Citizen USA - Editorials

In her incredibly banal, childish and then churlish poem entitled: I Am Cincinnati Nikki Giovanni welcomed Cincinnatians back to the Square Oct.14th by going off on Blackwell. As her pre-pubescent prose neared its merciful conclusion, Giovanni, using her poetic license as a license to kill Blackwell’s chances come Nov. 7th spouted “…I am not a son of a (expletive deleted) like Kenny Blackwell…I will not use the color of my skin to cover the hatred in my heart. I am not a political whore jumping from bed to bed to see who will stroke my need.”

I supplied the punctuation here. You see, as an “Urban Priestess” poet and “literary legend,” trivial things like punctuation, grammar and spelling are of no concern to Nikki. That’s just her style. As is going off on side tangents against Republicans at events she’s paid to discuss her (alleged) poetry.

“Is it that my nails keep breaking. Or maybe the corn on my secind little piggy. Things keep popping out on my face” - from “Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day”

Giovanni was invited to participate in the reopening “festivities” of the renovated and remodeled Fountain Square after over a year of work that saw the “Genius of the Waters” fountain get a cosmetic cleanup makeover and relocation to a more prominent location on the now more pedestrian-friendly plaza. But based on her recent history it didn’t take a “Genius” to determine that it was highly probable that Giovanni would carpe diem and indulge in exactly the same type of racially charged rhetoric that she so shamefully exhibited on the Square.

Yolanda Cornelia “Nikki” Giovanni is just another hater who has become a player in today’s warped political landscape because of her celebrity in the Arts/Academia crowd. You know, those artsy-dartsy folks who think it’s clever and artistic to display a cross in a jar of urine, or display a painting of the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung. And George W. Bush in a Gestapo uniform? High-brow humor! Many of the arts crowd I have encountered are Christophobic, Patriotophobic wine–and-cheese eating cretins living off the public dole through their National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grants paid for by the taxes of regular people who actually work for a living.

A cursory five-minute online web search of ‘Giovanni, Nikki’ is all it takes to discover that public events at which she discusses poetry often morph into cheap political attacks against her target du jour.

During a speaking engagement at Ohio University the Athens News reported that Giovanni advised students: "Please do not vote for Kenny Blackwell; he is a horrible individual."

And Shortly before the 2004 Election here was Nikki, going off on George W. Bush before a crowd of college age voters at South Carolina State…As the South Carolina Times and Democrat reported: Giovanni ‘bravely’ bleated: "I'm so sick of this retro president… What did you do yesterday? 'Well, I dropped bombs.' B-i-i-i-g deal!"

And according to the Divine Miss N. - Saddam Hussein is a kindly Santa Claus-like fellow. Pish-tosh about all those mass graves and ripped out tongues. Everybody knows its G.W. that’s the bad guy, not poor ol’ Mr. Hussein, who ruled benevolently for 30-plus years by feeding his critics to the palace Dobermans (an incident confirmed to me by a source in Iraq. One of those Saddam-style Scooby-snacks was my source’s uncle.)

But in the bizzarro-universe inhabited by Nikkei and her ilk, “It's embarrassing that we have a head of state that says, 'I want to kill Saddam.' That's embarrassing! By any other standard, that's mass murder. He's a war criminal," Giovanni declared to the SC State kids who of course ate it up, not because she’s a historian or even politically literate. But because she’s a pop culture icon!! The new pseudo-experts on world events who never let facts get in the way of a good story.

Second child of Yolande and Jones Giovanni, Nikki's family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1943.

In 1957 her family moved to Knoxville to live with Giovanni’s maternal grandparents. After being dismissed from Fisk, Giovanni again spent time in Cincy working at Walgreens and attending some classes at U.C. Maybe it was there that Nikki first started disliking “Kenny.” It has been widely reported that the two knew each other as teens. Maybe the catty Bearcat resented Blackwell attending cross-town rival Xavier, where he played D-line on one of the last Musketeer football teams. Thus the genesis of the term “player hater.” Or maybe Kenny just didn’t want to a local sock hop with Nikki in Junior High. A woman spurned…

Giovanni did to her credit go back to Fisk and achieve her degree. In 1968 she moved to New York City where she received a grant from the National Foundation of the Arts to attend Columbia.

According to comments on enotes.com, Giovanni's earlier works “were recognized mainly for their militant, revolutionary, Black-Power stance…”

So who does Giovanni consider to be worthy of praise and suitable role models for the college kids? Why, she advocates the career path of "the great Angela Davis, who recognized and accepted her responsibilities."

