The Black Woman’s Triply Entrapped Experience as Portrayed in Nikki Giovanni’s “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles”
by Diana Palka
“Black women are the most vulnerable and the most exploited members of the American society. The structure of the capitalist political economy in which Black people are commodities combined with patriarchal contempt for women has caused the Black woman to experience oppression that knows no ethical or physical bounds.” ---- Katie Cannon, leader in Black Womanist Ethics
Indisputably a marginalized group within American society at all points in time, black women have been on the receiving end of discrimination and abuse perpetuated by whites, specifically white males. Literary examples range from Harriet Jacobs’ vivid accounts in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, and speak to a divided readership of whites and blacks alike. Like Jacobs and Morrison, poet Nikki Giovanni is a black woman. Through her poems “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles,” Giovanni resonates a triple voice as black, female and black-female. Thus, Giovanni’s triple consciousness lends her to writing three “literatures of her own” as a part of three “muted cultures.”1 In order to effectively understand Giovanni’s literatures, it is necessary to first distinguish her identity/identities upon which these literatures are contingent.
Giovanni’s identity as black and the black literature she inherently produces is largely actuated by her experience living through “one of the most tumultuous eras of American history, which included the Civil Rights, Black Power and Black Arts movements” (Collier 22). Born in 1943, the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, Giovanni was regularly exposed to things like Jim Crowism and de jure segregation. Her early acceptance to Fisk University and her redevelopment of the university’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee proved to be just the beginning of Giovanni’s embracement of her black identity.
These experiences and encounters undoubtedly embodied and shaped Giovanni’s writing(s) and are especially evident in the poem, “Nikki-Rosa.” A brief, thirty-three line poem void of punctuation and capitalization, “Nikki-Rosa” inherently has “the effect of the narrator speaking directly to her audience” (Wiedemann). Although the speaker is identified as female in the title, she is not identified as black until the second line of the poem. Giovanni starts the poem by juxtaposing the negative instances of the speaker’s childhood memories with the benefits and positives often forgotten about by the “they”:
childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you’re Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have
your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath
from one of those
big tubs that folk in chicago barbecue in (1-11)
The speaker recognizes that her childhood consisted of positive and negative circumstances and events, yet realizes that the positives definitively outweighed the negative (Wiedemann). The “they,” first identified in line six refers to “the critics and biographers,” to whom the whole concept of the black experience is completely foreign (Wiedemann): “and even though you remember/your biographers never understand” (16-17), the speaker states.
At this point in the poem the reader can begin to recognize that the audience is, by virtue of the fact of the speaker’s frustration, black. While accessible to any audience, black or white, “Nikki-Rosa” is meant for specifically for black reception. In his essay “The Significance of Audience in Black Poetry,” William J. Reeves states, “This is not a soliloquy; this is not an ironic poem aimed at a general audience: this is a revolutionary poem meant to arouse one particular group” (Reeves 31). The poem is revolutionary in its presentation of one of the “central ideas in Giovanni’s work”: that “Black love is Black wealth” (Fowler 1; 26). The Black love/Black wealth concept is exclusively the domain of blacks and used as a catalyst to create a sense of black unity and/or pride amongst the black readership.
The speaker explicitly states, “and I really hope no white person ever has cause/to write about me/because they never understand/Black love is Black wealth” (27-30). Her continual use of the pronoun “they” implies an insider/outsider ideology, making the “they” (critics and biographers) on the outside of this inner-circle of readership. In a 2000 interview with Gloria Naylor, Giovanni described the schism between the black and white experience in saying:
…every time blacks do anything wonderful, the white reaction is something horrible… The reaction to the Million Man March is the burning of the churches. Or the beating of a Rodney King. Or, the reaction to Brown vs. Topeka was Emmett Till. And then the black reaction was Rosa Parks. But every time we do something, white retaliate in order to say, “We’re going to put you back in your place.” I don’t think so. I don’t think we want to be back in our places. (Naylor 1403)
And it is because of this type of schism, this type of antithesis between two people groups’ experiences that Giovanni seeks to provide an exclusively black literature for a repeatedly “muted” culture. This is not to say that Giovanni is ignorant to the fact that whites read and analyze her poetry, yet she purposefully creates a literature that whites can read on the surface level, but that only blacks can wholly dwell within.
