After eight-day delay, poet thrills San Antonio College crowd

She arrived eight days late, but renowned poet and civil rights visionary Nikki Giovanni delighted a full house at San Antonio College in a conversation about healing Wednesday.

Letting go of anger is key to racial reconciliation, said Giovanni, 80, a Tennessee native now living in Virginia. The Black American experience has shed light for everyone on faith and healing, she said.

“I think we’ve helped other peoples recognize that somehow, it’s ugly right now, and it’s cold outside, but the sun’s going to come. I just think that has to be a part of what you think. Because otherwise, you get caught up in revenge,” she told about 200 students and community members at McAllister Auditorium.

The event, part of DreamWeek, which celebrates the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., featured a Native American blessing and dance, music and poetry readings. It had been postponed when Giovanni contracted the flu last week.

“We have a responsibility to leverage the truth in its purest form as a practice of compassion that leads toward our collective nourishing,” said moderator Eric Castillo, the Alamo Colleges associate vice chancellor of arts, culture, community and impact. “In a world that compels us to act in haste, let us collectively take a deep breath.”

Mayor Ron Nirenberg also greeted the audience, calling Giovanni “an important American voice who has advocated for racial and gender equality and offered deep insights into our own culture.”

Giovanni, the subject of a new documentary, “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” which is streaming on Max, spoke of storytelling as a first step toward healing. African Americans who were enslaved or oppressed and barred from educational opportunities learned to tell stories through food, quilting and music, most notably spirituals, she said.

“We can … identify about 1,100 spirituals, songs that are passed down. But not one of them calls for revenge,” Giovanni said. “Everybody has to be proud of the little things we’ve done.”

At times turning to political commentary and championing the causes of transgender youth and women’s reproductive health, Giovanni also made the audience laugh, declaring, “I do talk dog” as a second language with her Yorkie, and arguing that “the human body needs to be reconstructed.”

“I don’t know about men, but women need to have another hand,” which, she asserted, would surely be used constructively.

Giovanni also discussed determination and persistence as values leading to a pathway to progress.

“We would wish, probably everyone in the room, that everything could be all right. That everybody could have a home, everybody could be warm, everybody could be loved. But that’s not going to happen that way. But little by little, every step … goes higher and higher. I do feel that change has come. I think change will continue to come,” she said.