Sloan Warner- Poetry Anthology

Yolande Cornelia Giovanni better known as Nikki Giovanni is an African-American poet, commentator, activist, and teacher from Knoxville, Tennessee. She became famous in the 1960’s as one of the first in the Black Arts Movements. Her poems are known as particularly revolutionary and rebellious. Oprah Winfrey has named her as one of the 25 living legends on this Earth. Throughout her anthology of poems named Black Feelings, Black Talk, Black Judgements, the poems are filled with themes of revolution. love for one another, and loyalty. Mixed with those themes are sentiments of vengeance, oppression, bitterness, and rage.

On Hearing “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”

He has a girl who has flaxen hair

My woman has hair of gray

I have a woman who wakes up at dawn

His girl can sleep through the day

His girl has hands soothed with perfumes sweet

She has lips soft and pink

My woman’s lips burn in midday sun

My woman’s hands--black like ink

He can make music to please his girl

Night comes I’m tired and beat

He can make notes, make her heart beat fast

Night comes I want off my feet

Maybe if I don’t pick cotton so fast

Maybe I’d sing pretty too

Sing to my woman with hair of gray

Croon softly, Baby it’s you

--Nikki Giovanni

This poem in particular has the majority of the themes and sentiments she expresses in many of Giovanni’s other poems. The rhyme scheme in this poem is effective because there is enough uniformity throughout, however, there is enough of a difference to be noticed by the audience causing the audience to perceive the white couple and black couple as similar people on the base level of being a human being, but living starkly different lives and situations. She is essentially commenting on the fact that the white folk have it inherently easier in the world, and the black community has an impediment in achieving a high quality of life. They are being oppressed. The diction expressed throughout the poem also makes it seem that the white community has a sweeter life than the black community’s dreary life. Words such as “soothed”, “perfumes”, “soft”, and “pink” are put in contrast in the first stanza with “burn”, “black”, and “ink”. These words affect the audience in giving the light versus dark comparison for the different lives.

Unfortunately, I don’t have my own style to compare Giovanni’s stylistic choices to; however, if I were to have a style which reflected my personality in any way, I would say our styles are different. Giovanni has a revolutionary style full of intensity and rage, not always paying attention to rhyme scheme or meter; whereas, my style would probably be more geared towards even-keeled thinking, taking more time to get the meter and rhyme perfect. With that said, Giovanni has her own personal style which affected countless people and continues to affect people to this day, which is incredibly respectable and for a great cause in the Civil Rights Movement.

Works Cited

Giovanni, Nikki. "On Hearing “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”." Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgement. New York: W. Morrow, 1970. 2. Print.