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Post by Quevin. on Oct 30, 2017 14:40:27 GMT -6
In Nikki Giovanni’s poem, Nikki Rosa, Giovanni is expressing how she feels about how people view her past vs how she feels about her past. The idea that perspective affects memory is introduced as early as the first line, as she states “childhood remembrances are always a drag”. Her feelings about her childhood are presented here, but this isn’t the meat of the issue. She goes into more detail about her childhood in the following lines, and the way that she describes makes it seem so nonchalant. She fires off the details in short, quick bursts and this effect on the audience is shocking because to her it is normal, or not bothersome, but to every other person this is a horrible place to be. Poverty in any sense of the imagination is not good. Living in a state of poverty and not having basic necessities is not something that someone should enjoy. The conflict in this poem between Giovanni’s memories and the tone of the poem is also prevalent here. Because she just lays out the information with the absence of passion or emotion, the whole poem just seems absurd. On a personal level, I identify with Giovanni. Growing up in a poor environment is bad, however you will learn to make the best of your situation and find happiness in what you do have. People adapt to their situations, especially children, who sometimes do not understand the situations that they are in. Towards the end of the piece, she states that she would never want a white person to report on her life because they would know nothing about her situation. That is why I understand it because I experienced this myself. A white person, who is well off, never experienced having to live from paycheck to paycheck, never having to make ends meet on a dime. A white person during this time would not have any idea of what it was like for a black person to struggle in poverty. As she states towards the end of the poem “Black love is Black wealth”. Giovanni wants people to understand that for her, existing in poverty was not a detrimental factor for the type of person he was. She didn’t come out of it a bitter and hateful person. She had the love and care of the people around her, so she wasn’t really hindered by the situation she was in. I think this is partly because she was a child, and as children we don’t view the world as complex as an adult. As children our minds do not factor in why something is the way it is, we just simply exist within it. This is the case for any and every child in any situation. Children do not inherently know right from wrong, or bad experiences from good ones. We learn those from the society that we grow up in. Nikki Giovanni is providing us with her own personal example of how the mindset of a child can create memories that seem bad or unordinary to other people, but to that child, and even their adult selves, the experience will always mean something completely different.
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Post by andrea on Nov 1, 2017 12:08:37 GMT -6
In Nikki Giovanni's poem Nikki Rosa, she talks about how those on the outside, specifically white people, view experiences that may be common for many black people as automatically negative since they aren't inherently positive experiences. However, in reality, though the experiences, such as not having an inside toilet, aren't what makes up a person's life. For many black people, the positive aspects of their childhoods overshadow the negative. However, when white people get a hold of such instances, they vilify them in an attempt to discredit ones various positive childhood memories. In the poem Giovanni mentions how, rather then focusing on how one ever got a decent bath or how often ones parents argued due to your father's drinking, kids focused on the fact that at least their family was still together, semi stable, and able to create happy experiences.
Overall, this poem is meant to highlight how white people are prone to vilifying ones childhood because they, people of color or black people to be specific, weren't able to share what they thought to be decent childhoods. However, even if their childhoods weren't perfect, they were still joyful experiences.
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Post by jordan on Nov 1, 2017 20:19:41 GMT -6
In Nikki Giovanni's poem, Nikki Rosa, I agree with Andrea and Quevin that she is making note of how her past is viewed to from her perspective versus a white person's perspective. Giovanni talks about her past in short sentences; she's listing what her childhood life was like as fact. Her tone when looking back on her past in the poem is nonchalant. I picture her shrugging her shoulders, not bothered at all by what she said. To an audience who experience the same thing, they would also feel nonchalant, while another audience would be too shocked to look past the hardship. I believe that's the main conflict: the barrier between experiences and the unintentional focus on the bad things because that's so interesting to talk about. I watched a video of Nikki Giovanni perform this poem on YouTube, and the tone of last two lines, "and never understand that all the while I was quite happy", sound almost defensive or matter-of-fact in response to the negative white people highlight about her past.
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Post by Keviana S on Nov 2, 2017 10:12:32 GMT -6
In the poem Nikki Rosa by Nikki Giovanni, the narrator addresses a black audience and talks about the shared experiences that is foreign to a white-middle class audience. The narrator is a woman that realizes her childhood experiences contain both good and bad events. Nevertheless, like Jordan, Andrea, and Quevin said, the negative memories, are caused by poverty. They are outweighed by the positive, which provides her a strong and close family.Through her poem she communicates the idea that black people and white people have different ideas when it comes to wealth and happiness. Wealth for black people is the love and togetherness of families-not material things.The narrator uses direct images and tone to compare and contrast the big idea of "black wealth" and "hard life" throughout the poem. Her uses of images with direct word usage combines to make her point; for example, “you always remember things like living in Woodlawn with no inside toilet”. This image gives a special and warm feeling to remember this community but also a negative impact, because they have to use outdoor facilities. Another example of how the tone and imagery is being conveyed is “how good the water felt when you got your bath from one of those big tubs that folk in Chicago barbecue in." She is showing a positive memory of feeling fresh after taking a bath versus the negative fact that it was a barbecue drum. The community in this poem is a part of what the author calls "black love", which means that being together as a family bring a sense of support and happiness while struggling with poverty.
