Zakir Hussain at a festival in 2022, above; and below, with, from left, Shankar Mahadevan, V. Selvaganesh and Ganesh Rajagopalan. of Shakti, winners of the “Global Music Album” award for “This Moment.”
, pose in the press room at the 66th GRAMMY Awards at Peacock Theater on February 04, 2024 iCredit...Piyal Adhikary/EPA, via Shutterstock
Zakir Hussain, a percussionist and composer who was both a master of North Indian classical music and a linchpin of far-reaching world-music fusions, died on Saturday in San Francisco. He was 73.
His death, in a hospital, was from the lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, his family said in a statement. He lived in the Bay Area.
Mr. Hussain earned the honorific Ustad, given to Muslim virtuosos of Hindustani (North Indian) classical music. He performed and recorded extensively with leading Indian musicians, including Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and Shivkumar Sharma. His main instrument was the tabla, the tuned drums that accompany Indian classical ragas, but he also played many other traditional and modern instruments.
Mr. Hussain’s work reached well beyond the Indian classical tradition to forge global musical hybrids. With the English jazz guitarist John McLaughlin, the Indian violinist L. Shankar and the Indian percussionist T.H. Vinayakram, he formed the group Shakti in 1973. Shakti was not only an East-West fusion, but also, with its two percussionists, a fusion of North and South Indian rhythms.
Mr. McLaughlin, Mr. Hussain and three other Indian musicians regrouped as Shakti to record the 2023 album “This Moment”; it won a Grammy Award this year for best global music album.
Mr. Hussain shared two more Grammys this year — for global music performance and contemporary instrumental album — for the album “As We Speak,” a collaboration by Mr. Hussain, the banjo player Béla Fleck, the bassist Edgar Meyer and the Indian bansuri (bamboo flute) player Rakesh Chaurasia.
Through the years, Mr. Hussain performed and recorded with George Harrison, Van Morrison, Yo-Yo Ma, Pharoah Sanders, the Japanese drum group Kodo, Herbie Hancock and Charles Lloyd.
He also composed soundtrack music and orchestral works, and until recently he played more than 150 concerts a year. To every performance, he brought an eagerly attentive presence, beaming as his hands flew over his tabla drums to deliver fleet, microscopically precise beats and melodic tones.
At the ceremony where he accepted the 2022 Kyoto Prize, a Japanese lifetime achievement award in the arts and sciences, Mr. Hussain said: “I am from India representing the age-old tradition of North Indian classical music. The way it was played 500 years ago — same way it is being played now, performed now. The difference now is we not only are doing our music, Indian classical music, but we are also learning how to be able to talk our music in as many different musical languages as possible, because the world has become small.”
Zakir Hussain Qureshi was born on March 9, 1951, in Bombay (now Mumbai). He was the eldest son of Ravi Shankar’s longtime tabla drummer Alla Rakha Qureshi. His mother, Bavi Begum, oversaw the household while also taking care of her husband’s students. She changed his surname to Hussain a few days after he was born, on the advice of a saint, he said.
Mr. Hussain dated his musical career from two days after he was born.
“I was brought home from the hospital,” he told NPR in 2015. “The tradition is that the son is handed to the father, and then the father has to recite a prayer in his son’s ear, putting him on his way. My father, when he took me in his arm, instead of reciting a prayer, he sang rhythms in my ear. And my mother was very upset and said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ And he said, ‘Because this is my prayer.’”
After playing on drums, pots and pans as a young child, Mr. Hussain officially became his father’s student at 7. They would awaken daily before dawn to study Indian classical music for three hours. Before starting his school classes, Zakir recited the Quran at a madrasa and sang hymns at a Roman Catholic church. He lived near a mosque, where he would hear Sufi qawwali music.
Image
Credit...Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
Mr. Hussain played his first paid concert when he was 12. He became a session musician performing Indian film music, which often fused an international assortment of styles. He made his United States debut at 18, playing with Ravi Shankar at the Fillmore East in New York in 1970, when his father was ill, and continuing with Shankar on tour.
In San Francisco, he joined jam sessions with the Grateful Dead and recorded with band members on the 1971 solo album by the Dead’s drummer Mickey Hart, “Rolling Thunder.”
