In Memory of Nikki Giovanni

June 7, 1943 - December 9, 2024

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Good morning, peeps, and welcome to wok F Daily with
Me your Girl. Daniel Moody recording from the Home Bunker, Folks,
I'm in a heavy space today as I record this show.
I'm recording this after finding out about the passing of

(00:34):
poet writer professor Nikki Giovanni. And for those that do
not know Nikki Giovanni, please do yourself the incredible favor
of googling her and her extraordinary work and life. I

(00:56):
was introduced to her poetry when I was sixteen years old,
and interestingly, for me, I was in high school, and
as many of you know, I grew up in a
majority white community school district where I could count the

(01:20):
black people maybe maybe there were ten of us. And
I say that because it's hard to understand if you
are not black. So I will just offer this episode
as just a kind of stream of consciousness around what

(01:44):
it means to exist inside of a white community as
a black person. And for me, at sixteen, I wasn't
really conscious of my blackness as a marker of negativity, criminality, indecency.

(02:07):
I didn't see it as something to be ashamed of.
I saw my blackness as something that I didn't quite
understand given the fact that my family was not from
the United States, and for me, my relationship to my

(02:30):
blackness as a child of immigrants is one that I
think that I have spent a lot of my life
grappling with, and by grappling, I mean trying to understand
and make sense of. So when my white teacher, male teacher,
mister Leogrand said, Danielle, go and check out this poet.

(02:58):
Go to the library and check out this poet, Nikki Giovanni.
And so in my sixteen year old ignorance, I'm like,
why is this dude telling me to go and research
an Italian man? Like I give a damn. And mister Leogrand,

(03:18):
my teacher, was one of the coolest fucking people on
the planet. In hindsight, I realized that even though I
grew up in a majority white area ninety six percent
white school district, by great fortune or probably alignment of

(03:40):
the universe, I had some of the most enlightened white teachers.
I think that I could have had mister Leogrand being
one of them, because one he kind of ran our
high school classroom like a class There was a lot

(04:01):
of freedom. He treated the students as if they were
as if we were young adults, right, that didn't need
the conformity of rules and oppression. That if he recognized,
right that if you treat people young people as you know,
young adults, and give them responsibility of themselves, their space,

(04:26):
what they're learning, you can open up a universe inside
of them. And so when I went to the library,
and now in hindsight, of course, speaking on this at
a time when again books are being banned and librarians
are leaving the profession and libraries are no longer sanctuaries,

(04:48):
I realized how profound it was to go into this
library where I spent so many weekends with my mom
and my sister and they go when I look up,
who I think is this Italian author? And come to
find on the cover of this book this beautiful, seemingly

(05:13):
petite black woman with this small spherical afro, and I
just devoured her poetry, took it in like air, and
it was the first time that I felt seen. I

(05:35):
felt this articulation that my spirit had been wrestling with
about what it meant to be black in this place
that feels the need to categorize, to minimize and to
sort people and assign value based on your skin color,

(05:57):
based on your gender, And it was a wild ride.
And I'm so grateful to that teacher because I would
read so many of Nikki Giovanni's poems, and I would

(06:18):
consume so much in my world would be opened up
to this just portal of black literary geniuses, American literary
geniuses who again categorized and minimized because they spoke and

(06:39):
wrote and taught on the varied black experience. And what
was so dope about Nikki Giovanni and being introduced to
her as a teenager was there was so much friction,
right that comes with youth and growing and growing up

(07:02):
in your mind expanding and you beginning to question the
world around you. Why is such a profound question. And
for me, as a young black child of immigrants woman,
I could see all of the ways that society had

(07:27):
already decided who I was and what I could and
could not do, what I could and could not dream
and aspire to be. And that in and of itself
is so deep to shoulder and to recognize at such
a young age. And now, granted, for me, I had

(07:50):
sixteen years of relative ignorance. And when I say ignorance.
I do actually meet bliss where because my family came
from Jamaica to the United States at a time when
there was a unbelievable racial recogning that had been tearing

(08:16):
this country apart for decades, if not centuries prior. They
experienced it to a certain extent from arm's length, inappropriately
also sorting themselves outside of American blackness, which in hindsight,
was a way to distance themselves from Black American pain.

(08:43):
And so it would not be until that day in
eleventh grade, in my Honors history class, second day of school,
where for the first time, I was called a nigger,

(09:06):
which that word is in and of itself used as
a weapon, used as a way to cause as much
psychic harm and emotional damage as possible. Now, if you've
been listening to me for all of these years, and

(09:29):
I've read anything that I have written, then you know
that my response in that moment was pretty classic Daniel
Moody woke as fuck response before I even knew who
I really was and what it meant, and would articulate
what it means to be woke so many decades later.