You probably remember the name if you’re 45 or over. Angela Davis was a member of the violent militant group the “Black Panthers” in the 1960’s and 70’s. She achieved infamy and was the subject of an intense 18-month nationwide manhunt for her role in a Black Panther prison break in which a judge was kidnapped and later killed and a prosecutor was paralyzed after being shot.

Judge Harold Haley was thrown into a van, had a shotgun taped to his throat and was murdered by his captors inside the van. The guns used in the kidnapping were traced back to Davis who was charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and homicide. After her capture, Davis was tried and acquitted.

Following her release, Davis visited Fidel Castro in Cuba, making the same pilgrimage as had other sixties Black Power radicals Huey Newton and Stokely Carmichael.

Giovanni attained notoriety as one of the emerging poets in the Black Power/Black Arts movement in the sixties and wrote “A Poem for Angela Davis (1970)” where she lauded the violent revolutionary.

Giovanni boasted to the South Carolina State crowd, "I always say what I believe. I like controversy. I'm a '60s person." But to prove that she is still down with the hip-hop hep-cats on campus Giovanni pathetically boasts of her own ‘body art’ ‘tats.’

“I have a tattoo, and mine says, 'Thug Life.' "

Because Lawd knows you gotta’ keep re-establishing that street cred. Afterall, 40 years is a long time to ride that Black Panther tale, especially with kids who don’t know Angela Davis from Bette Davis.

Giovanni also took a shot at Tiger Woods, who like Blackwell, apparently wasn’t black enough to suit Nikki. Referring to the golf legend as “that little Negro” Giovanni said, "I'm so happy Tiger Woods lost the Masters." Tiger’s crime? He didn’t obey the National Organization of Women (NOW) nags when they called for a boycott of Augusta National over the historic golf club’s policy as a private men’s club.

She again played the “Reparations Rap” telling the SC State kids she's "a fan of reparations ... We have a sacred obligation to collect their wages.” Giovanni also said blithely, “Of course we need affirmative action.” And according to the Times-Democrat “expressed contempt” for Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and others. Anybody see a pattern here? With that $4 mil couldn’t anybody at 3CDC come up with the same info I did? Did they try? And if they did, would they care about Giovanni’s bombastic statements? Or was that precisely the reason, as I and others suspect, that she was invited? And that the 3CDC short list of “prominent Cincinnatians” to consider likely numbered exactly one.

I can see asking Giovanni to attend Howard dean’s birthday party. But why on earth would such a potty-mouthed and obviously partisan poet be invited to speak at what should have been a celebration of and for ALL Cincinnatians...not just liberal Left Democrats?

I posed just that question to the “civic” group that extended the extended the invitation. The Cincinnati Center City Development Corp. (3CDC) is according to its Press spokesman Kevin Armstrong a private non-profit development corporation that works directly with Cincinnati City government but is not part of it. Armstrong and 3CDC feigned ignorance over Giovanni’s Blackwell-bash. According to a 3CDC press release rushed out two days later after irate Cincinnatians had lit up the switchboards brighter than the “Holiday” tree that will sit on the square next month (in observance of the birth of crass commercialism): “Nothing in an early draft provided to 3CDC indicated the negative tone of the final poem's middle section. “Organizers requested a work that would deliver a positive, uplifting message about the importance of Cincinnatians reconnecting with one another.”

But what occurred was more like the Black Fist connecting and reconnecting with the collective jaw of a city already on the ropes through years of hate-speech fomented racial strife, riots and an inner-city murder rate that has most Cincinnatians avoiding downtown like the plague. You could almost hear General Kabaka Oba’s ghostly laughter echoing off the downtown high-rises and over the exact same Square he had hurled similar racial and religious epithets so many times before.

Even Cincinnati mayor Mark Mallory is loathe to venture from the safety and security of his City Hall office without being accompanied by his Mr. T-like bodyguard. (“I pity the fool who comes near the Mayor!”)

Speaking of Mallory, he somehow escaped Giovanni’s poison pen. After slamming Blackwell Nikki fawned over the Democrat in lyric praise.

“I am Mark Mallory Talking to everyone. Walking with everyone. Listening to everyone Leading by consensus, not fear…”

A more apt description might have read “I am Mark Mallory (insert first two words, line 3, and last word in the stanza)…I am Mark Mallory…walking...in fear.

