The complications of being Nikki Giovanni -- Nikki Giovanni by Virginia Fowler

Abstract

Review.

In the early 1980s, when I was at Hollins College, Nikki Giovanni canceled a poetry reading, and Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) was brought as her replacement. Reading Virginia Fowler's Nikki Giovanni, I was reminded again of the irony of hearing Don Lee and his work instead of Giovanni--not just how disappointed I was, but how odd it seemed for such a thoroughly male-identified poet to be reading in Giovanni's place. To my mind, Giovanni is not only an African American poet, but also (resoundingly so) a woman. While Fowler's study is not an analysis of the gender implications of Giovanni's writing (and its critical reception) as such, or of Giovanni's conflictual relationship with writers like Don Lee and the Black Arts Movement, the book begins to illuminate these issues, tracking new ground for further study and exploration. Fowler situates Giovanni's work in the social and literary context from which it arose, mapping the contours of the Black Arts Movement and the conflict for writers like Giovanni whose art would not restrict itself to the limits of the Black Aesthetic.

Giovanni became serious about writing while a student at Fisk University, where she was also a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and became involved with the then-flourishing Black Arts Movement, whose proponents, like Don Lee and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), applauded her for the "revolutionary" poems included in Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement (brought out as one volume in 1970 by William Morrow, after private printings in 1968 and 1969, respectively). Fowler points out that these same advocates, and others like them, were "writing scathing reviews and making vicious personal attacks" on Giovanni by the time My House was published in 1972. Fowler accounts for this hostility by pointing to Giovanni's refusal to follow the prescriptions of Black Arts leaders, the fact that she was a woman, and the fact that she far surpassed other poets in popularity (14). In a lengthy interview included in the book, Giovanni remarks bluntly about her associations with the poets of the Black Arts Movement, for example, LeRoi Jones, who, in Giovanni's estimation, "has always been an opportunistic man," a strong advocate of avoiding white presses who has himself published with William Morrow and Random House:

The guys and I were not going to get along because the guys were into power. They like to tell you what you should do. I remember reading Don[ Lee]'s book, Dynamite Voices. And if he weren't such a poor writer I would have puked. The nerve of this son of a bitch, if I may, to say what my writing should be. I think he should deal with what his writing is. Don was too young and not nearly well-read enough to be a critic.

Don just didn't know what he was talking about. But of course the joke to me was Don's position on me at one point that what I really needed was a good man, you know. Ishmael Reed used to say that to me all the time, too....I got tired of hearing what was wrong with me. (137)

At every turn, Fowler attempts to set the record straight, to answer criticism and show Giovanni as a serious poet. Fowler pinpoints important issues in the criticism of Giovanni's poetry that have been faced by women writers for years, and complicated by the added component of race. She notes that "one of the charges frequently made by Giovanni's detractors is that, after she achieved success with her early volumes, she abandoned Black revolutionary concerns and wrote about personal issues only" (27). While Fowler points out that Giovanni would disagree with the aesthetic assumptions embedded in the criticism, she does not proceed to scrutinize the gender implications of such a statement. Women have forever been criticized for paying too much attention to the small, "personal" details that are considered the stuff of neither revolutions nor belles lettres.

The contradiction between Giovanni's enormous popularity with "ordinary readers" and the marked critical/scholarly neglect of her work drives much of Fowler's study. Giovanni's first two books of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement, were extraordinarily popular. Black Feeling sold 2,000 copies in its first year, and Black Judgement sold 6,000 copies within the first six months. Between 1972 and 1980, Giovanni gave as many as 200 lectures and readings per year throughout the country. She has won numerous awards and been awarded many honorary degrees. In addition to her well-known volumes of poetry and essays, Giovanni has also published several books of children's poetry (Spin a Soft Black Song, 1971; Ego Tripping and Other Poems for Young Readers, 1973; and Vacation Time, 1979, which won the Children's Reading Roundtable of Chicago Award). In 1987 PBS released the film Spirit to Spirit: The Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Fowler asserts that Giovanni is "quite possibly the most widely read living poet in the United States today" (ix). Why, then, she asks, has Giovanni been neglected by most literary scholars and critics? Fowler attributes this neglect to "judgments derived from early reviews by detractors and extremely selective reading of her work itself" by scholars (ix). In her study, Fowler seeks to "initiate a serious dialogue about Giovanni's poetry by offering a critical and analytical overview of that work and by correcting misperceptions about her life as well as her work" and to provide "a starting point for future consideration of Giovanni's individual volumes of poetry as well as of her overall development" (x).