And through her omissions of any form of punctuation, Giovanni creates a residence within her audience. Aside from “establishing a reverence for black folk culture” Giovanni allows the structure, diction and lack of grammatical conventions to establish an/prescribe to a “black literature” (Carson). In leaving out any periods, commas, ellipses, etc., Giovanni defies the rules of the “dominant culture’s” literature and writes her own ticket. By capitalizing things only largely identifiable with black culture (IE: “Black,” “Woodlawn,” and “Hollydale”), Giovanni makes a statement of where her loyalties lie and reiterates the message she is trying to send to a particular receiver. While writing about experiences unique to the black community alone, she uses a structure and protocol in complete repudiation of standard white conventions, solidifying her membership in black culture and its unequaled position within the literary canon.
Giovanni’s membership in yet another “muted culture” will eventually qualify her for triple entrapment; however, she must first be identified as a woman. In a review of Virginia Fowler’s book Nikki Giovanni, Ann Folwell Stanford describes Giovanni as “not only an African American poet, but also (resoundingly so) a woman” (Stanford 481). Her refusal to conform to the agendas of the Black Arts and black power movements, although they were initiatives that sought to “‘control’ their ‘cultural institutions’ by establishing their own journals and magazines,” was due to the fact that they were male controlled (Fowler 24). Giovanni turned down the opportunity to join the movements dedicated solely to black-male advancement and embraced her gender in exercising her “refusal to be controlled by the men to whom both these movements seemed to belong” (Fowler 46). And as a result of her repudiation, Giovanni’s presence within the analects of women’s literature is one that doesn’t go unnoticed.
Giovanni begins “Life Cycles” with the pronoun “she” in stating, “she realized/she wasn’t one/of life’s winners” (1-3), quickly identifying the female subject of the poem as the underdog, the lowly and peripheral. She goes on to state that the subject’s existence was like “some unwanted child/too late for an abortion/was to be borne/alone” (7-10). By referring to an exclusively female issue, Giovanni speaks to yet another particular group: women. And Giovanni continues to delve into portraying women as marginal in identifying the skeletons in the subject’s closet:
she had so many private habits
she would masturbate sometimes
she always picked her nose when upset
she liked to sit with silence
in the dark
sadness is not an unusual state
for the black woman (11-17)
Giovanni’s use of habits that are typically shameful if practiced by women, like masturbation, or habits that are thought of as unclean or disgusting, like picking one’s nose, sharply juxtaposes the widely accepted notion of a middle-class white woman and the male mentality which prescribes and confines women to that mold.
Giovanni eventually reveals how the subject deals with the imposed decorum and the men to which it belongs in affirming that “she took to sneaking drinks/ a habit which displeased her/ both for its effects/ and taste” (19-21), disclosing that this “she” has unwillingly resorted to coping mechanisms she despises. In doing so, Giovanni writes the subject into a literature of her own, as a marginalized and muted woman. This experience, much like abortion or the disgraceful participation in typically male habits by females, is “an experience more common to some groups [non-dominant] of people than to others,” and specifically belongs to woman (Fowler 87). In reluctantly succumbing to these coping mechanisms, the subject of the poem finds herself in the “wild zone,” a place unique to female experience, not experienced, not understood, not recognized by males. The wild zone not only further separates and mutes women as a unique “culture” but it helps validate a women owned literature because:
Spatially it [the wild zone] stands for an area, which is literally no-man’s- land, a place forbidden to men, which corresponds to the zone…which is off limits to women. Experientially It stands for the aspects of the female life-style which are outside of and unlike those of men…But if we think of the wild zone metaphysically, or in terms of consciousness, it has no corresponding male space since all of male consciousness is within…the dominant structure and thus accessible to or structured by language. (Showalter 367)
Giovanni’s representation of the wild zone in “Life Cycles” is not characterized by the subject (subject matter and protagonist) of the poem, but through her, again, disregard for any standard conventions of the male-dominated English language. “Life Cycles” contains no form of punctuation or capitalization, a tactic Giovanni uses to formulate her own conventions of her own language, embedded within her own literature.
