Nothing Black but a Cadillac

THE Black, hueman, woeman writes, "Ruth aint no Baby and her daddy would rather you not eat it--some things are just bad form," but there aren't any other allusions to graceless forms on the page, so upi might as well supply the rest yourself. For example, a lot of the woman's poems are some of those things you should shun. They're too easy to swallow, and this has enticed a whole flock of followers who chuck stanzas between their gums without noticing that their form is bad--consuming mediocre poetry is bad form.

Three years ago Ebony ventured to print a couple of excerpts from her poetry, but it was mainly interested in gushing that "Nikki, the poet, has become a personality, a star." Last summer, The New York Times finally heard that Nikki Giovanni is a star and it found space for her in the Op-Ed page; Giovanni was ready for The Times with a long poem called "Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)." The poem seems to invoke the voice of an African goddess who croons a mixture of nursery rhymes, Egyptian myth, parables of the Biblical parables (such as the tale of noah who built new/-ark), and a snatch of the Temptations singing "Psychedelic Shack." All these grandiose items jostle each other benignly without ever coalescing into a meaningful idea: it's just Giovanni presenting her unreal ego. And Time likes to call the poet "a shrewd and energetic propagandist." It kind of reminds you of Beverly Johnson, the black model, who drew the attention of the mass media when she danced around a fantastically big can of deodorant on television.

Nikki Giovanni brandishes a strong ego, believing that it wards off exploitation. But that's not the way things work out. She recognizes the model's plight as a person whose deeper attributes will probably never be allowed to surface: "Being pretty has always had drawbacks for Black women; being beautiful is our natural state." Yet similar qualms about the image of herself that has been most widely spread don't seem to figure in her mind. Smugly, she explains that writing is the only pastime she is fitted for--her lone skill--and publishes without bothering to catch her breath for a moment and rate the words that drone on and on. She blithely denounces Ralph Ellison, who was reluctant to risk a second novel, and swishes unseeingly by his acrid message still hanging on in the morass of literature--dangling, perhaps, more tenaciously because he never repeated himself.

SHE used to name herself "woman" and pace restlessly through poems, aware that "just because our hair is natural doesn't mean we don't have a wig," and used to warn of a sad part of her life:

Its knock-kneed mini skirted wig wearing died blond mamma's scar born dead my scorn your whore rough heeled broken nailed powdered face me.

Giovanni was disconcerting then, but she wheedled a revealing kind of empathy out of you, at least if you were a woman (not necessarily a black woman), too. Not so nice to herself--nonetheless the poet kept a grip on her personality; it wasn't glamorous piece of public property tempered to complement the bland taste of everyman.

Recently the author let someone write an introduction to one of her books that strokes away your jitters; it says Giovanni "curses with a style and sense of the genteel, a freedom and control in an admirable balance that is impossible to imitate." Occasionally, she has quoted jingles in her essays that lend themselves to a certain style, like "Nothing black but a Cadillac," after which she added politely, "Niggers ought to be buried in Cadillacs because that's what's killing us." Gentility. GM, Lord & Taylor, Philco "new color" TV...but isn't that what she meant when she admonished you for worshipping weakness? Maybe these days she really is aiming for a genteel brand of obscenity. It's hard to guess why she should. Apparently her flock wants it that way. Better leave the cussing out altogether--tacit apologies make it so utterly superfluous.

There aren't any conventionally offensive words in Giovanni's new collection of poetry, The Women and the Men. The women she writes about are maternal, stifled, mistreated. And the men--well, she doesn't deal with men as individuals but as qualities. She likes the poetic reverberations of lions, for example: a "pride" of lions; the lion thrown to slaughter in Daniel's den, Daniel representing men; the lion representing an alternate male predicament. Her men throw fleeting shadows over these poems, usually their last lines, which strain for harmony. Her primary subject is Giovanni, fawningly courting invisible men or haunting strong women who are being broken incessantly down to death. If you counted the verse where the first person hasn't slithered in, you'd probably tick off the few pleasing poems. It's sort of sentimental poetry.

In a poem describing love she inflates nature with banal symbolism:

rain is god's sperm falling in the receptive woman how else to spend a rainy day other than with you seeking sun and stars and heavenly bodies how else to spend a rainy day other than with you

A man, Imamu Baraka, has used the same ideas more mysteriously and senuously--the love he evokes could hold men and women, while Giovanni's amounts to idle chatter:

...The world, the world says is full of love can you find it, can you enter, and remains, grow strong with it beautiful thing in the rain, the world, these sent things whisper mice, fucked ladies, whisps of cloud still visible four o'clock in the nighttime for the expanding or retracting dying or just coming thing we will always be.

GIOVANNI probed the relationships between men and women in a book of prose pieces called Gemini, too. This writer's thoughts seldom take to much studied analysis--whatever form she arranges them in--but her prose tends to flaunt a certain intrigue that the poems fall shy of. Why, she groans, don't black men assert any control over white men? They're being dogged by death anyway, so they can't be anxious about dying. She figures they don't want white men mad at them. White women seek equality first and then follow the example of black men, according to Giovanni. She thinks white women aren't denied anything by white or black men--that they can step on both. But they are cowed by their black counterparts: "Both white women and Black men are both niggers and both respond as such. He runs to the white man to explain his 'rights' and she runs to us." Sure, her point of view is facile and dubious, but it could inject some tease into her stanzas--it's got cunning.

And this poet can handle provocative banter all right. It bursts from the wide body of her "Poem for Aretha:"

and diana ross had to get an afro wig pushed every Black singer into Blackness and negro entertainers into negroness you couldn't jive when she said "you make me/feel" the blazers had to reply "gotta let a man be/a man" aretha said "when my show was in the lost and found/you came along to claim it" and joplin said "maybe"

According to this poet, "To be black, is to be very hot. The age of the cool went out when honkies learned to say dig' with their eyelids lowered." Well, you don't burn, Giovanni.