Much of the biographical material Fowler uses is derived from Giovanni's collection of autobiographical essays Gemini, as well as the author's own friendship with Giovanni. (Both teach at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University.) Fowler traces influences on Giovanni's work and life, pointing out that her maternal grandmother was something of an activist, distressing her husband by virtue of her involvement with such groups as the Highlander Folk School, which was suspected to be communist because it was interracial. Louvenia would volunteer her granddaughter for demonstrations, such as the one against segregated dining facilities at Rich's department store in Knoxville, or she would send Giovanni to deliver Sunday dinner to local shut-ins, instilling in her a strong sense of accountability and service to her community.

The book is divided into six chapters, with an appended interview and selected bibliography. After an introductory overview of biographical information in the first chapter, Fowler turns to the early poetry. She carefully traces the controversial publishing history of Black Feeling, Black Talk and Black Judgement, along with selected poems from Re:Creation (Broadside, 1970), as The Women and The Men (with Morrow, 1975, for which Giovanni was roundly criticized).

Fowler argues that one of the most important themes in Giovanni's work is the "precedence of the individual over ideology" (28). She notes that, in Giovanni's second volume, Black Judgement, the poetry (although it contains "Nikki-Rosa" and "The Great Pax Whitie") suggests that Giovanni was coming to understand that "her gender set her apart from the Black revolutionary leaders" (43). Ultimately, Fowler concludes,"...Giovanni's refusal to be controlled by either the Black Arts Movement or the Black power movement was a refusal to be controlled by the men to whom both these movements seemed to belong" (46).

Chapter Three takes up My House (1972), the sales for which outstripped those of the earlier volumes, The Women and the Men (1975), and the numerous record albums Giovanni made during the '70s. The shift from the early works to My House can be seen in a voice that emerges as stronger, more mature. Fowler argues that Giovanni long before feminist writers began to do so, celebrated women. While this statement is debatable (after all, she began writing well after Gwendolyn Brooks's women-focused poetry in The Streets of Bronzeville [1945] and especially Annie Allen in 1950, to name only two instances), it raises important questions for feminist (and other) critics: What is the basis of the (relative) critical neglect, and what kinds of readings might a feminist critical lens bring to the poetry, moving beyond the surface themes and images and into the struggle and resistance that may be inscribed less visibly in the poetry?

Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978) marks another change in Giovanni's voice, representing an attempt to "present [the] savaging of dreams" as a "universal experience, an inherent aspect of the human condition." However, this effort "is often at odds with [Giovanni's] acknowledgment of the fact that it is an experience more common to some groups of people than to others" (87), and this, says Fowler, accounts for the darkness of mood in Cotton Candy. The primary theme is the ephemeral nature of life. For Giovanni, cotton candy "becomes an apt metaphor for life itself, which one invests in and strives to make better despite the inevitability of change, and ultimately, death" (88).

Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983) moves in a more hopeful direction than the relatively bleak Cotton Candy. The dedication of the book makes clear a shift in the poet's consciousness:

This book is dedicated to the courage and fortitude of those who ride the night winds--who are the day trippers and midnight cowboys--who in sonic solitude or the hazy hell of habit know--that for all the devils and gods--for all the illnesses and drugs to cure them--Life is a marvelous, transitory adventure--and are determined to push us into the next century, galaxy--possibility.

Giovanni's form begins to change in this volume with the appearance of groups of words separated by ellipses. Giovanni "was looking...for a way to create a fuller and visually more accessible page" in the use of this "lineless form," as well as finding a way to counter what she saw as a growing trend toward absolutism in public discourse. The ellipses represent, of course, omissions, but, for Giovanni they also signal the limited access of truth that language allows. In addition, says Fowler, this new form "represents a logical evolution from [Giovanni's] use of free verse, comparable to the evolution of jazz from the blues" (11). The use of the lineless form raises interesting questions about gender and writing and would, it seems to me, be a fruitful line of inquiry for scholars examining women's experiments with language. For example, to what extent is the lineless form, with its ellipses and short phrases an utterance of resistance? How do race and gender contribute to the struggle that inheres in these and the earlier poems? Is this new form a bridge between the poem and the essay, or is it an attempt to create a new way of writing poetry--one that is (intentionally) not recognizable or easily coded into traditional poetic categories?

Nikki Giovanni is a good introduction to the work of this popular poet, bringing together major works for examination and usefully tracing the lineaments of Giovanni's writing career. Fowler's book should be beneficial to those interested in African American women's writing, and although it skims the surface of the critical and theoretical issues that may underlie the response to Giovanni's poetry, it provides a sound and provocative beginning for anyone interested in further study.

Virginia Fowler. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Twayne, 1992. 150 pp. $21.95.

Reviewed by

Ann Folwell Stanford DePaul University