 "Photo: Beata Dumaplin")
Poet, educator, writer and activist Yolande Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni has a powerful message and she communicates it through her poetry.
Many people came out to see Giovanni speak and read her personal poetry about love, family and life Friday evening at the Bell Memorial Union auditorium.
Much of her writing has been on the topic of black culture in the U.S.
Giovanni grew up in an era of segregation and her activism for civil rights defined her younger years, she said.
Everyone around her was working to change women’s rights, fight racism and stop the Vietnam War.
“My contribution was in writing,” she said.
Giovanni discussed current events, shared personal stories about her family and upbringing and read pieces of her poetry aloud. One of her topics was her discontent with President Barack Obama. Her concern is he is not dealing with the immediate problems the country is facing and is more concerned with his second term in office, she said.
“He ought to learn something from Jack Kennedy and realize there is no second term, there is only today,” she said. “You have to assume that somebody out there wants to shoot me and I’ve got to get today’s job done before they do.”
Another topic she spoke about was rising above the mean spiritedness of human nature.
“People in general are not nice and it will probably take another 1,000 years for people to become nice, but we can still try,” she said.
Giovanni has strong ties to the birth of hip-hop. In the ’60s and early ’70s, when Giovanni was establishing herself as a writer and poet, she decided to combine her poetry with a musical back drop that flowed with the rhythm of her words, she said. In 1971 she and producer Carl Procter made an album with her poetry recorded over gospel.
“We said, ‘lets just try this and see how it works,’ and that album was ‘The truth is on its way,’” Giovanni said.
In 1973 Procter nominated Giovanni for a Grammy Award only to find there was no category for the kind of music she had made, Giovanni said.
Her combination of poetry and music gave way to the revolutionary hip-hop sounds of Sylvia Robinson, The Sugarhill Gang and eventually Tupac Shakur, Giovanni said.
“All poetry has a certain rhythm to it and that rhythm is hip-hop,” she said.
With a life so heavily dedicated to the Civil Rights movement and her poetry, Giovanni said she was moved by Shakur. Her love for what he gave the world through his music is marked clearly on her arm by a tattoo that reads “Thug Life,” which she got after Shakur was murdered in 1996.
The purpose of her tattoo was to tell younger generations, “we mourn with you,” she said.
“Losing Tupac was a great loss,” Giovanni said. “It’s important to acknowledge the geniuses in the world and Pac was one of them. He wasn’t the first hip-hop artist, but Tupac, well, he was really saying something.”
Giovanni comes across with a pretty simple message.
“Don’t hate,” she said. “And listen to jazz, because jazz is pretty cool.”
Tracy Butts, an English professor and the director of multicultural and gender studies at Chico State, studied under Giovanni at Virginia Tech, Butts said.
“She really influenced my decision to be an English major and come to Chico State,” she said, adding Giovanni has a very powerful message of kindness and the need to do better.
Giovanni sees a great importance in understanding history for the sake of the future, Butts said.
Junior and Men of Honor President Spencer Blair is inspired by Giovanni’s poetry.
“She has a way of using our past to show people what we can do in the future,” Blair said. “It makes us ask ourselves, ‘how can we do better as a society?’ It’s a very hopeful feeling.”
Joel Hersch can be reached at
jhersch@theorion.com
Be the first to comment on this article!