Mr. Hussain studied and taught ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a Ph.D. He moved to Northern California to teach at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, where he led the Tal Vadya Rhythm Band, a cross-cultural, percussion-centered group.
Mr. Hart joined the group in 1975, and led by him and Mr. Hussain, it was renamed the Diga Rhythm Band. It released a debut album, “Diga,” in 1976, featuring the Dead’s Jerry Garcia as guest guitarist. One of its tracks, “Happiness Is Drumming,” was reworked into the Dead’s song “Fire on the Mountain.”
Mr. Hussain often joined Mr. Hart through the years, on projects including the 1991 album “Planet Drum,” which won the first Grammy Award for world music album. Global Drum Project — a group with Mr. Hussain, Mr. Hart, the Puerto Rican percussionist Giovanni Hidalgo and the Nigerian percussionist Sikiru Adepoju — also won a world-music Grammy, in 2009.
In 1978, Mr. Hussain married Antonia Minnecola, a dancer in the Indian classical style Kathak. She was also his manager. She survives him, along with their daughters, Isabella and Anisa Qureshi; two brothers, Taufiq and Fazal Qureshi; a sister, Khurshid Aulia; and a granddaughter.
Through the years, Mr. Hussain appeared on hundreds of albums, equally at home with Indian classical traditions and fresh multicultural hybrids. He recorded dazzling tabla duets with his father and extended, introspective ragas with leading Indian musicians. In 1991, he started a label, Moment Records, to release his classical and contemporary collaborations. Eight years later, the producer Bill Laswell and Mr. Hussain assembled Tabla Beat Science, a project that merged tabla drumming and electronics, leading to a studio album and a tour.
Throughout his career, Mr. Hussain continued to forge kinetic musical alliances.
“Music is a conversation that happens amongst people,” he said in an interview with India Today. “And it happens to be a process or an exercise which transcends all borders and all fences, all religions, all other ways of life, and it’s a living process unto itself.
“If people all over the world would consider interacting with each other the way the musicians and the artists all over the world interact with each other,” he continued, “we would have a much more peaceful planet.”
It is Saturday evening, and I find myself watching a spellbinding 1994 performance by Whitney Houston in the new 1994 South Africa of Nelson Mandela. I had never heard of this concert but, for some reason, I find that I am overcome by the performance and the setting. I know we currently have Beyonce, and Taylor, and even Mariah, but there is something about Whitney Houston's performance in this concert which separates her from all others. I encourage all who can to take a look at the PBS showing of this concert
but for so many of us it is her spoken word that was so powerful, so please listen to understand what we once had amongst us ... and in recordings such as these, still do.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr.[1][2] (June 7, 1943 – December 9, 2024) was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets,[2] her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a 2004 Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends".[2] Giovanni was a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.[3]
Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement of the period, her early work provides a strong, militant African-American perspective, leading one writer to dub her the "Poet of the Black Revolution".[2] During the 1970s, she began writing children's literature, and co-founded a publishing company, NikTom Ltd, to provide an outlet for other African-American women writers. Over subsequent decades, her works discussed social issues, human relationships, and hip hop. Poems such as "Knoxville, Tennessee" and "Nikki-Rosa" have been frequently re-published in anthologies and other collections.[4]
Giovanni received numerous awards and holds 27 honorary degrees from various colleges and universities. She was also given the key to over two dozen cities. Giovanni was honored with the NAACP Image Award seven times. One of her more unique honors was having a South America bat species, Micronycteris giovanniae, named after her in 2007.[5]
Giovanni was proud of her Appalachian roots and worked to change the way the world views Appalachians and Affrilachians.[6]
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee,[7] to Yolande Cornelia Sr. and Jones "Gus" Giovanni. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio where her parents worked at Glenview School. In 1948, the family moved to Wyoming, Ohio, and sometime in those first three years, Giovanni's sister, Gary, began calling her "Nikki". In 1958, Giovanni returned to Knoxville to live with her grandparents and attend Austin High School.[4] In 1960, she began her studies at her grandfather's alma mater, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, as an "Early Entrant", which meant that she could enroll in college without having finished high school first.[8]
She immediately clashed with the then-Dean of Women and was expelled after neglecting to obtain the required permission from the Dean to leave campus and travel home for Thanksgiving break. Giovanni moved back to Knoxville, where she worked at a Walgreens drug store and helped care for her nephew, Christopher. In 1964, Giovanni spoke with the new Dean of Women at Fisk University, Blanche McConnell Cowan, who urged her to return to Fisk that fall. While at Fisk, Giovanni edited a student literary journal (titled Élan), reinstated the campus chapter of SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee), and published an essay in Negro Digest on gender questions in the Movement.[9] In 1967, she graduated with honors with a B.A. degree in history.
