The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni Read Free

Lady Whose Voice I Like,” for example, the male speaker attributes Lena Horne’s success to her physical attractiveness and the attention bestowed on her by white people, rather than to her abilities and talent as a singer; his final exasperated charge is that “you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu,” to which she replies, “show me someone not full of herself / and i’ll show you an empty person.”
    Countless poems play variations on this theme, reiterating the idea that the position women are expected to occupy—solely because of their gender—leaves them “empty” in one way or another. Expected to “sit and wait / cause i’m a woman” (“All I Gotta Do”), women live in a world.
made up of baby clothes
  
to be washed
food
  
to be cooked
lullabies
  
to be sung
smiles
  
to be glowed
hair
  
to be plaited
ribbons
  
to be bowed
coffee
  
to be drunk
books
  
to be read
tears
  
to be cried
loneliness
  
to be borne
 
  
“[Untitled]”

    Expected to devote their lives to the needs of others, women do not necessarily receive any gratitude for such devotion, but may actually be punished for it. As Giovanni says in “Boxes,”
    everybody says how strong
    i am
    only black women
    and white men
    are truly free
    they say
    it’s not difficult to see
    how stupid they are
    i would not reject
    my strength
    though its source
    is not choice
    but responsibility
    Variations on the idea expressed in the final stanza may be found frequently in Giovanni’s poetry.
    While many of Giovanni’s poems explore and describe women’s lives, others celebrate women—Black women in particular—as a way of providing an antidote to the slurs so often cast upon them. None offers a more audacious celebration than the enormously popular “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why).” Without question one of the most powerful celebrations of the Black woman ever written, the poem attributes to her the creation of all the great civilizations of the world. Far from being bound to a narrow and confined existence, the speaker asserts, in the poem’s famous concluding words, that “I…can fly / like a bird in the sky….” Although “Ego Tripping” accumulates outrageous claims to power (“the filings from my fingernails are / semiprecious jewels,” “The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid / across three continents”), it also accurately reflects Giovanni’s frankly chauvinistic belief that whatever good we find in our world is attributable to the Black woman. Characteristically, in this poem and many others (aswell as in her prose), Giovanni urges that we not be ashamed of an aspect of identity over which we have no control—in this case, gender—just because the world in which we live uses it as a basis for oppression. Although she does not deny the reality of the oppression, she rejects the notion that the victim is responsible for her own oppression. Instead, in what is a frequent gesture, she embraces her gender and her race, and, in poems like “Ego Tripping,” offers her own definition and description of the Black woman. She once commented, in fact, that “Ego Tripping” was written in opposition to the gender roles typically taught to little girls; it “was really written for little girls…. I really got tired of hearing all of the little girls’ games, such as Little Sally Walker.” 8
    The speaker in “Poem (For Nina)” similarly emphasizes the importance of embracing her racial identity. If the white world cannot see beyond the color of her skin, and tries to oppress her because of it, then she will embrace in order to celebrate that component of her identity:
    if i am imprisoned in my skin let it be a dark world with a deep bass walking a witch doctor to me for