the world

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/dec/14/nikki-giovanni-black-arts-literary-consciousness

How Nikki Giovanni’s Black American consciousness changed the world

One of the foremost poets of the Black arts movement died on Monday but continues to inspire her literary children

Syreeta McFadden
Sat 14 Dec 2024 09.03 EST

“We are the culture bearers of planet Earth,” Nikki Giovanni said in 1978 on American Black Journal, a Detroit TV program. Viewers watched the young poet, then just 36, establishing herself as part of Black American literary royalty in real time. She fielded a series of somewhat maudlin questions about creativity, Black identity, gender and politics with aplomb, her answers demonstrating her nascent wisdom and embrace of her role as a Black female writer in post-civil rights era United States.

Giovanni, who died Monday at 81 after her third battle with cancer, was one of the foremost poets who emerged from the Black arts movement of the mid-1960s. Even from her beginnings as a new artist in the movement that signified radical Black American consciousness, Giovanni always seemed aware of her singular power. Her uncanny and ferocious mind made her one of the most prolific and accomplished poets in American literature.

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This makes sense considering Giovanni never remained static in her writing and thinking. Her interrogations of class, gender, race and the greater American body politic only sharpened as she grew older, challenging limiting definitions of Black humanity. For instance, Ego-Tripping, one of her most famous poems, captures that buoyant feel of marrying history and the fantastic, a deeply imaginative myth-making and myth-busting that equates black womanhood with the divine. “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,” one stanza reads.

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… the impact of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, calling it a “declaration of war”. “We had choices,” Giovanni said. “We can tell our grandparents we can’t do it or change the world. It was way easier to change the world”.

… photos at link …