Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, by Virginia C. Fowler (editor).
Where I learned:
Pg. 46: Critics, especially regarding Black artistry, aim to assign Black artists one descriptive bubble for their work, placing them into a categorical mold that will absolve the critic from having to perform their task effectively (the critic’s task = to continually interpret work so that no matter what is going on at a current period, a piece of work still asserts itself as a viable entity, something to be contended with, something that can continue to be useful for time periods to come). By grouping all Black art together, critics are either intentionally or unintentionally enlisting Black artists to do their job for them instead of them — the critics — taking the time to adequately interpret each piece of art independently and unhinged from the constructed stereotypes and expectations that constitute Black art. A critic, most of the time, will look at Black skin and assume that their art is like the art that precedes them — i.e. all Black male and women singers are R&B artists, all Black male artists in general are rappers, etc. By acting on this assumption, it is much easier for the critic to interpret the art through a lens that’s already been used — one that assigns the review of the Black artist’s new album to the Urban department automatically, for example. By applying this overarching ideal to all Black art, the critic is relieved from having to think critically about the Back art (and perhaps, relieved of having to think critically about Blackness altogether) and view it from a new lens: one that separates the art from the assumption and categorizes it as what it truly could be.
Pg. 62: “I think I’m more interested in exploring people than I am in exploring ideologies — mostly because I’ve explored ideologies and there’s a limit. It’s always going to come back to you.”
When you submit yourself to using ideologies as a way to understand people, you’ll end up only receiving a better depiction of yourself. Your ideologies are a quilt stitched together using the fabric of your beliefs, your convictions, your perceptions of the outside world. Ideologies are the ways that you interpret differences so that you can feel more comfortable about their deviations. You cannot apply your concepts to people and expect to understand them wholly and without subjection.
Pg. 63: What makes white women happy and what makes Black women happy will always differ because white women have always been afforded both luxury and general humanity where Black women have not.
You know how you can feel something’s truth before you can recognize or see it? This is what this concept was for me. I think about all of the Black women and girls who I know who find the most sincere joy in sublunary things that are often forgotten by women of a different caste system: new TVs, new coats, new shoes, a big purse, a manicure, an acceptance letter, a new restaurant that encourages a photo of your food before you eat it… We have been historically (and presently) forgotten about where the joy of these experiences have been considered, so when we finally feel that fabric or escape the second glances when being led to our seat in that restaurant, it is a cause of celebration for us. These are things that make us happy — as superficial as they are — and when we express this happiness, we are viewed as shallow, cheap, ghetto, “not being used to anything nice.” If we are these things, we still deserve respect and humanity, but we are not these things when we are expressing the relief of being able to indulge in the niceties that we have been excluded from for so long. I would not expect a white woman to have an independent reaction of triumph and exhilaration when finally purchasing the bag of her dreams and subsequently posting about it on Instagram. I just wouldn’t. But when I see that happening from women who look like me, I share in their joy because I know that it has been a long time coming. And I am happy for them.
On the woman feminist’s role: “Where I sympathize most with men is that there’s nothing in the system that says that they can be wrong. And I would hope, speaking of the feminist movement, that one of the things they’d do is give men the same space that they need. … because once you can be wrong, then you can be terrifically right. If you always have to be right, then you have to be safe, which means you’ll never do anything.”
On individualism over communalism: Giovanni enlists the idea that individualism, to her, effects change far better and more withstanding than communalism does. She insists that if given the space to be one’s own individual with one’s own belief systems, proclivities, habits, and the like — and if this space is afforded to the next person and the next — then that freedom allows her to be her own individual with convictions strong enough to incite lasting change. Conversely, the idea of communalism, to her, dampens an individual’s distinctiveness and likens them more to robots blindly following a communal command as opposed to each person enlisting their own beliefs into an overarching system meant to ignite change.
To this, I agree — mainly because I can recognize when freedom is of utmost importance to another woman, and I appreciate this quality of Giovanni’s. I cannot be subsumed into a community that changes my comfort to theirs while subsequently expecting me to make a difference either for the greater good or for myself. I have to be myself with my own habits and my own ideas and my own likes for me to propose positive differences in another life or community.
Pg. 72: “But Nikki, it’s also true that since your mother played that role, you haven’t got to.”
