Nikki Giovanni's third NAACP Image Award for literature gave her great satisfaction because of the book that won it: Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea.

The Image Awards are presented to actors, authors, movies, performers, and others for the way they depict African Americans. In her book, subtitled "poems and not quite poems," Giovanni put the black American experience of the "Middle Passage" into the context of space. Although there has been science fiction with blacks in the future, she said, nobody before has put them in space. However, she said, "Black Americans have been the only human beings in a space with no known landmarks."

People from other countries did not go to Africa to get slaves, Giovanni said. "They went to get free people to make them slaves." As long as those captured people could look back and see their homeland, they had a landmark, she said. In the Middle Passage--that point at which they could see neither homeland nor destination--they "couldn't see where they were going nor where they had been, and they had the expectation of the future's being unpleasant. After all, they were chained and branded."

But at that point, Giovanni said, those enslaved people made a decision: they decided to retain their humanity, and that decision makes them perfect models for space exploration. "When we look at space, the question facing us is ‘How will people react once they can no longer see Earth, but cannot see their destination?’" she said.

The biosphere experiment was no real test, she said, because it was still on Earth. "We have to understand what African Americans went through in that same dark space and what they knew that allowed them to make the right decision," Giovanni said. "It's a whole new way of looking at slavery, from the point of view of people who went through it. They brought a humanity to Earth that has to be respected."

The fact that her book took this intellectual look at the people who not only survived the Middle Passage but also retained their humanity is what Giovanni thinks won it the Image Award for outstanding literary work in the fiction category. "I'm excited by it," she said. "We needed this. Imagine if the planter society had won. People made a decision to remember they were human, to fight the battle with a song. And that song changed the world. It was a great decision. These are great people."

In winning this third Image Award, Giovanni was in good company. Levar Burton, who played Kunta Kinte in Roots, won for outstanding performance in a youth/children's series or special for PBS's Reading Rainbow. Angela Bassett won for outstanding actress in a television special or movie for The Rosa Parks Story, which won outstanding television dramatic special or movie (Giovanni was recently named the first Rosa Parks Woman of Courage). Natalie Cole won for outstanding jazz artist. Nelson Mandela won for outstanding children's literary work. Both Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won for movie roles.

Finalists in Giovanni's category were The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts with Henry Louis Gates as editor, The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter, A Love of My Own by E. Lynn Harris, and Thieves' Paradise by Eric Jerome Dickey.

Giovanni has been a major influence in American literature since her poetry provided a voice for black people in the 60s. She has won dozens of awards, including the Langston Hughes Award for distinguished contributions to arts and letters, the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, two previous Image Awards, and the Virginia Governor's Award for the Arts 2000, given for distinction in creative achievements.

Each award was special. This one, though, was for something she especially wanted to accomplish: "I'm trying to say that intelligent people have to question everything and have to dig a little deeper." Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, she said, "opened a window, if not a door, with its new way of looking at slavery, particularly the Middle Passage."

Contact:

Tags

Share this story