The Orbit of Our Dreaming

Fresh off the long drive home from Hampton, where she’d been studying computer science the past two years, my sister Toya strode through our front door, newfound treasure in tow: The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni. The collection was signed by the bard herself, whom I knew primarily through Toya’s praise. The inscription was simple, direct: Latoya—Happy Birthday. I had never held a book of poems before, only encountered the art form in discrete units scattered throughout the world: hymns intoned in moments of communal celebration; the Maya Angelou poem “Phenomenal Woman” that was taped to Toya’s bedroom door; the lyrics of Paul Laurence Dunbar we read aloud at school events, voices lifting our maroon auditorium into the atmosphere. Toya wrote too—jotted down stanza after stanza in her journal, though she never read them in public. Poems are born of privacy, I learned, but did not say: adventures of the mind enshrined in paper, kept safe from interference.

Something about Giovanni’s author photo sparked my attention: the phrase “Thug Life” was engraved on her forearm. This, on the surface, was a double-offense: tattoos and the music of Tupac Amaru Shakur were forbidden in our home. True to form, my parents eventually struck a bargain in service of my education, offering Shakur’s The Rose That Grew from Concrete (1999) as a gift for my 12th birthday. It was the first poetry collection I called my own. I carried it with me each day, now connected through 2pac’s timeless phrase, his renegade way of life, to the vibrant, living voice my sister had ushered into the quietness of our family culture. The first poem I read from Giovanni, naturally, was one of her most famous, “Ego Trippin (there may be a reason why)”:

I am so hip even my errors are correct 
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off 
           the earth as I went 
           The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid 
           across three continents 
I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal 
I cannot be comprehended 
            except by my permission

The speaker in this poem is seemingly infinite, incomprehensible (except by her permission), and unflinchingly self-assured. There is no sense that she must make herself small in order to be blessed, or live a worthy life. Instead, this persona embodies the promise of abundance, bends reality with a flick of her wrist, reflects a beauty so expansive it nurtures the Earth, adorns landscapes in precious metals. As I read more of Giovanni’s writing, I saw that this galactic sense of scope and scale is not limited to a single poem, but extends across her essays, speeches, and musical collaborations. This is an interstellar ethics, a call to expand our universe of obligation, a renewed vision of our role and remit as stewards of planet Earth.

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On June 11, 1945, from her maritime post on the houseboat Sun Tan, Zora Neale Hurston proposed the idea to W.E.B. Du Bois: A 100-acre memorial dedicated to African American heroes across the ages. Her shorthand description? A cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead. Given the loss of several Black literary titans over the past decade—Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni among them—I would like to offer this writing as a foray into the practice of memorialization Hurston gestures toward. A lyric essay elegy for Giovanni; a meditation on her life as a poet, educator, and performer that takes seriously one of the major claims within her oeuvre—that “black love is black wealth.” Hence, we will begin with adoration, and end with a call to build something new, that our beloved might live on in song, and stone, and constellations bearing their names.

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Nikki Giovanni entered the world in 1943, in Knoxville, Tennessee, bearing her mother’s name: Yolande Cornelia. Her parents, Yolande Sr. and Jones “Gus” Giovanni, were both educators. The nickname by which the poet is best known was bestowed by her older sister, Gary Ann: a loving gesture to set her apart. From the start, their family life was marked by movement: Knoxville to Cincinnati to Wyoming (the city in Ohio, not the state), all before Giovanni turned 14. As her later poems reflect, this was a time of both material hardship and invincible joy; celebrations on birthdays and Christmases that shone amid the more difficult stretches of life together. Among the wonders they cultivated was a sprawling book collection. In their home, her mother’s library overflowed, featuring texts by Richard Wright, Charles Darwin, and Langston Hughes. This foundation served the young writer well; she was an excellent student, prone to charting her own path, often in spite of conventional wisdom or the disciplinary measures of American education. Her middle school teacher and lifelong friend, Althea Augustine, put it this way: “she was a brilliant, precocious child, an avid reader and independent thinker and doer. She would come to school at her convenience and leave the same regardless of school regulations.”