It’s a jumbled and agenda-driven equation. Nikki G. is black. Ken Blackwell is black. Mark Mallory is black.

But Blackwell’s apparently not black enough for Nikki. And his conservative Christian stances drive her stark raving. According to an Oct. 18th Cincinnati Enquirer article Giovanni despises Blackwell because during his tenure as Cincinnati Mayor Blackwell refused to cave in to the Gay Lobby and nixed the idea of proclaiming a “Gay Pride Day” in Cincinnati.

Blackwell also doesn’t toe the party line of what another conservative Christian African-American, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, calls the “Democrat Plantation.” i.e. to be “a proud black man/woman you have to have an entitlement mindset (in favor of welfare, reparations, and affirmative action); demand political power by casting all who oppose you as ‘racist’ if they’re white and disparaging them as ‘Uncle Tom’s’ or ‘House Negroes’ if they’re black (Peterson said he’s been called both); and always, always, always vote Democrat.

I asked Armstrong why 3CDC hadn’t done their due diligence in researching their guest’s provocative past.

“We invited Nikki because she’s a famous, nationally known, talented poet and a Cincinnati native. We did not know and we did not expect she’d say what she said.”

So she blind-sided you? “I wouldn’t describe it that way,” Armstrong danced verbally. “We asked Nikki to come in and deliver a poem, she delivered it.”

Come on Kev, you didn’t know what she was going to say? “No.”

So she did blind-side you with her attack on Blackwell?

“Blind sided is a much more accusatory tone, than I would use. She used language in her poem that we had no idea that she was going to use.”

But again, did you do any research or background, anything that might indicate that she could possibly make such a political statement?

Armstrong simply responded- again, “We invited Nikki to speak, because she’s a famous poet and a native Cincinnatian”

I asked Armstrong who at 3CDC made the call to select Giovanni over other prominent current or former Cincinnatians. “It was decided within 3CDC. Not by one person.”

Were any other people considered before Giovanni was selected? “I really don’t know how to answer that question,” Armstrong said. “We decided who we considered and who we should invite at this event we thought it made sense to include Cincinnatians and Nikki fit that bill. I can not say that we invited her instead of or over someone else….you consider who you want to invite, consider the nature of the event, and then you identify people who seem appropriate to invite and invite them”

So was she or wasn’t she the only one considered?

3CDC- “I imagine we considered other people… but… I don’t know who they were.”

Since 3CDC is “funded privately” I asked Armstrong who some of those private backers were? “We don’t discuss that information,” he said, but Armstrong did let slip something extremely interesting. Saying that while no tax payer money was directly used in paying for the Giovanni fiasco, Armstrong admitted, “There was taxpayer money involved in the work we did on Fountain Square.”

How much? How about this for relevance? Of the total $43 million dollar Fountain Square renovation project cost, Armstrong said 3CDC received a grant from the City of Cincinnati for $4 million to plan and organize the re-opening celebration.

When I asked Armstrong just how many of 3CDC’s private backers tended to lean to the Left side of the political spectrum in their voting patterns he responded that he “wouldn’t even entertain that question.”

I would. Especially since many conservatives and Republicans think that this was a staged political hit on Blackwell and that Giovanni was the hired gun. And that 3CDC stands for “3 Cash-heavy Dem Contributors.”

Armstrong first maintained that “Nikki was not paid” for her Cincinnati appearance but when I told him my research suggested that Giovanni appeared the type of person who wouldn’t cross the street without first being guaranteed a performance fee, Armstrong backtracked. “We may have covered the flight. I’m not certain.”

So much uncertainty. So little rhyme. I am the Bengals The Reds…I am the best 3-way chili in the world I am Montgomery ribs…

I am the University of Cincinnati I am Xavier

I am calling on Joe Deters to appoint an independent counsel to determine what first grader had their essay plagiarized. I’m not the only person who finds her writing elementary. A South Atlantic Review article said many Giovanni critics find her "too militant, too violent, too loud, too political, too simplistic..." Cosmoetics poetry critic Dan Schneider wrote in 2002: “Most of the ‘poems’ she’s written in her 50s & 60s are things that even most 16 year-old diaristic teenyboppers would find pathetic. No music, no skill, no attempt at anything poetic.”

Schneider continued, “By the (19)90’s the aging failure turned her attention to merging the spoken word with rap music.

About Giovanni’s poem "Ego Tripping" Schneider wrote, “This is an exercise in self-pity that is embarrassing to even a novice reader of poetry. What mawk! What self-indulgence.”