Soon after graduation, she suffered the loss of her grandmother, Louvenia Watson, and turned to writing to cope with the death. These poems would later be included in her collection Black Feelings, Black Talk. In 1968, Giovanni attended a semester at University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work toward an MSW and then moved to New York City. She briefly attended Columbia University School of the Arts toward an MFA in poetry and privately published Black Feeling, Black Talk.[10] In 1969, Giovanni began teaching at Livingston College of Rutgers University. She was an active member of the Black Arts Movement beginning in the late 1960s. In 1969, she gave birth to Thomas Watson Giovanni, her only child.[9]
After the birth of her son, Giovanni was accused of setting a bad example because there were not many single moms at that time. Giovanni noted that the birth of her son helped her to realize that children have different interests and require different content than adults. This realization led her to write six children's books.[11]
In 1970, she began making regular appearances on the television program Soul!, an entertainment/variety/talk show that promoted black art and culture and allowed political expression. Soul! hosted important guests such as Muhammad Ali, James Baldwin, Jesse Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Gladys Knight, Miriam Makeba, and Stevie Wonder. (In addition to being a "regular" on the show, Giovanni for several years helped design and produce episodes.) She published multiple poetry anthologies, children's books, and released spoken word albums from 1973 to 1987.[9]
In 1987, Giovanni was recruited by her partner and eventual wife Virginia Fowler to teach creative writing and literature at Virginia Tech.[12] There, Giovanni later became a University Distinguished Professor, before retiring in 2022.[13][14] She received the NAACP Image Award several times, received 20 honorary doctorates and various other awards, including the Rosa Parks and the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters.[7] She also holds the key to several different cities, including Dallas, Miami, New York City, and Los Angeles.[15] She was a member of the Prince Hall Order of the Eastern Star, she received the Life Membership and Scroll from the National Council of Negro Women, and was an Honorary Member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Giovanni was diagnosed with lung cancer in the early 1990s and underwent numerous surgeries. Her book Blues: For All the Changes: New Poems, published in 1999, contains poems about nature and her battle with cancer. In 2002, Giovanni spoke in front of NASA about the need for African Americans to pursue space travel, and later published Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems, which dealt with similar themes.[10]
She was also honored for her life and career by the HistoryMakers, along with being the first person to receive the Rosa L. Parks Women of Courage Award. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor from Dillard University in 2010.[9] In 2015, Giovanni was named one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History" for her contributions to poetry, education, and society.[16]
In 2020, Giovanni gave an extended interview to Bryan Knight's Tell A Friend Podcast where she gave an assessment of her life and legacy.[17]
Giovanni released a new album, The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni, on February 8, 2022.[18]
Seung-Hui Cho, a mass murderer who killed 32 people in the Virginia Tech shooting on April 16, 2007, was a student in one of Giovanni's poetry classes. Describing him as "mean" and "menacing", she approached the department chair to have Cho taken out of her class, and said she was willing to resign rather than continue teaching him. Cho was removed from her class in 2005.[23] After the massacre, Giovanni stated that, upon hearing of the shooting, she immediately suspected that Cho might be the shooter.[23]
Giovanni was asked by Virginia Tech president Charles Steger to give a convocation speech at the April 17 memorial service for the shooting victims (she was asked by Steger at 5:00 pm on the day of the shootings, giving her less than 24 hours to prepare the speech). She expressed that she usually feels very comfortable delivering speeches, but worried that her emotion would get the best of her.[24] On April 17, 2007, at the Virginia Tech Convocation commemorating the April 16 massacre,[24] Giovanni closed the ceremony with a chant poem, intoning:
We know we did nothing to deserve it. But neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS. Neither do the invisible children walking the night awake to avoid being captured by a rogue army. Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory. Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water....We are Virginia Tech.... We will prevail.[25][26][27]