Both “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles” not only textualize Giovanni’s experiences as black and female respectively, but upon further examination of the double voicedness of the speakers and the subjects, yet another voice can be heard: the combination of black and woman, a black woman. Professor of African American studies at Wesleyan University, Ann duCille, wrote:
It is not new that by virtue of our race and gender, black women are not only the “second sex”— the Other, in postmodern parlance— but we are also the last race, the most oppressed, the most marginalized, the most deviant, the quintessential site of difference. (duCille, 592)
DuCille makes it evident that there is no other race, no other people group quite as subdued as black women, and her thesis is further supported in Giovanni’s “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles.”
As the title of “Nikki-Rosa” gives away the gender identity of the speaker, the reader can quickly conclude that the speaker is a black woman, reminiscing upon the happenings of her black-girl childhood. The black, female speaker of the poem is not only possessive of a vivid memory of her childhood; she is also well-versed in the standard misconception white, male critics and biographers maintain in writing about “famous” black women. The speaker adamantly states that she “really hope[s] no white person ever has cause to write about” (27), her because she knows what will inevitably happen. The speaker knows that these “biographers— in particular white biographers— will seize on the tangible, objective facts, falsely confident of the subjective reality to which such facts point” (Fowler 1). Her desire to never have a white person write about her is similar to her desire to never have a male (of any race) write about her. Paralleling Giovanni’s rejection of the Black Arts and black power movements, the speaker desires only females write about her for the same reasons Giovanni disregards the aforementioned movements. In the June 1969 issue of Negro Digest, Giovanni stated:
It sometimes seems that the only thing that culturalists care about is assuring themselves and the various communities that they are the vanguard of the Black revolution. They have made Black women the new Jews while they remain the same old niggers. (Giovanni 34)
Giovanni’s refusal to join up with the male-dominated black advancement movements signifies the awareness of her identity as a black woman.
Furthermore, “Life Cycles” clearly identifies the subject of the poem as a black woman in the second stanza in line 17. These strong emotions felt by the “she” of the poem are not only a result of her womanhood, but also a product of the color of her skin and her inherent membership within the black-female community. All of the sentiments expressed in the poem (IE: realizing “she wasn’t one of life’s winners” [2-3], “sit[ing] with silence in the dark” [14-15] and “sneaking drinks” [19]) are a direct result of her sadness, which “is not an unusual state for the black woman” (16-17). As a black woman, the subject of the poem experiences emotions unique to those of the triple entrapped as black, female and black-female. In bell hooks’ essay “Talking Back,” hooks speaks of the same experiences she encountered/encounters as a black female and the eventual “liberated voice” they produced:
Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our [the triply entrapped] movement from object to subject— the liberated voice. (hooks 76)
If engaged in a conversation with Giovanni, hooks would be able to share a deep understanding with Giovanni and the themes embedded in “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles” because of her triple voice. Hooks discloses her inability to believe in herself as a writer, even after being published, because she was “held captive by domineering forces of history” that sought to depreciate her self-worth (hooks 76).
Relating this alienation between women and specifically black women to the feminist movement, it is easy to see the cultural split which leads to the formation of a separate literature and literary canon:
Most black feminists tell of racism in the women’s movement. They recount being rejected or ignored or objectified by white women. Black feminists felt that feminism was not relevant to their lives as black and primarily working-class women and that white women were insensitive to their concerns, often insulting and obtuse. They suggest that privileged white feminists could focus only on issues of personal concern, unable to comprehend that for black feminists race and class were as important as sex discrimination. (Brienes 1096)
Even within a supposed unified movement, in this case a unified literature, a stark schism existed. It is this stark schism that gives birth to literature owned by perhaps the most muted culture, black women. And it is a literature that “bestow(s) a cultural authority that derives in part from their [black women’s] enforced experience of embodiment” (Abel, 479). In “Nikki-Rosa,” the speaker is not only black or female, rather she is a black-female. The same is true in “Life Cycles”, and in both cases, the poems exhibit a “cultural authority” that can only come from an insider. Giovanni writes with this “cultural authority” as a black-female, and transcends her “enforced experience of embodiment” by boldly proclaiming and embracing her identity and membership within the most muted of cultures. In writing with this triple-voice, Giovanni gives the muted culture of black females a voice that is able to eclipse the notion of inferiority and subjugate the misunderstandings of the “they” in “Nikki-Rosa” and the predetermined mold of women defined in “Life Cycles.”