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mari
New Member
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Post by mari on Nov 2, 2017 14:47:48 GMT -6
In the poem, nikki rosa, nikki expresses that she, although poor had a very delightful experience in her childhood. She claims that being poor is what brought her family closer together over certain materialistic items.(Edit: didnt get home til 9) At first I had thought that she was trying to tell white people that blacks enjoy what they have. upon reading this again, I found that in the first line, even black people had seemed to only really notice the negative side of their childhood. " childhood remembrances are always a drag if you’re Black." Here she had specified the "if you're black." by putting it separately on it's own line. I took it that she implied that only blacks really focus on the negative side of their childhoods.
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taj
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Post by taj on Nov 2, 2017 15:42:02 GMT -6
In Nikki Giovanni's "Nikki-Rosa", Giovanni shows a subtle vulnerability by her lack of capitalization. This informal style of writing leads the writing to seem more like a dialogue or a genuine statement rather than a writing that was meticulously planned in every comma and period. The title "Nikki-Rosa" most likely refers to Rosa Parks, an appropriate reference in that the poem is in relation to Giovanni's race. Giovanni writes to acknowledge the weakness of perspective and the flaws of the "Individualist" mindset of current society. Especially in America, the idea of being the "underdog" who rises to the top of adversity is well beloved and integral to the key core values of society. Giovanni writes that the desire to make this "underdog" story happen causes them to skew their perception of what that person has actually experienced. This combined with the writer's experiences being a black woman, leads her to juxtaposition of her happy memories with the story that is presented by media, being a poor, unhappy life led by abuse. Giovanni argues that by ignoring the complexities of one's upbringing, brings them to being something that they are not. The title Nikki-Rosa indicates that through the disregard of all of Giovanni's happy memories (which are equal if not more than her bad memories), she is taken away from her complexity and becomes something she is not-in this example Rosa Parks (a civil rights activist).
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Post by nayaj0nes on Nov 2, 2017 16:18:50 GMT -6
In the poem Nikki Rosa, written by Nikki Giovanni, the author is speaking of how her outsiders, mostly white people, view mostly african american experience as negative because in their opinion, the experiences aren’t congenitally positive; she proves her point in the poem by comparing and contrasting how she views her own experiences with how whites view african american experiences. The poem itself is a juxtaposition of the narrator’s youth with the misreadings or misinterpretation of future biographers. Future biographer’s may mention the fights between her mother and father as well as her father’s drinking, but will fail to mention the importance or the closeness of extended family. Overall the narrator is fearing that the simple pleasures of her childhood would be overlooked due to the fact that the people viewing her experiences will not understand the enjoyment of them and instead only focus on the negative things that have occurred. One aspect of this poem that I feel is often overlooked is the lack of punctuation in the poem. I feel that the author does this in order to make it seem as though she is actually having a conversation with her audience. The importance of this is because this allows her audience to truly experience the emotions being felt by the author.
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Post by nikymbaw on Nov 2, 2017 17:40:18 GMT -6
When reading this poem, I felt that the speaker was simply recounting the memories that from an outsider perspective would seem wrought with difficulties and trauma. Poverty is a core element of this poem, and whenever people speak of it they tend to focue on the struggles, such as the speakers “...father’s pain as he sells his stock//” or how their parents “...fought a lot//” However, the speaker themselves was rather accepting of their upbringing, in fact they even point out of people tend to “...never talk about how happy you were to have//” their family sticking together in tough times. Overall, I agree with Naya on how the poem itself is a representation of how some people can misinterperate the memories or past of another, and people will never truly understand the true meaning of those memories. I especially feel like this piece is aimed at whites, as establishing early on in the poem how “childhood remembrances are always a drag// if you’re Black//” instills how the overall “black experience” was viewed by white Americans. This can also be supported by the line “...I really hope no white person ever has cause// to write about me/ because they never understand//” what it was like to be growing up like the speaker.
I also feel that the poem opens up the conversation that the perspective of ones upbringing or something that makes them who they are is really important. Everyday in class we study other people’s perspective, but we have to be careful to not create a one dimension image of that person, which is what I feel the speaker fears.
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Post by akmaples on Nov 3, 2017 10:26:29 GMT -6
In the poem "Nikki-Rosa," Nikki Giovanni writes about her growing up in her family. The poem calls into question our ability to truly understand someone else’s background. This then goes to how we understand where other people come from and what makes up their identity. When I first read this poem, I pictured a poverty-stricken family living in a small apartment. The family happens to be poor because they have no toilet inside and take baths in "one of those big tubs that folk in Chicago barbecue in" (10-11). The family is not as concerned about poverty as they are for their love for one another, "And though you're poor it isn't poverty that concerns you and though they fought a lot it isn't your father's drinking that makes any difference but only that everybody is together and you and your sister have happy birthdays and very good Christmases" (20-26). The poem reveals a good family does have its problems. I got the feeling the children in the poem loved living where they lived although their parents weren't the richest, or they didn't live in the nicest house. The children realized that there was more to life than having a pleasant house and delightful things. The children in the poem realize that family life is more important than material objects. The poem "Nikki-Rosa" was written based on the life of Nikki Giovanni.
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