Her speech also sought to express the idea that really terrible things happen to good people: "I would call it, in terms of writing, in terms of poetry, it's a laundry list. Because all you're doing is: This is who we are, and this is what we think, and this is what we feel, and this is why – you know?... I just wanted to admit, you know, that we didn't deserve this, and nobody does. And so I wanted to link our tragedy, in every sense, you know – we're no different from anything else that has ...."[24]
She thought that ending with a thrice-repeated "We will prevail" would be anticlimactic, and she wanted to connect back with the beginning, for balance. So, shortly before going onstage, she added a closing: "We are Virginia Tech."[24] Her performance received a 54-second standing ovation from the over-capacity audience in Cassell Coliseum, including then-President George W. Bush.[28]
Giovanni announced her retirement from Virginia Tech in September 2022, having taught there for 35 years.[29] She was conferred the title of University Distinguished Professor Emerita by the university in December 2022.[30]
On December 9, 2024, Giovanni died of complications from lung cancer in a Blacksburg, Virginia hospital. She was 81.[31][32]
The Civil Rights Movement and Black Power movements inspired her early poetry, which was collected in Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968), which sold over ten thousand copies in its first year; in Black Judgement (1968), selling six thousand copies in three months; and in Re: Creation (1970). All three of these early works aided in establishing Giovanni as a new voice for African Americans.(30) In "After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, Cheryl Clarke cites Giovanni as a woman poet who became a significant part of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement.[33] Giovanni was commonly praised as one of the best African-American poets emerging from the 1960s Black Power and Black Arts Movements.[34] Her early poems that were collected in the late 1960s and early 1970s are seen as radical as and more militant than her later work. Her poetry is described as being "politically, spiritually, and socially aware".[34]Evie Shockley describes Giovanni as "epitomizing the defiant, unapologetically political, unabashedly Afrocentric, BAM ethos".[35] Her work is described as conveying "urgency in expressing the need for Black awareness, unity, [and] solidarity." Likewise, Giovanni's early work has been considered to be "polemic" and "incendiary".[36] Examples of poems in which she vehemently advocated for change include "The True Import of Present Dialogue Black vs. Negro" (1968), "Poem for Black Boys" (1968) and "A Litany for Peppe" (1970).
Not only did Giovanni write about racial equality, but she also advocated for gender equality, as well. In fact, Odon states that "Giovanni's realignment of female identity with sexuality is crucial to the burgeoning feminist movement within the black community."[37] In the poem, "Revolutionary Dreams" (1970), Giovanni discusses gender and objectification. She writes, "Woman doing what a woman/Does when she's natural/I would have a revolution" (lines 14–16). Another example of a poem that encourages sexual equality is "Woman Poem" (1968). In "Woman Poem", Giovanni shows that the Black Arts Movement and racial pride were not as liberating for women as they were for men (Virginia Fowler, Introduction to the Collected Works of Nikki Giovanni). In "Woman Poem", Giovanni describes how pretty women become sex objects "and no love/or love and no sex if you're fat/get back fat black woman be a mother/grandmother strong thing but not woman."[38]
Giovanni took pride in being a "Black American, a daughter, mother, and a Professor of English".[34] Giovanni was also known for her use of African-American Vernacular English.[39] She wrote more than two dozen books, including volumes of poetry, illustrated children's books, and three collections of essays. Her work is said to speak to all ages, and she strived to make her work easily accessible and understood by both adults and children. Her writing, heavily inspired by African-American activists and artists,[39][40] also reflects the influences of issues of race, gender, sexuality, and the African-American family.[34] Her book Love Poems (1997) was written in memory of Tupac Shakur, and she stated that she would "rather be with the thugs than the people who are complaining about them."[41] Additionally, in 2007 she wrote a children's picture book titled Rosa, which centers on the life of Civil Rights leader Rosa Parks. In addition to this book reaching number three on the New York Best Seller list, it also received the Caldecott Honors Award, and its illustrator, Brian Collier, received the Coretta Scott King Award.[42]