Eventually, Giovanni found herself back in Knoxville, entrusted to the care of her grandparents and attending Austin High School. There, it was the guidance of mentors like Emma Stokes and Alfredda Delaney that helped guide her toward creative writing as a critical practice and lifelong pursuit. Giovanni excelled in high school and, at age 17, enrolled at Fisk University, her grandfather’s alma mater, as an “early entrant.” The rest of her educational career would be a whirlwind: she was expelled her freshman year of college for leaving campus early—and without permission from the Dean of Women—to head home for Thanksgiving. Following her expulsion, she moved back to Cincinnati full time. She picked up a job at Walgreens, took care of her nephew, and attended classes whenever she could at the flagship university campus nearby. Three and a half years later, at the encouragement of a new dean, she returned to Fisk, resuscitated the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and graduated in 1967 with a degree in history. That same year, she enrolled in a master’s program in the School of Social Work at the University of Pennsylvania. Giovanni left the program several months later.

The next year, she made her way to Harlem to try something new, matriculating into the School of the Arts at Columbia University as an MFA candidate in poetry. Mentorship was elusive, but the writing flowed from the start. Within months, Giovanni self-published Black Feeling, Black Talk, a collection that sold over 10,000 copies in less than a year (after raising $500 from friends and family, she distributed the first copies herself, both in-person to independent bookstores in Harlem and via mail to Philadelphia and San Francisco). This move was meant to achieve at least two goals at once: cultivating an audience for her writing in New York City and beyond, while also fulfilling the spirit of her degree program’s requirements: to produce a publishable collection of poems within two years. The professors at Columbia didn’t share this vision, citing the program’s policy of students remaining in residence for the full two years before graduation. In 1969, she left the program without a degree (and joked for years that she was owed one).

Despite her now longstanding, contentious relationship with university protocols, Giovanni returned to campus life only months after leaving Columbia. She briefly taught at Queens College, then joined the faculty of Livingston College at Rutgers alongside Sonia Sanchez, Miguel Algarín, and Toni Cade Bambara, as well as The Ohio State University, before her final stop at Virginia Tech, where she began her appointment as a professor of English in 1987. She remained there throughout her career, teaching future rocket scientists, biologists, and engineers. It was an experience that echoed beautifully against the devotion to more-than-human lifeworlds that is hinted at in her early poems but manifests most vividly in later work: page after page where her love for the Earth and all its creatures extends outward, upward, off into the cosmos.

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Within the world of 20th century Black poetics and politics, the question of space exploration is a vexed one. And although there is no shortage of artists who affirm a desire to seek out the stars in search of solace—some, like the inimitable Sun Ra, go so far as to claim the outer planets as both birthplace and future home—there is likewise an impulse to beautify life on Earth before we seek salvation elsewhere. This tension is embodied, for example, in Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word touchstone, “Whitey on the Moon.” The poem sketches a man living under intense economic pressures (“Taxes taking my whole damn check”) and trying to navigate the devastating, material consequences of that reality (“a rat done bit my sister Nell […] her face and arm began to swell / and whitey’s on the moon”). The speaker’s critique, we learn, is not of space exploration as a practice or collective dream, but as an imprudent allocation of government resources, and human intellectual capacity, during a state of emergency.

Consider, likewise, the “March against Moon Rocks,” a three-day protest organized by Ralph Abernathy and the Poor People’s Campaign at Cape Canaveral in July 1969. As its name suggests, the demonstration featured hundreds of marchers voicing their disapproval of the US space program’s share of federal spending. An iconic sign from that week reflects their argument in miniature: “$12 a day to feed an astronaut. You could feed a starving child for $8.” Alongside these signs, the protesters brought out mules: signifiers of a history of unpaid and underpaid Black labor in the American South, a fiscal and moral debt that is often unacknowledged, or else indefinitely postponed. Martin Luther King Jr. introduced this tactic, known as “The Mule Train,” into the metonymic vernacular of the Civil Rights Movement during a visit to Marks, Mississippi, in the spring of 1968. The Mule Train eventually made its way from Mississippi to Washington DC, where it joined a shantytown on the National Mall known as Resurrection City for six weeks.

Crucially, the “March Against Moon Rocks” was not the first instance of African American protest against government spending on the space program. Before that fateful demonstration on the Space Coast in ’69, there were smaller-scale insurgencies: for example, a sit-in orchestrated by the National Welfare Rights Organization outside the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, or the audible chorus of boos heard in the audience at the Harlem Cultural Festival when the Apollo 11 landing was announced. In 1971, a group of 20 protesters, each pushing a baby stroller, took to the streets of New York City to interrupt the ticker-tape parade celebrating the Apollo 14 landing. Their refrain? Crumbs for the children and millions for the moon.

