Nikki Giovanni, who died at 81 on Monday, was a leading figure of the Black Arts movement, writing at the intersection of love, creativity, gender, race and more. And her poetry was a platform for truth-telling (The Guardian, Dec. 10: A life in quotes: Nikki Giovanni).
The public viewing at McCoy Funeral Home in Blacksburg was held yesterday. A memorial service is planned for February, 2025.
Nikki Giovanni wrote one and only one "haiku" about men on Mars through the lens of Afrofuturism.
A Haiku for Mars
When the man in the moon smiles
The men on Mars dance
To the shadows
Of lonely love
Of lonely lonely lonely
love
A Good Cry: What We Learn from Tears and Laughter, 2017, page 17.
For more about her work, see The New Yorker, Dec. 11: Nikki Giovanni’s Legacy of Black Love
A captivating performer, she reigned over the stage at readings, which she gave until quite recently, despite a cancer diagnosis. Eventually, her public appearances became more occasions for her to hold forth, lecture, riff. At such events, either from behind the mike or in the audience, I often heard her talk politics more than poetry, and more about outer space than about line breaks. She preached and provoked. She especially spoke about the power of Mars and how we must go there. A moving excerpt from her interplanetary work appears in the Whitney Museum’s recent Alvin Ailey exhibition; its fullest expression may be the documentary, Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, from 2023, which traced Giovanni’s Afrofuturist message past the stars to a sometimes more unreachable realm, here on earth.
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