Giovanni's poetry reached more readership through her active engagement with live audiences. She gave her first public reading at the New York City jazz spot, Birdland.[43] Her public expression of "oppression, anger, and solidarity"[43] as well as her political activism allowed her to reach more than just the poetic circles. After the birth of her son in 1969, Giovanni recorded several of her poems with a musical backdrop of jazz and gospel. She began to travel all around the world and speak and read to a wider audience. Even though Giovanni's earlier works were known to carry a militant, revolutionary tone, Giovanni communicated "a global sense of solidarity amongst oppressed peoples in the world" in her travels.[43] It is in this sense of human unity in which Giovanni aligned herself with the beliefs of Martin Luther King Jr. Like King, Giovanni believes a unified, collective government must be made up of the everyday, ordinary citizen, regardless of race, ethnicity, or gender.[43] In the 1970s and '80s her popularity as a speaker increased even more. In 1972 Giovanni interviewed Muhammad Ali on Soul![44]
Giovanni was often interviewed regarding themes pertaining to her poetry such as gender and race. In an interview entitled "I am Black, Female, Polite", Peter Bailey questions her regarding the role of gender and race in the poetry she writes.[45] Bailey specifically addresses the critically acclaimed poem "Nikki-Rosa," and questions whether it is reflective of the poet's own childhood and her experiences in her community. In the interview, Giovanni stresses that she did not like constantly reading the trope of the black family as a tragedy and that "Nikki-Rosa" demonstrates the experiences that she witnessed in her communities.[45] For example, Giovanni writes about her happy childhood as: "Black love is Black wealth and they'll/probably talk about my hard childhood/and never understand that/all the while I was quite happy" (lines 30–33).[46] Specifically, the poem deals with black folk culture and touches on such gender, race, and social issues as alcoholism and domestic violence and not having an indoor bathroom.[47]
Giovanni's poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s addressed black womanhood and black manhood among other themes. In a book she co-wrote with James Baldwin entitled A Dialogue, the two authors speak openly and frankly about the status of the black male in the household. Baldwin challenges Giovanni's opinion on the representation of black women as the "breadwinners" in the household. Baldwin states: "A man is not a woman. And whether he's wrong or right... Look, if we're living in the same house and you're my wife or my woman, I have to be responsible for that house."[42] Conversely, Giovanni recognizes the black man's strength, whether or not he is "responsible" for the home or economically advantaged. The interview makes it clear that regardless of who is "responsible" for the home, the black woman and the black man should be dependent on one another. In a 1972 Soul! interview with Mohammed Ali, Giovanni uses her popularity as a speaker to a broader audience to read some of her essay "Gemini" from her book Gemini. In the excerpt from that essay, Giovanni intones, "we are born men and women...we need some happiness in our lives, some hope, some love...I really like to think a black, beautiful loving world is possible."[44] Such themes appeared throughout her early poetry which focused on race and gender dynamics in the black community.[42]
Giovanni tours nationwide and frequently speaks out against hate-motivated violence.[47] At a 1999 Martin Luther King Day event, she recalled the 1998 murders of James Byrd Jr. and Matthew Shepard: "What's the difference between dragging a black man behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, and beating a white boy to death in Wyoming because he's gay?"[48]
Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983) acknowledged black figures. Giovanni collected her essays in the 1988 volume Sacred Cows... and Other Edibles. Her later works include Acolytes, a collection of 80 new poems, and On My Journey Now. Acolytes was her first published volume since her 2003 Collected Poems. The work is a celebration of love and recollection directed at friends and loved ones, and it recalls memories of nature, theater, and the glories of children. However, Giovanni's fiery persona still remains a constant undercurrent in Acolytes, as some of the most serious verse links her own life struggles (being a black woman and a cancer survivor) to the wider frame of African-American history and the continual fight for equality.