Who ultimately gets to participate—materially, emotionally—in the spoils of American abundance? Whose pain is rendered invisible, subsumed in service of a narrative of national triumph? Earthside—as Scott-Heron, Abernathy, and countless protesters during this period reminded us—the scale of suffering is colossal. There are millions of Nells: children living off of crumbs, poisoned by preventable conditions, navigating a state of deprivation engineered by institutional neglect.

Across a career of almost six decades, Giovanni’s writings speak to these fundamental human questions. In each era, her work moves between the ongoing catastrophe of American poverty and a sense of unabashed astonishment, an unrelenting obsession with the stars. This sensibility is evident not only in her poems, but in moments of public address. In 1990, she delivered a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their annual convocation held in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Her speech that morning—where she addressed topics ranging from parenting and spaceflight to our irreducible ethical debt to one another as earthlings—was a timely one, “The Dream and Hope, the Nightmare of Reality: Closing the Gap for Our Youth.” Here’s how it opens:

You are children, in case nobody has mentioned that to you lately. You do not know everything. I have a child and I like him. He’s now twenty years old. He’ll soon be grown; I accept that. I want him to go on and live his life [...] He just went to college and I tell you, the reason you go to college is that it makes your mother happy.

This is a rejoinder to a mass culture that valorizes professionalization over play, a reminder of a deeper truth that the students’ present surroundings might obscure. You are children reads like an incantation, a return to innocence, or else an invitation to intellectual courage. In this moment, when the university is positioned as much more than job training alone, I think of my own students at MIT, who take poetry classes in which they write about their families, fears, and best wishes for the future; who are already working to further develop the technology that guides so much of modern life; and who express both high hope and profound anxiety about the world those advances have helped to create. I think, too, of Du Bois’s 1906 speech at Hampton University, “The Hampton Idea,” and one of its core claims: that even in his much earlier era of technical education, young people were being trained “not to hitch their wagon to a star, but to a mule.” And, in the process, compelled to abandon their full range of aspiration.

Instead, Giovanni suggests, the university should be a place to reckon with all you do not know, and do so in community. Somewhere we fortify the pride of those who love us, enhancing their joy by our presence. On this occasion, she also introduces her son, Thomas. She casts a line from the auditorium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, all the way to Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives as she speaks, an undergraduate at Morehouse College. Her desire is for the young people in attendance to likewise live lives enhanced by professional success and adventurous study. This core theme of the address takes on many forms, including a shoutout to Michael Jordan, then only 26 years old (“It will break my heart if Michael Jordan ends up poor and on drugs and selling tennis shoes or something to earn a living. This boy should be rich. So should you”), as well as an emphasis on the importance of educating the next generation (“To all of you who are saying ‘What should I do with my life?’ I say, teach [...] We need people to be involved with people”). But the lecture takes on new energy when she begins to discuss one of her truest passions at this point in her literary life. The far reaches of outer space:

The one thing I do love more than anything is space [...] We have Voyager II that has crossed beyond that which is even imaginable for us. I love it. We know that the dog star, in fact, has to be beyond the power of the yellow sun. It is too far out. What does that mean? It means the cosmic loneliness of earth is not real [...] We are earthlings. We are a small ball in a small universe and now we have to envision a universe beyond.

Our communal status as earthlings, for Giovanni, is what the philosopher Paul Tillich might have called an ultimate concern. Beyond any legible differences in terms of status, appearance, or strength, what matters most, in her estimation, is our shared vulnerability, and the physical fact of our co-presence here on this impermanent, impossibly beautiful planet, where all manner of goodness and evil alike might find us. But how do we, as readers, square such a worldview with the rest of her writing, especially the early poems for which she is most well-known? Where does this sense of astronomical wonder, this optimism that extends even beyond Earth’s atmosphere, intersect with lines from the late ’60s like “maybe i shouldn’t write at all / but clean my gun / and check my kerosene supply / perhaps these are not poetic / times / at all”? The truth is that this sensibility, this honed sensitivity to her people’s pain, never exits the work. Rather, it is transmogrified, and is likewise found in Giovanni’s writing during the final years of the 20th century, and well into the 21st.

