Poet’s words truly take flight
Well, she didn’t win the spoken-word Grammy Award -- that went to Al Franken (for “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them”). Then there’s the NAACP Image Award coming up in March, which she’s also positively positive she won’t win. Her competitors? Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Not going to happen, not in a million years.
That’s fine with her. She’s just happy to be nominated, to show up and sparkle, sparkle, sparkle.
But the bat -- that’s hers and hers alone. Her own species, named not for a Grammy winner or a Pulitzer Prize winner, but for her, Nikki Giovanni.
The Giovanni. The poet’s bat.
It’s really cute, she says, with big ears and little eyes. Next year, she’ll trek to the rain forests of Ecuador for a little tete-a-tete with her namesake. She cannot wait. After all, she’s most likely the only poet ever to have had a mammal named after her.
“The Giovanni is out there,” she says, grinning. Big. “I just think it’s sooo cool.... I’ve done something that neither one of them [Walker and Morrison] has done, which is have a bat named after you.” She laughs.
“Years from now, they’ll say this is the Giovanni, and nobody will know why.”
“Why” is because a certain Texas Tech biologist loves her work.
So when Robert Baker discovered this species of the Micronycteris genus, he felt compelled to pay homage. There are, he says, only about 5,000 species of mammals, and most already have names. (The Latin name of this particular bat can’t be published until the formal paperwork is completed.)
“I’ve got some of her writings hanging on my wall ... so this is somebody you ought to say thanks to,” Baker says. He’d never met Giovanni, he says, but still....
As a poet, he says, “she knows things that my brain knows and she brings them out.” He quotes vintage Giovanni: “The beautiful are to be pitied / as the ugly / but the average is no guarantee of happiness.”
“That just captures so much.”
Indeed, Giovanni has been capturing life, the pulse of the times, since she was a baby-faced radical with the black arts movement, pen in fist, spitting verbal grenades onto the racially charged landscape of the 1960s.
She’s 60, and time hasn’t much tempered the rage, though it has pruned her power-to-the-people ‘fro into a cropped little platinum affair. “Thug life” is tattooed on her wrist, homage to rapper Tupac Shakur, whom she sees as a young martyr slain before his time.
As she sees it, hip-hop is carrying the banner for a new kind of revolution.
The fighting spirit remains, but she’s also found a certain amount of peace. Time had brought trouble. She wrestled with cancer, eventually winning the war but losing a lung. She writes a book every couple of years. Her latest, “The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni,” is nominated for outstanding literary achievement at the NAACP Image Awards. (Her Grammy nomination was for “The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection,” a CD collection of essays and poems past and present.) But Giovanni can’t write about the cancer.
“When I had cancer,” she says, her eyes misting up, “I didn’t want to pray for life. I thought that would be cheap. I figured whoever God was knew I didn’t want to die. So I prayed for grace.”
Grace she got, along with a palpable sense of wonder. Today, her thought process is loopily nonlinear, often fueled by the giddy glee of a much younger woman. She is fascinated -- no, obsessed, with space.
Space travel is a “life-seeking thing,” necessary to save humankind, which she sees as a “scared, crazy species.” And if we go to Mars -- and she really thinks we need to head there as quickly as possible -- then for sustenance, for instruction, for a compass, we need to get a clue. And that clue can be found in the spirituals of the Africans who were brought to the Americas in the Middle Passage, the dangerous and for many deadly slave ship voyage from the west coast of Africa across the Atlantic.
“We have to go back to the Middle Passage. The slaves on ships, they made a decision to live, and they decided to remain sane. Ultimately, space travel is Middle Passage.”
A Middle Passage upon which she would be only too happy to embark.
“In a heartbeat,” she says. “Are you kidding?”