One of my favorite dialogues in this book is the one that occurs between Giovanni and James Baldwin. In this specific incident, Giovanni is bold in her proclamations of not tolerating the things that her mother and her mother’s mothers endured, and shaming the women who choose to follow more traditional roles of motherhood and domesticity. Baldwin gently submits to her the possibility that because her mother — Giovanni’s mother — assumed that traditional role with no resistance or contention, Giovanni now has the freedom to reject that role if she wants to.
I think this is something that non-traditional women should consider when weighing other women’s options as if they were asked to be weighed in the first place. It is not of our own accord that we are able to freely reject the roles of heritage in a home. The women who came before us who assumed what we wouldn’t made it possible for us to say no where they had to say yes. And we should give honor and respect to those before us who did so while we continue to make it safer for those who won’t.
“I just have never believed that solutions come in isolated, individual packages. Roles may. The role-playing may be individual, but the solutions are not.”
Giovanni’s response to claims of violence not being the answer (pg. 94-95): “Because we have been subject to some of the most horrendous violence. We find that love is not the opposite of violence. Love does not stop violence. Nonviolence is not the antithesis of violence. It does not stop violence. The antithesis of love is indifference, not hate. And I think that the answer to violence is a response. One must respond.”
Pg. 96: “That the violence hurled against us will be met… with violence, I am going to say yes, I can take the weight because I cannot take the weight of constant degradation. … Black people… have given up on trying to reform white people.”
I think this is essential to understand — especially right now — and is equally pathetic to have to compare nearly sixty years after this book was published. There is nothing more that I can say that would better explain this concept to a reader who wants to understand.
Pg. 102: “The question is how, in our interaction with each other, do we get the things that sustain us? And how do we give what we need to give without giving the essence of ourselves?”
I struggle with this a lot mainly because I am selfish and I like behaving as I want to, and in the brief moments that I do give, I am always silently wondering where I can draw the line between them and me, between their needs and my capacity, between love and the stopwatch ticking in my mind alerting me to when it will be time to detonate.
Giovanni on family relationships (pg. 116): “I am personally fond of my family. I think we get along — although not without effort. I mean, a family member’s like any other friend. That’s where people miss. They expect a family to take the worst of them and their friends get the best. They don’t work at a good relationship. I think familial relationships are very delicate and should be treated as you would any other love affair.”
Pg. 139-140: “Writers don’t write from experience. ...If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. We cheapen anything written when we consider it an experience. Because if it’s someone else’s experience, we don’t have to take it seriously. We could say ‘That’s what happened to ____; isn’t that a shame?’ The point is that’s what happened; that’s what still happens. Writers write because they empathize with the general human condition.”
When we relegate our writings to an experience, we’re limiting them and their potential. We’re allowing them to only exist in a vacuum, one time, and with limited meaning. We’re saying this happened one time — because experiences only happen one time — and then we set that instance in a corner never to be touched again. What causes experiences — what stirs them into creation — happens perpetually and all of the time around us. That’s where writers should write from. We write from the empathy we feel with those who continue to experience the human condition because those things that create experiences for us always happen on a continuum.
Pg. 145: “If I never contradict myself then I’m either not thinking or I’m conciliating positions and, therefore, not growing. There has to be a contradiction. There would be no point to having me go three-fourths of the way around the world if I couldn’t create an inconsistency, if I hadn’t learned anything. If I ever get to the moon, it would be absolutely pointless to have gone to the moon and come back with the same position.”
Inconsistencies = growth.
Small quotes of Giovanni’s insight on writing:
“The hallmark of a good writer is to make the worst person in the book understandable and sympathetic.”
“... take your thought to the farthest point; push yourself a little beyond what makes sense to you.”
“... It’s insufficient to just write that you are in love. Nobody cares. We care about what’s around it. What triggered the poem.”
“Follow your image as far as you can no matter how useless you think it is. Push yourself. Always ask ‘What else can I do with this image?’ because you have images before you have poems. Words are illustrations of thought.”
“You must be unintimidated by your own thoughts.”
“If you didn’t write it, would it still make sense to you?”
Giovanni on the role of the writing (pg. 199): “The writing is always secondary. You cannot write in a vacuum. And so the writing is always the second thing that happens. … First you conceptualize it or you experience it. But experience is no excuse. … There is nothing worse than somebody saying ‘Well, this is actually what happened.’ Nobody cares what actually happened. … What you’re trying to get the student to bring out is what does this mean? What is the larger context here? And the writing is always going to be secondary to the life. … People think that the writing is the product. But it’s not. It’s the byproduct. The product is the life.”