What Nikki Giovanni Taught Us About Resistance, Community, and Collective Liberation
Bettmann
There’s this video of Nikki Giovanni that I often return to, that I’ve been returning to again and again since her death at 81 was announced on December 9. In the grainy recording, taped some time in 1984, the poet stands at a podium, addressing a rapt audience at San Francisco State University.
She’s around 41 years old, dressed in her effortless uniform from that time of a blazer, button-down shirt, and loosened tie, and even through the grain you can feel something of her spirit, her wry humor, her remarkable and innate understanding of the human condition. She reads some poems, cracks a few dark jokes, and then says something that, to me, encapsulates what it is to be alive and conscious in these frightening, oppressive, uncertain times:
"All most of us want is somebody to love and somebody that we can love. We want a job that we can go to—sure, we’re underpaid, but at least we know it’s there. We want to feel that there is some dignity in our lives. I can’t believe that we are asking too much. We do want to feel there is something in us that is good and that is wonderful, and if we bring it out, no one will trample on it.
We want to feel that we can commit to something a little beyond what we’ve seen. I can’t believe that we are asking too much. I can’t believe that human beings have to continue to go back to square one all the time. We know how to do hate. We know how to do ignorance. We know how to do war. We know how to do indifference. We know how to do all the mean, dirty, ugly things of this world. We don’t have to practice that. We have to practice loving, and caring, and tolerance. And it is time that we started."
I suppose I keep returning to the video, to the words above in particular, because there’s something comforting and familiar and true. I felt somehow understood the first time I heard these words, just as I felt understood the first time I read a Nikki Giovanni poem, “Revolutionary Dreams,” at 17, and sensed a large window in the gloomy house of my life suddenly open up. This, I think, is what all great writers do: they let the light in. In thinking about how to practice the love and care and tolerance that Giovanni spoke and wrote about, how to get started on a viable path to liberation, I’ve been delving into the language that Giovanni entrusted us with, the ideas and lessons that everyone, especially the young who are inheriting the world she has left behind, can use to light the way forward.
Giovanni, who was born in Knoxville, TN, released her first collection of poems, Black feeling, Black talk, in 1968. She was a key figure of the Black Arts Movement, a voice of resilience, love, and defiance, speaking to the struggles and joys of Black life with a sharpness that was both devastating and affirming. For young people trying to find their way in a world marked by uncertainty and precarity, Giovanni offers more than poetic inspiration; she offers a blueprint for navigating identity, relationships, and resistance with courage and clarity.
Here are some things that Nikki Giovanni understood, things that we should all work to understand: She understood that the way to transcend oppression was through personal autonomy, critical thinking, and a rigorous curiosity about the world. She understood that life must be vehemently protected, be it the lives of the Black and brown victims of police brutality, trans youth, or victims of genocide and colonization. She embraced contradiction. She understood the delicate and necessary balance of being strong yet soft, idealistic yet practical, grounded in the present while always dreaming of a better future.
She understood the personal and political necessity of friendship and community. Not for-the-gram community, but the rough, messy, and fulfilling work of loving and being loved. “You have to allow people to care for you,” she explained in a 2021 interview with Public Books. “You need care, but you have to allow people to care. It goes both ways. I care for you, but you have to allow me. It is actually a very similar thing with love. You have to love me. And I, well, I have to let you love me.” In other words: our survival as a species depends on our love, on our needing each other, and being unafraid of that need.
She understood the power of dreaming. Giovanni often described herself as a dreamer, wrote many poems about the act of dreaming. She dreamed not only for herself, but for the collective -— for collective love, liberation, for more than what the world of her time (and ours) had to offer. And she understood the role language plays in dreaming, how a poem is a living thing, a new discovery. She knew that words can become portals into new worlds if you let them.
“I wanted to be a writer who dreams or maybe a dreamer who writes...” she wrote on her website. Initially, though, her dream was not to publish or even be a writer. “[M]y dream was to discover something no one else had thought of,” she once wrote of her career. “I guess that’s why I’m a poet. We put things together in ways no one else does.”
Nikki Giovanni understood that being aggressively, defiantly yourself — in alignment with your principles, committed to your beliefs, your joys, your contradictions — is not just an act of survival but a gift to the world. She showed us that survival is not about enduring; it’s about striving to change that which you cannot endure, and living with purpose, humor, and tenderness.
We live in an age where authenticity is commodified, where the individual is encouraged to perform their personhood rather than live it. Giovanni’s life and work stand as a counterpoint, a reminder of what true, unapologetic selfhood looks like and how it can shape not just a life but a legacy. Most of all, she understood what Toni Morrison described as the grandeur, the “attempt” of life, doing all one can with the time given, licking the plate of life until it's clean.
As Giovanni once wrote:
"i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live."
She did. Let us honor her by trying to do the same.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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