Something Like A Revolution (An Ode to Nikki Giovanni)

By Sippie Niles

Last year, my therapist asked me what Nikki Giovanni and I have in common. I had spent 5 sessions discussing her book "Gemini" and how it was changing my life.

At first, I wanted to say nothing, except that we are both Black, female, queer, and creative.

She was shorter than I, lighter than I, and braver than I could ever be. She was a Cancer; I’m an Aquarius. I’ve always thought Cancer women were hot-tempered, too emotionally driven. I like to think I’m more even-tempered than that. She held a kind of rage in her little bones that I think might burst me open from the inside out.

I wanted to see her as something mystical. Tough. Witty. Outside of me.

Like Beyoncé. We all want to be Beyoncé, but we know we are not Beyoncé.

Nikki wrote beautiful poems and once asked her people, “Nigger, can you kill?” on live television. She was furious at the state of the world, at the state of the Black community. She didn’t back down when James Baldwin tried to convince her that expecting Black men to genuinely love Black women in this country was “extremely difficult,” maybe even “impossible.” She responded, “I demand it! Now you sit with that.” And he did.

This was a man she admired and revered. Still, she knew it was necessary to be clear. To be understood.

What a powerful woman.

I also know I tend to romanticize the dead. Somehow, people are easier to understand once they’re gone.

But then I watched more videos of her speaking and noticed something small, something familiar. She had a Southern twang, the kind that only slips out if you were born below the Dixie Line. It didn’t surprise me to learn she was born in Tennessee. She spoke with her hands, flinging her small, dainty fingers around as if movement itself might make people hear her more clearly. She rarely raised her voice. There was something calming but serious about her, something I’ve been told I have, too.

When she read her poetry, it sounded like a song I already knew but had never heard outside of myself.

Beyond the physical, I wondered what else I was missing.

She loved music. On SOUL!, the Black cultural showcase of the 1970s, she would smile and almost glow while watching Black artists recite poetry, sing, and dance. She delighted in witnessing people share their God-given gifts with the world, the same way she had been blessed to do. In the same way, I feel blessed to do.

She was the younger child, which gave her room to mess up in ways I never could. Still, she was more like an older sister to her own big sister, protective, defensive. She got into fights with middle-aged boys when she was five, as if she were born a fighter.

I did a lot of protecting, too, of my little brother and my niece. And though it was hard becoming a young adult early, I look back on my high school years after my mom died with a strange fondness.

Nikki writes about this in her poem titled Nikki-Rosa, explaining why she didn’t want white people writing about her once she was gone. Even though her childhood held trauma, domestic violence, and an emotionally absent father, she knew they wouldn’t understand that

“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.”

That line stays with me. It’s the tension of surviving and loving at the same time.

She went to college, though she was briefly expelled for rebelling against curfews and drinking. Later, she clashed with the Dean of Women. In her book, she writes about begging her parents to let her leave school and dedicate herself fully to the movement. They understood, but they were firm. Go back to school or get a job.

She felt deeply misunderstood.

I remember feeling that way after my freshman year. Being on that campus changed how I saw the world. I didn’t want to give myself to the movement, exactly, but I knew I didn’t want to give myself to whatever they had going on at that school.

I was on academic probation. I had a drinking problem. I had my own run-ins with the administration. I wrote things online that pissed the Chancellor off, but he needed to know that everything about that campus was screaming white power. I refused to pay the school money every semester without letting them know what was on my mind.

So I created space.

I put on poetry showcases that gave Black artists room to speak about our lives. There was poetry, music, singing, and monologues. Soul Cries was cool. I think Nikki would’ve thought so too. I helped plan protests and sit-ins to get the Confederate flag taken down.

It’s hard to focus when so much is happening around you.

Somehow, some way, like Nikki, I got my degree. I’m grateful I did. She was, too.

Where we differ is that after undergrad, she was pushed by her parents toward graduate school. I moved to another state and threw myself into grassroots organizing.

She had found her purpose in poetry. I’m still finding mine. I’ve always been a writer, but I also paint. I sing. I make things. I don’t yet know how all of that weaves itself into organizing and community work, but I know it all lives inside me.

Right now, I’m reading her poetry and learning her more intimately. She writes about loneliness, how sharp it can be. She writes about the joy of hearing her son cry for the first time, how he never forgot the doctor who gave him his first shot. He cried every time the doctor came near. She smiled at that. “You are vengeful,” she told him, “and I like that.”

She liked that he remembered who hurt him. That he wouldn’t let it happen again.

She chose to have her son alone. She wasn’t going to wait for anyone to become what she already knew she wanted to be: a mother. She loved children. She believed in loving them fiercely, giving them tools to protect themselves, and pushing the world forward for them.

She wrote about loving deeply. And about the pain of letting go.

As time passes, I still hear the fire in her words, the frustration with this country, her sometimes-painful love for Black men, her loyalty to Black people, the future she imagined for us. The revolution is always hovering at the edge of things, daring us to keep going.

The way I want to be like her is simple: she stayed true to herself. She let herself feel deeply and turned those feelings into something that could outlive her. She also understood, deep in her bones, that she was only one voice in a much larger chorus. That the fight was never hers alone.

She wrote in her poem, "my poem":

If I sit here for the rest of my life, it won’t stop the revolution. If I never write another poem or short story, it won’t stop the revolution. The revolution is in the streets, And if I stay on the 5th floor, it will go on. If I never do anything, it will go on."

And still, she went on to do extraordinary things. She won the NAACP Image Award, the Langston Hughes Medal, and twenty-seven honorary degrees. Her words fueled movements. They shifted people.

She died of lung cancer. Like my dad.

I close my eyes and still see the cigarette balanced in her delicate hand while talking to James Baldwin. They chain-smoked the way I did with fellow organizers in Miami. I’m glad I quit, but the urge still visits me sometimes.

What surprised me most was learning that she had a white female partner at the end of her life, given her deep distrust of white people. But Nikki had so much love to give, it had to land somewhere. She wasn’t going to let Black men keep her from becoming what she wanted to be: a lover.

And I don’t believe for a second that she made that woman’s life easy. She often said she was difficult to love.

I think sometimes I am too.

There’s one line in her poem When I Die that makes us feel the closest, because it’s exactly how I feel:

And if ever I touched a life, I hope that life knows, that I know, that touching was and still is and will be, the true revolution.