Nikki Giovanni will Live Forever

My friends and I threw a lot of parties in college. I’ve always befriended the record collectors and DJ’s and those who love music more than books but also love books that act like music just as much as songs themselves. At every party we had, without fail, one of my closest friends who was also always the DJ, my brother really, who had started out by inviting me on a date to listen to records. I told him I was busy studying for finals and then he saw me out getting food with some friends at Berkeley’s ‘food ghetto’ the same night. We’d been craving “dollar noodles” in the middle of studying but he didn’t believe me and really didn’t speak to me for a while, though he still djed all my parties and would always play this Latyrx song with a mumbled line about Nikki Giovanni in it, and because it always felt like he was playing it for me, it helped me self-actualize into the woman in the song, a muse refusing her role so she can live, making concerted decisions to exceed all perceptions of her. It was his I forgive you for not wanting to hide in young love just yet, or that’s how it felt, and it was true.

Nikki Giovanni was among the female writers who taught us how to live and come out of hiding at a time when her level of consciousness was scarce to non-existent. When she sat across from James Baldwin and promised him he didn’t know what love is, or how to love black women, that love is not sharing trauma and pain while faking it with everyone else, she taught me how to live. How I live now, how to live forever outside of the valorization of the trouble and turbulence we’ve been taught is our most valuable asset. We’ve been lied to. A couple of months ago Fred Moten sent an email while en route to Florida to have a talk with God, with Ms. Nikki Giovanni, but she never made it there, due to weather, inside and out. Would she have told him what love is. Their voices in gorgeous concert he’d already know and nod and they’d make better music for Jimmy to listen to from his sky roof. When we imagine what she might have said at this one of her last dates with one of the living G.O.A.T.s we are reminded again, how to live. So well that even hypothetical encounters are healing to those who might have been there, to what might become. How do you live? Nikki Giovanni is this constant reminder, a beacon for the endless new beginning whose long beautiful life tells us that if you love in weak ways nothing else will work well. If you can’t love fiercely enough to be wrong sometimes on purpose, you’re dead. Even if you’re Jimmy Baldwin, love is not the empty gestures of romance or even the grand gestures, it’s the way you make the lie and libel of black survival become the truth, it’s the only meaningful bloodless but always sanguine and high stakes revolution.