I was born in the congo

I walked to the fertile crescent and built

drinking nectar with allah…

…My oldest daughter is nefertiti

the tears from my birth pains

I am a beautiful woman

My son noah built new/ark and

I stood proudly at the helm

as we sailed on a soft summer day

I turned myself into myself and was

My bowels deliver uranium

the filings from my fingernails are

semi-precious jewels

I caught a cold and blew

My nose giving oil to the arab world

I am so hip even my errors are correct

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal

I cannot be comprehended except by my permission

- from “Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)”

Wow! Nikki really must be All That! And humble too!

In an interview Giovanni gave to a Tennessee student published on the Internet the student asked Giovanni, “How did you become an author? Did anyone help you get started?”

Giovanni replied, "Probably the easiest thing in the world is to become an author. All you have to do is say you are one. We do not have test or require licenses or anything like that.”

And I could say I’m the Grand Poobah of the Lollipop League. But that doesn’t make it so.

In an interview in the online journal "Writers Write" Giovanni said, "Writing poetry is largely a case of the heart...but it's also a big head case because your heart gets interested in things, but if your head doesn't know about them, you end up with this trite crap.”

then my job is to not

do what i don't want

…when i can't express

- Okay, that just makes my head hurt.

I’m sure he “couldn’t recall” this either but Armstrong and 3CDC even had local precedent to draw on regarding Giovanni. According to published reports in a 2002 appearance at a Women's Leadership Conference at the University of Cincinnati Giovanni said referring to African-American felons shot by the Cincinnati Police, "Another dead body just won't do.” Nikki then suggested that police not be given guns and later maintained that reparations be paid for slavery.

In her “I am Cincinnati” spiel Nikki couldn’t resist taking another swipe at Cincinnati cops (who by the way, were providing security for her safety).

I have watched policemen

Shoot young black men in the back

And have watched my community respond

By “respond” she means Riot. Four days of senseless violence, looting, and curfews that marred Easter Holy Week and from which Cincinnati has not recovered and possibly never will.

Ohio Fraternal Order of Police vice-president and former Cincinnati FOP head Keith Fangman categorized Giovanni’s words at the ‘family friendly’ event as “inflammatory” in an Enquirer interview. “What a great way to welcome the cop-hating, racial element back to Fountain Square.” He said sarcastically.

And like me, Fangman wasn’t buying 3CDC’s plausible denial spin. “Any imbecile should have known that Nikki Giovanni is an ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, left-wing, political militant and should never have been invited to speak at his celebration.”

Any comment to that Kev??

“We invited Nikki because she’s a famous, nationally known poet…” yada, yada, yada.

I tried once more. “With the racial tensions already high in Cincinnati, and with the recent Kabaka Oba episode, was it wise to bring a poet here for a family event who lionized the Black Panthers in the 60’s?”

3CDC’s Armstrong – (Insert “We invited Nikki” mantra here.)

Fame is a curious thing

According to e-notes.com, it wasn’t life in Lincoln Heights that turned little Yolanda into Nikki G. the flame-throwing activist. Like many of our kids today, the e-notes bio describes Giovanni as not becoming radicalized into a Far Leftist until her days at Fisk University. Now older, and grayer but more of an ideologue than ever, Nikki is doing her best to pass her strident viewpoints onto a new generation through her numerous paid college speaking engagements and her role as a Professor at Virginia Tech.

Prior to an appearance at the Shrine of the Black Madonna Bookstore in Atlanta Giovanni told an interviewer from Creative Loafing.com, "Some people say there's been a big change (in her later writing.) “What they're saying is, you no longer say 'mother----er,'" she says, laughing so hard she coughs. "But how long can you say 'mother----er?' I'm a 59-year-old woman. Shouldn't I clean up my act a little bit?"

Yeah, Yolanda Cornelia, you should.

In her poem “Nikki-Rosa” Giovanni writes:

“…childhood remembrances are always a drag

I really hope no white person everhas cause

because they never understand.”

Hatred’s not so hard to identify or understand Nikki. As one of its champions, it’s just getting increasingly harder for you to justify. Next time you’re in Cincy, have a cheese coney, a Big Boy from Frisch’s and some Graeter’s ice cream. I’m sure 3CDC still has some meal money left from that $4 mil. Just do us ALL – black and white – Democrats and Republicans - a favor. Stay away from the microphones. Unlike you, we still live here.