Giovanni's collection Bicycles: Love Poems (2009) is a companion work to her 1997 Love Poems. Both works touch on the deaths of her mother, her sister, and those massacred on the Virginia Tech campus. "Tragedy and trauma are the wheels" of the bicycle. The first poem ("Blacksburg Under Siege: 21 August 2006") and the last poem ("We Are Virginia Tech") reflect this. Giovanni chose the title of the collection as a metaphor for love itself, "because love requires trust and balance."[49]
In Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (2013), Giovanni describes falling off of a bike and her mother saying, "Come here, Nikki and I will pick you up." She explained that it was comforting to hear her mother say this, and that "it took me the longest to realize – no, she made me get up myself."[50] Chasing Utopia continues as a hybrid (poetry and prose) work about food as a metaphor and as a connection to the memory of her mother, sister, and grandmother. The theme of the work is love relationships.[51]
In 2004, Giovanni was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album at the 46th Annual Grammy Awards for her album The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. This was a collection of poems that she read against the backdrop of gospel music.(29) She also featured on the track "Ego Trip by Nikki Giovanni" on Blackalicious's 2000 album Nia. In November 2008, a song cycle of her poems, Sounds That Shatter the Staleness in Lives by Adam Hill, was premiered as part of the Soundscapes Chamber Music Series in Taos, New Mexico.
She was commissioned by National Public Radio's All Things Considered to create an inaugural poem for President Barack Obama. The poem, entitled "Roll Call: A Song of Celebration", ends with the following enthusiastic, optimistic three lines: "Yes We Can/Yes We Can/Yes We Can".[52] Giovanni read poetry at the Lincoln Memorial as a part of the bi-centennial celebration of Lincoln's birth on February 12, 2009.[53]
Giovanni was part of the 2016 Writer's Symposium by the Sea at Loma Nazarene University.[54] The University of California Television (UCTV) published the readings of Giovanni at the symposium. In October 2017 Giovanni published her newest collection, A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter. This collection includes poems that pay homage to the greatest influences on her life who have passed away, including close friend Maya Angelou who died in 2014.[55] Giovanni often reads from her books. In one reading she shares her poem "I Married My Mother". In 2017, Giovanni presented at a TEDx event. Here she read the poem "My Sister and Me". She called herself and her sister "two little chocolate girls". After reading the poems she states, "Sometimes you write a poem because damnit, you want to."[56]
Giovanni's Big-Eared Bat, also known as Micronycteris giovanniae, was named in her honor in 2007. The bat is found in western Ecuador and the naming was given "in recognition of her poetry and writings".[68]
^ Jump up to:abcdJane M. Barstow, Yolanda Williams Page (eds), "Nikki Giovanni", Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007), p. 213.
^ Jump up to:abcBaldwin, James and Nikki Giovanni. "Excerpt from a Dialogue". Nikki Giovanni and Virginia C. Fowler, Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1992. 70–79.
^ Jump up to:abBailey, Peter. "I am Black, Female, Polite". Nikki Giovanni and Virginia C. Fowler, Conversations with Nikki Giovanni, Jackson: University of Mississippi, 1992. 31–38.
^Giovanni, Nikki. "Nikki-Rosa". Poetry Foundation. Retrieved June 25, 2020.
^Giovanni, Nikki (1976). Gemini : an extended autobiographical statement on my first twenty-five years of being a Black poet. Penguin Books. ISBN0140042644.
^A poetic equation : conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (Rev. paperback ed.). Howard University Press. 1974. ISBN0882580884.
^The chant of the women of Magdalena and the Magdalena poems, with author's preface, Tradition and poetic memory. Woman in the Moon Publications. 1990. ISBN0934172145.
^Sacred cows-- and other edibles (1st ed.). W. Morrow. 1988. ISBN0688089097.
^Giovanni, Nikki (September 15, 1996). Grand mothers : poems, reminiscences, and short stories about the keepers of our traditions (1st ed.). Holt. ISBN0805049037.
^Giovanni, Nikki (2010). The 100 best African American poems : (*but I cheated). Sourcebooks. ISBN9781402221118.