When read by non-black female, Giovanni’s “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles” cause the reader to recognize his or her position in society. When the reader is outside the “one particular group” that Giovanni is speaking directly to, he or she experiences a secondary effect that Giovanni creates. For example, a white woman reading “Nikki-Rosa” or “Life Cycles” would more than likely dismiss the poems as trifling accounts of one’s human experience. Upon further contemplation, the white woman’s inability to understand the clout with which Giovanni crafts her poems and the themes embedded within them will eventually cause her to de-center her thought process, a secondary effect intended for Giovanni’s secondary audiences. Adrienne Rich’s “Notes toward a Politics of Location” addresses this conflict as she explores the difficulty of using the pronoun “we”:
You cannot speak for me. I cannot speak for us. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through. And so even ordinary pronouns become a political problem. (Rich 1102)
Rich’s questioning of what was instilled in her by her “white North American world” denies any kind of universality and the idea that “white middle-class feminism can know for ‘all women’; that only when a white mind formulates it the formulation to be taken seriously” (Rich 1105-06). Giovanni reaffirms Rich’s assertions in “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles” in creating a literature that speaks most directly to black females. However, Giovanni’s literary identity and its subsequent poems reach far beyond the confines of gender and race. “Nikki-Rosa” and “Life Cycles” effectively create a “muted” experience for the dominant cultures that read her works from a lenses differing from the one through which she wrote them. This “muted” experience not only forces the outsider-reader to reexamine his or her position in society, but it further affirms the idea that “muted” cultures have a literature of their own.
Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth. “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation.” Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 470-498. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
Becerra, Cynthia S. "The Poetry of Giovanni." Masterplots II: African American Literature, Revised Edition (2009): Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.
Breines, Wini. “What’s Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black Women, and Feminism in The Movement Years.” Signs 27.4 (2002): 1095-1133. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
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Collier, Andrea King. "Nikki Giovanni: A Poetic Force." Writer 118.10 (2005): 22-25. Academic Search Premier. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
duCille, Ann. “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies.” Signs: 19.3 (1994): 591-629. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
Fowler, Virginia C. Nikki Giovanni. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. Print.
Giovanni, Nikki. “Black Poems, Poseurs and Power.” Negro Digest. (1969): 30-34. Web.
hooks, bell. “Talking Back.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. Ed. Mary K. DeShazer. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 2001. 72-76. Print.
Naylor, Gloria, and Nikki Giovanni. “Conversation.” Callaloo 23.4 (2000): 1395-1409. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
Reeves, William J. “The Significance of Audience in Black Poetry.” Negro American Literature Forum 9.1 (1975): 30-32. JSTOR. Web. 25 Oct. 2010.
Rich, Adrienne. “Notes toward a Politics of Location.” The Longman Anthology of
Women’s Literature. Ed. Mary K. DeShazer. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 2001. 1095-1106. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. “Intertextualities.” The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature. Ed. Mary K. DeShazer. New York: Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers Inc., 2001. 353-374. Print.
Stanford, Ann Folwell. “Review: The Complications of Being Nikki Giovanni.” African American Review 28.3 (1994): 481-484. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2010.
Wiedemann, Barbara. "Nikki-Rosa." Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition (2002): Literary Reference Center. EBSCO. Web. 14 Nov. 2010.
1 In her essay “Intertextualities,” Elaine Showalter discusses and defines Edwin Ardener’s concept of “muted” and “dominant” cultures and asks “Does a muted culture have a history and a literature of its own, or must it always be measured according to the chronology, standards, and the values of the dominant?