![]() Safety West Bank settler extremists widen campaign against Palestinians That dialogue leads into an excerpt of a 1971 conversation between Giovanni and another luminary, Baldwin, which ran as a two-part episode on the television series “Soul!” Ellis Haizlip, who produced and hosted the show, introduced this particular discussion in a way that felt like a metaphor to space, and finding light in the darkness: The conversation on the radio delves into her childhood and her abusive father – and how it makes her analysis of Black men tenuous. ![]() The call letters contain an urgent intonation, an inquiry of a higher power: The imagery of her reading “I Married My Mother,” a poem about abuse, trauma, and emotional release, on the radio station WHYY is stunning. What brings those slivers together is Giovanni’s unique analysis – with an incisiveness that cuts beyond the bone and to one’s soul. What our commentator comes away with is a sense of love and awe. BAM is a fitting nickname for the “big bang” that would birth the careers of icons such as James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Gil Scott-Heron.Ī new documentary offers a nonlinear, lyrical look at the activism and life of a celebrated Black poet. Her poetry is a stargate into the activism of the period, a timeline from past to present and beyond.īorn in Knoxville, Tennessee, and raised in Cincinnati, Giovanni rose to fame as one of the pioneers in the Black Arts Movement (BAM), which drew heavily from both the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. It offers slivers of Giovanni’s life, focusing on matriarchy, sisterhood, and sexuality. The documentary, which is now streaming on Max, is simultaneously victorious and vulnerable. And yet, the documentary is about not just transmission, but translation – specifically, the uniqueness of how Giovanni views life and the world around her. It feels deficient to call Nikki Giovanni a poet laureate after viewing her documentary “Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project.” She is much more than her words, which span across the space of Blackness and the endless time it seems to take to secure our civil rights.
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