Nikki Giovanni, the charismatic and iconoclastic poet, activist, children’s book author and professor who wrote, irresistibly and sensuously, about race, politics, gender, sex and love, died on Monday in Blacksburg, Va. She was 81.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of lung cancer, said Virginia C. Fowler, her wife.
Ms. Giovanni was a prolific star of the Black Arts Movement, the wave of Black nationalism that erupted during the civil rights era and included the novelist John Oliver Killens, the playwright and poet LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, and the poets Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange and Sonia Sanchez, among others. Like many women in the movement, Ms. Giovanni was confounded by the machismo that dominated it.
Yet Ms. Giovanni was also a star independent of the movement, a celebrity poet and public intellectual who appeared on television and toured the country. She was a riveting performer, diminutive at just 105 pounds — as reporters never failed to point out — her cadence inflected by the jazz and blues music she loved, with the timing of a comedian or a Baptist preacher who drew crowds wherever she appeared throughout her life. She said her best audiences were college students and prison inmates.
In 1972, when she was 29, she sold out the 1,000-plus seats at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, reading her poems alongside gospel music performed by the New York Community Choir. Soon after, for her 30th birthday, she sold out the Philharmonic theater, all 3,000 seats, where she was joined by Melba Moore and Wilson Pickett, who sang gospel numbers with the same choir that attended her earlier show. The audience joined in, too, with gusto, The New York Times reported, especially when she read one of her hits, the stirring paeon to Black female agency called “Ego-Tripping,” which generations of Black girls have performed at school. It begins:
I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad
And it concludes, triumphantly:
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal/I cannot be comprehended/except by my permission/I mean … I … can fly/Like a bird in the sky …
By 1971, she had already published a memoir, “Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet.” Fiercely intelligent, Ms. Giovanni never lacked confidence, never suffered fools and was, in her youth, an Ayn Rand fan. In her book, she wrote about the contradictions and false pieties of the Black power movement, her scrappiness as a child and her ambivalence about gender relations. She was not convinced that men and women were meant to live together.
Image
Poet Nikki Giovanni, left, Kay Mazzo, ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet, and fashion designer Betsey Johnson receive the first Sun Shower Award in 1971.Credit...Associated Press
“Maybe they have a different thing going,” she wrote, “where they come together during mating season and produce beautiful, useless animals who then go on to love, you hope, each of you.”
Her poem, “Housecleaning,” made the point succinctly:
i always liked housecleaning
even as a child
i dug straightening
the cabinets
putting new paper on
the shelves
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washing the refrigerator
inside out
and unfortunately this habit has
carried over and I find
i must remove you
from my life
In her early years, much of her poetry was boldly militant, as she addressed the horrors that galvanized the civil rights movement: the murder of Emmett Till, of the four Black girls in the Birmingham church bombing and of Martin Luther King Jr. “No one was much interested in a Black girl writing what was called ‘militant’ poetry,” she wrote in “Gemini,” so “I formed a company and published myself.”
To mollify the church ladies she had grown up with, particularly her beloved grandmother, who might be put off by her incendiary work, she recorded an album, “Truth is on its Way” (1971), with the New York Community Choir.
“I wanted something my grandmother could listen to,” she told Ebony magazine in 1972, “and I knew if gospel music was included, she would listen.”
Along with “Ego Tripping,” the album included another enduring hit, “Nikki-Rosa,” which ended with:
and I really hope no white person ever has cause
to write about me
because they never understand
Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood
and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy
Yolande Cornelia Giovanni Jr. was born on June 7, 1943, in Knoxville, Tenn., to Yolande (Watson) Giovanni and Jones Giovanni, known as Gus. Her older sister, Gary Ann, nicknamed her Nikki, and the name stuck. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Cincinnati, where Yolande and Gus began working as house parents in a school for Black boys, earning only one salary between them. Later, they would each teach grade school.
Nikki’s father was abusive toward her mother. It enraged her, as did her mother’s acceptance of it.
By 15, “I was either going to kill him, or leave,” she said later, so she moved to Knoxville to live with her grandparents. She graduated early from Austin High School (now Austin-East Magnet High School), where her grandfather taught Latin, to attend Fisk University, the historically Black college in Nashville, where, after a hiatus of a few years, she earned a bachelor’s degree in history, with honors, in 1967.
