nBestselling American poet and civil rights activist Ikki Giovanni was on fire in the 1960s. Completed before her death in December, the documentary watched Giovanni in the late '70s and promoted the sold-out release. On stage, she recites poems about love, race, and gender, while at the same time as a stand-up comedian, she erupts the auditorium with hoops and laughs. Posing for a selfie, the woman tells Giovanni that she named her daughter after her. Another says she wrote a letter to her on the verge of dropping out of college. “You wrote it back. I'm a teacher now!”
In archive footage, Giovanni, as a young woman, reads the 1968 poem, Nicky Rosa. This has a line about how white people can't understand black lives. Giovanni was born in quarantine in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lived with his grandparents after witnessing domestic violence at home. In a radio interview she is dull: “I was either going to kill him” – she is talking about her father – “Or I was going to move.”
Filmed at home with her long-term partner Virginia, Giovanni stumbles upon kindness. For her fans, she's always smiling for selfies all over the world. But clearly she was not a woman suffering from fools. As the subject of the documentary, she is bounded, refusing to upset the areas she considers off limits, including her childhood challenges and the death of Martin Luther King.
Her poems were read by Giovanni himself and actor Taraji Pe Henson, and made hair at the back of my neck. There are also snippets from the conversation that aired in 1971. It is between Giovanni, still between his 20s and writer James Baldwin. Two completely original and wonderful thinkers, flickering of perceptions inspires between them that someone on their level is here matching their fierce intelligence. It's electricity.
