There was a directness and urgency in her spoken and written voice but she could be mischievous and funny too
ikki Giovanni was the epitome of what we Jamaicans call Talawa, small but mighty. I told her so when we spoke in February. She had a reputation for scolding interviewers when they strayed or said something stupid. I was nervous but needn’t have been. Giovanni had a slow-rising smile that emitted warmth, even as she told me, apparently to put me at ease, “Remember, the door is always open, if you don’t like what you’re hearing you can always walk away.
Her poetry emerged from the fire and rage that fuelled the civil rights movement. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, her poem Reflections on 4 April 1968 asked:Giovanni was African American from the peel to the core, but she reminded me of my Jamaican mother and the resilient women of her church who spoke simply, with gravitas.
From her poems, it’s clear that Giovanni had an aversion to pretension. Form was important but fundamentally her poetry was a platform for truth-telling. She was a straight shooter and would take her argument to the man, black or white. She called out her own feckless wife-beating father in the poem Baby West.
There was a directness and urgency in her spoken and written voice. But she was often mischievous and funny, too. In I Take Master Card, for instance, she instructs smooth-talking romancers that there is a price for love:‘cause I’m so strong and beautiful and wonderful and you couldIn 2010, I shared a stage with Giovanni in Washington, where I read my own work in the shadow of her startling performance, and didn’t meet her again until earlier this year at the Barbican in London.
Giovanni was from a generation who spoke matter-of-factly about the certainty of death. Her poems underlined that preparedness, perhaps most notably in When I Die.Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories.
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