She had been thrown out for leaving campus without permission, and for protesting other campus rules. Becoming a debutante was not among her aspirations (she later wrote a poem about it) which made her an odd fit among Fisk’s sorority sisters.
But when she returned after a few years, the climate had changed; she studied with Mr. Killens, a founder of the Harlem Writers Guild; helped restart a chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee; and began to write.
She attended the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Work on a Ford Fellowship, but dropped out. She was not cut out for social work. The dean arranged for Ms. Giovanni to receive a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship to attend Columbia University’s School of Fine Arts, but she soon left to write full time.
She self-published her first two books, “Black Feeling Black Talk” and “Black Judgment” (1968). Her son, Thomas, was born in 1969: “I had a baby at 25 because I wanted to have a baby and I could afford to have a baby,” she told Ebony magazine with vehemence. “I didn’t get married because I didn’t want to get married and I could afford to not get married.”
But she did need to hustle. She hit the lecture circuit, and began appearing regularly on “Soul!,” the influential Black culture program that aired on public television from 1967 to 1972.
For one segment, she conducted a captivating two-hour interview with her hero, James Baldwin, which was filmed in London and ran as a two-part special in 1971. She was 28 and Mr. Baldwin, 47. It was astonishing, as The New Yorker put it: “Two of the most important artist-intellectuals of the twentieth century were engaged in intimate communion on national television.”
Wreathed in plumes of cigarette smoke (it was the 70s), she asked Mr. Baldwin about her father, who was, in her estimation, emblematic of so many Black men: What to do about a man who is mistreated in the world and comes home and brutalizes his wife? Where did that leave his daughter?
“I’m afraid of Black men,” she said, adding, “It’s a cycle and it’s unfortunate because I need love.”
Later in their conversation, she said, “There has to be a way to do what we do and survive, which is what seems to me to be missing.”
“Sweetheart,” Mr. Baldwin answered. “Sweetheart. Our ancestors taught us how to do that.”
Ms. Giovanni held teaching positions at Rutgers and Queens College before being recruited in 1987 by Ms. Fowler, who was then the associate head of the English department at Virginia Tech, to be a visiting professor. She earned tenure a few years later. She and Ms. Fowler have been a couple ever since, and along the way Ms. Fowler became a scholar of her work, editing her collections and writing her biography, “Nikki Giovanni” (2013). They married in 2016, and retired in 2022.
“Everybody needs a bench, and in order to get a bench, you have to be one,” Ms. Giovanni said. “I could say love, but you get tired of hearing about love.”
That said, she wrote many enticing love poems, including one that read:
I wrote a good omelet … and ate a hot poem …
after loving you
Hilton Als, the cultural critic and New Yorker writer, said in a phone interview that when he first heard Ms. Giovanni perform in the early ’70s, he was struck by her presence and the story she was telling, about a strong Black woman and the home that sustained her, epitomized in her poem, “My House.”
i mean it’s my house
and i want to fry pork chops
and bake sweet potatoes
and call them yams
cause i run the kitchen
and i can stand the heat
“It was a voice you didn’t hear a lot then, this desire for home,” he said. “Later, as she ditched the Black nationalist rhetoric, she became more herself. She was saying something really profound to me, a member of the gay community and the Black world and whatever. She was the first warrior in terms of talking about queer love, not specifically, but it was there.”
Among many honors, she received seven N.A.A.C.P. awards and 31 honorary doctorates. And a scientist who was a fan, Robert James Baker, named a species of bat after her, the Micronycteris giovanniae. She was the author of more than 30 books — many for children — three of which were best sellers. Her newest book, “The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs, and Things,” is expected to be published next year.
In addition to Ms. Fowler, Ms. Giovanni is survived by her son, Thomas, and a granddaughter.
“I really like what the young people are doing,” Ms. Giovanni told The Times in 2020, reflecting on the Black Lives Matter movement, and the work of her students, “and I think my job is to be sure to get out of their way, but also let them know, if it means anything to them, that I’m proud of them.”
“I recommend old age,” she added. “There’s just nothing as wonderful as knowing you have done your job.”
