THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, November 2, 1996 TAG: 9611010087
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 69 lines
IN THE '60s, black poet Nikki Giovanni mouthed the unspoken words of people silenced by centuries of slavery, oppression and discrimination. African America, engaged in the civil rights movement, rallied around Giovanni's vernacular verse.
Sunday evening, Giovanni comes to Hampton University to read from her work. Tickets for the event, which is open to the public, are $6.
``I am very happy to be coming back to Hampton University. I used to be on the Board there,'' Giovanni said in a phone interview.
The poet most recently appeared in Hampton Roads in March, when she read to a standing-room-only crowd at the Virginia Beach campus of Tidewater Community College.
Now 53 and tempered by time and experience, Giovanni nonetheless continues to speak for the disenfranchised.
For example, in her collection of essays ``Racism 101,'' published two years ago, she writes: ``. . . the problem of the twentieth century is not the problem of the color line. The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of civilizing white people.''
Giovanni's unswerving and sometimes shocking call of three decades ago still rings in the memories of those who lived through that time of social unrest.
Calling upon an oral tradition that reached back centuries - and following the lead of black poets of the Harlem Renaissance - Giovanni spoke in terms that hit home for blacks throughout America.
She took her cues from Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown and other African-American poets in putting into words the anguish that went hand-in-hand with being black in a nation still plagued by the effects of slavery. At the same time, she celebrated blackness, speaking specifically to the kinds of male-female relationships that slavery and its aftermath had spawned.
In her poem ``The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,'' Giovanni asks:
Nigger
Can you kill. . .
Can a nigger kill a honkie
Can a nigger kill the Man
Can you kill nigger
Huh?. . .
Can you kill the nigger
in you. . .
And free your black hands to
strangle. . .
Now a professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg and author of 17 published books of poetry and prose, Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tenn.
In her poem, ``Adulthood,'' she tells how her childhood coalesced into a monochromatic vision: ``. . . the gray area was slowly darkened into / a Black thing.''
It is this ability to put into words the black experience - with all its tonalities - that has won Giovanni a permanent place in the collective heart of African-American readers. ILLUSTRATION: BARRON CLAIBORNE photo
Nikki Giovanni continues to speak for the disenfranchised.
Graphic
WANT TO GO?
What: Poetry reading by Nikki Giovanni
Where: Hampton University's Ogden Hall
When: 7 p.m. Sunday
Cost: $6
Information: 727-5691 by CNB