This abiding love makes an appearance in poems such as “Stardate Number 18628.190,” in which time travel and spaceflight alike are not means of escaping life on Earth, the here and now, but are for better understanding our place in the grand arrangement. It’s a work of verse dotted by ellipses like so many scattered comets, which is “not a sonnet…though it will sing…Precious Lord…take my hand…Amazing Grace…how sweet the sound…Go Down, Moses…Way down to the past…Way up to the future [...] and go out into Space with Etta James saying At Last.” You hear it again, this sense of unbound aspiration, in “Space,” in which Giovanni’s speaker anxiously anticipates a visit to her home by a Martian woman, though she eventually regains her confidence, assuring her guest that she need neither be frightened, nor underwhelmed, by her human form, as she is only seeing her “solar years” and not the multitudes she holds within. It is also on display in 1993, three years after her speech at MIT, when Giovanni sits for an Essence magazine interview with Mae Jemison, the astronaut, author, and educator best known for being the first African American woman in outer space.

Throughout their conversation—aptly titled “Shooting for the Moon”—the alignment between Jemison and Giovanni is evident almost immediately, in two moments in particular: the first being when Jemison says—echoing the argument offered in that classic tune, sung with singular aplomb by Sam Cooke in 1964, “The Best Things in Life Are Free”—that “space belongs to all of us.” The second is when Jemison describes her relationship to history: “I’m not the first or the only African American woman who had the skills and the talent to become an astronaut. I had the opportunity. All people have produced scientists and astronomers.” This analysis of her professional life reads as both a straightforward description of the history of science—“all people have produced scientists”—and a rather insightful claim about what it means to be lifted up as a trailblazer, or a genius. She was not the first, she says, because those who came before were not capable. She comes from them, lives a life that was made possible in part by their generally unheralded brilliance:

When I came home for Christmas, my first year at Stanford University, I brought my calculus with me. My mother said, “Why don’t you ask your father to help you?” I thought she couldn’t be serious. My father is a high-school graduate, and I was this, well, hotshot at Stanford. But I did ask him for help, and he made it so clear to me. That one thing changed the way I thought about my father and myself.

Referencing Jemison’s childhood in Decatur, Alabama, Giovanni prefaces this moment with a memory of her own father (and mine too, in a way) asserting that “there is something about Alabama men and numbers.” For both of them, gifts are an inheritance, inextricable from a line of gifted ancestors, most of whom had nothing resembling the opportunities through which they have built their legacies, and everyday lives. Jemison won her scholarship to Stanford when she was only 16, a science prodigy with an eye for the ways human beings made sense of the world around them. In later biographical writing, she recounts evenings spent stargazing between the ages of six and eight with her Uncle Louis, who discussed Einstein’s theory of general relativity with her, said stars were distant suns so far the interval blurred their true majesty, and otherwise ushered the great wealth of the universe more clearly into view during their time together outside, laughing under endless indigo. From that point on, understanding scientific concepts, wrestling with the grand unknowns of observable worlds, was par for the course for this young adventurer. If asked as a child, she says, it would have been difficult to explain what inspired her, exactly, to pursue the path of becoming a scientist, doctor, and astronaut. But now she knows: “it was the creativity that drew me to it. The possibilities.”

In the 2023 film Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, the poet appears onstage at the Apollo Theater, in conversation with the anthropologist Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, and says, “The history of our people is a great history. And it’s our duty to tell that story.” A great deal of this story, this duty, it seems, is reckoning with what it means to bear a history of those barred from all manner of human thriving, the pursuit of happiness, by the letter of the law. In one of the following scenes, juxtaposed against an image of the older Giovanni, we hear her voice again:

My great grandfather was a slave. My grandfather attended Fisk University, wanted to be a Latin scholar, was a Latin scholar in fact, it’s just that he couldn’t find a job because nobody was hiring black men to be Latin scholars at that particular point. But he was a dreamer, is my point, and his dream was not realizable because of a number of situations [...] My mother had me. I’m also a dreamer, but I don’t understand why my dreams can’t come true. So I will continue to do what my grandfather could not do. I will fight. I’m a fighter. And my son should not have to fight the same battles that I fought.

This timeless commitment, to collectively invest in the dreams of young people—no matter the brutal constraints surrounding one’s own life—is one that Jemison and Giovanni share. Its evidence is everywhere. In public programs for aspiring scientists and writers, picture books that conjure new worlds, poems like “Always There Are Children,” which features a central question we must answer anew each day: “how do we welcome the future?”

Something like an answer rises through a chorus of those who came before. They call to us from the deep prismatic dark, saying Valiantly. With gentleness, and curiosity. Our eyes trained on the infinitude just beyond our reach. Not only in search of a place for us, but as a form of everyday fabulation; the Word made flesh, and stone, and star; this story within a story yet unfolding, our gift that will not fade.