(09:54):
But I remember looking at that sixteen year old white
boy who was admonishing me for sitting in a seat
that he wanted but was not yet assigned, and thought
that by intimidating me and trying to humiliate me and

(10:17):
remind me of my place as the sole black person, soul,
black woman girl in that class, that I would then
relinquish my sense of self and give up my seat
so that he could sit with his friends. I didn't

(10:40):
even know those people that I was sitting next to.
It didn't matter, but I decided that I was not
going to move, and so I looked at him very clearly,
and I said, the seats have not been assigned, so
go sit someplace else. And that's when he responded with
the word nigger, and I said, go fuck yourself and

(11:04):
literally fuck off. And in that moment you heard like
the screeching of the desks, not away from me, but
away from him. But no one in that class, no
one in that moment stood up for me, no one
admonished him. And the silence in that moment allowed me

(11:29):
to really understand that I was indeed alone. So in
another class, when my teacher would say to me, go
find Nikki Giovanni and I would find her book Black
Talk black feeling, black talk, black judgment. And when I

(11:55):
tell you that that book of poetry changed my world
view and empowered me in a way that till this
day I probably really don't understand. But my sheer existence

(12:17):
as a very bold young black girl in an all
white school to question, to ask why, and stand resolute
waiting for an answer. Nikki Giovanni's words made me realize
that I wasn't alone, that there were so many generations

(12:41):
of bold black voices that had come before me, and
whether or not I knew them, I was them. So
to wake up to the news of the passing of
this extraordinary giant at a time when the world feels

(13:07):
like it is in just this dark place of regression,
I felt pain and a heaviness because in her eighty
one years, she had seen and experienced so much grief,
so much death of other black brilliant giants, whether through

(13:31):
murder by the state or disease poverty. But I realized
that she also equally saw and created so much art
and beauty and joy. And not to be alive is
to live straddled between light and darkness. It is to

(13:56):
try and seek out the light when you are in
a place of darkness, and when you are in that
place of darkness, to recognize that you are, in fact
the light that you are seeking. And that is what
hit me today, is that there is really no escaping

(14:17):
the depravity that is humankind. There is really no running
from it, because both that darkness and that light exist
in all of us. And when we see it acted
out in front of us, the reason why it sets
off alarms is because we know that it exists inside

(14:41):
of us as well. And she wrote about it all
to help us make sense of just such senselessness. I
think about it too, inside of the context of where
we find ourselves over the last week or so, where

(15:02):
this uber, wealthy white CEO is murdered in broad daylight
in midtown Manhattan, and now we know or the media
and law enforcement are leading us to believe that the
person responsible, another white, wealthy man, shouldn't be hailed as

(15:28):
some type of folk hero. And you see corporate mainstream
media admonishing those that had narro a tear to shed
for the murder of Brian Thompson, and then you have
politicians and media personalities saying this is not who we are.
All America has ever done is hail and celebrate murderers.

(15:52):
Think about it. If you kill one person, you're a murderer.
You kill tens of thousands from money, you're an extraordinary ceo.
You kill generations, they call you a president or a
prime minister. How is it that we are being told

(16:13):
don't celebrate this Luigi Mangione who murdered this ceo, he's
a murderer. But Biden and net and Yahoo are not.
And yeah, I said Biden, because without our weapons and
our tax dollars, fifty thousand plus Palestinians wouldn't be dead,

(16:35):
murdered in broad daylight and at midnight. But I am
somehow an anti Semite if I articulate that reality out loud.
We have statues made of marble to insurrectionists flags that
has hung on state capitol buildings until recently that celebrate

(17:02):
white enslavers, rapists, and murderers. We'd say that this country
was created by these.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Great men who all owned other people, who bore children
that they turned into property. So don't talk to me
about depravity and about what we should and shouldn't celebrate,
because there is ne'er a thing, a person, a place,

(17:36):
a holiday in this country that is not steeped in
someone else's blood and suffering that has been sanitized to
make white men seem like the victor and the heroes
to be hailed. Nikoi Giovanni spoke and wrote about all

(17:58):
of this and so much more, and right before I
turned my microphone on, I had just finished being quiet
for the last few hours, lighting candles and incense and
giving deep gratitude for her life's work and for her

(18:18):
life while watching her one hour in fifty six minute
conversation with James Baldwin from nineteen seventy one in London.
I've seen it so many times and everything that they
say continues to ring true today, if not deeper since

(18:41):
I was sixteen years old. We are nothing without artists, poets, writers, sculptors,
those that use their mediums to try and make sense
out of enselessness and provide hope in the midst of hopelessness.

(19:05):
So I encourage all of you, during times of despair,
to go to a library, go to a bookstore, take
a name that you haven't been taught about, particularly a
name of a person that is black that has offered

(19:26):
critical analysis on who we are as humans. Because black
people have endured so goddamn much and their critique. Our
critique allows people to see themselves, both the light and
the dark clearer, understanding that we make choices every day

(19:52):
deciding who we are and who we want to be.
It isn't that we are inherently better because we have
been categorized as such. It is because we choose to
continue learning, to continue growing, to continue questioning and challenging
ourselves to know more, and choosing to be bold.

Speaker 1 (20:17):
May Nikki Giovanni rest in great power. That is it
for me today, Dear friends on wok f as always,
Power to the people and to all the people. Power,
get woke and stay woke as fuck.