Nikki Giovanni

After a pathetically inactive day yesterday, I went to see Nikki Giovanni speak. She mostly talked about things on her mind: science, Coretta Scott King's funeral, books she's written recently, her mother and sister dying last year. But she also read a few of her poems. She was wonderful, incredibly inspiring for living out loud. One of the questions from the audience at the end of her talk was about her relationship with her son. She said she doesn't get along with him. She was unapologetic, and I found that remarkable because she talked a lot about our responsibility to our children and about the place of the church in the black community. Speaking of her son, she said she gave him the tools he needed to take care of himself. I admired the complexity of her thought. Of course, she may have been more hypocritical than complicated. Either way, I appreciated her candor.

There were more black people on campus than I had ever seen before. It was fantastic. There were probably 400 people there for the talk. I ran into P and we sat together. After the talk, we made plans to try to see some things from the Pan African film festival.

One of the things Dr. Giovanni said was that when she first met Martin Luther King Jr., in the mid 1950s, he was 26 years old. I found that surprising. He had so much gravitas. He was only 39 when he was killed.

Dr. Giovanni also read from her children's book on Rosa Parks. Being read to is one of the things I love, and this was no exception. Dr. Giovanni remarked that children's literature is folk literature. It is important to her because it helps give us a sense of our history.

She also talked for a while about the slave trade and the Middle Passage. She said that the majority of people enslaved in Africa were adolescents; older people were killed, in part because they would be able to carry the history and culture of their origins and therefore increase resistance to enslavement. It made me want to read more about that time.

Something else I loved about the talk was that it was filled with digressions. The digressions had digressions. Sometimes she spoke colloqually, and sometimes carefully, but always eloquently.