SOURCE: An interview in Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1983, pp. 60-78.

[In the following interview, Giovanni discusses her work's development, considers the effects of race and gender on writing, and provides insight into her own creative process.]

Nikki Giovanni began her literary career as a poet in the late sixties during the so-called "Black Revolution," and much of her verse at that time encouraged social and political activism among Black Americans. Her later work also addresses contemporary issues, but the focus falls instead on human relationships rendered from the vantage point of a mother, a lover, and a women. Giovannni's language remains startling, energetic, enraged, and loving….

[TATE]: The black revolutionary fervor of the sixties seems to be gone. We no longer even hear the rhetoric. Does this suggest that the revolution is over?

[GIOVANNI]: I bought three new windows for my mother's basement. Have you ever bought windows for your mother's basement? It's revolutionary! It really is.

I have a problem I think I should share with you. For the most part this question is boring. We're looking at a phenomenon as if it were finished. Everyone says, "Well, what happened to the revolution?" If you want to deal with states [dialectical transitions] you have to deal with Marx. But I'm not into that. From where I am, I see a continuous black revolution going on for the last four hundred years in America. There has been a continuous revolution of black people for the last two thousand years. And it's not letting up.

When you look at the decade from 1954 to 1964, you're forced to say black Americans won their objectives. We didn't like the segregated buses. We didn't like the segregated schools. We didn't like the way we were treated in stores. We didn't like the housing patterns. We didn't like the number of doctors or lawyers we had. We didn't like our lack of professionals. We won. But looking at the late seventies, there's no way you can consider the Bakke decision to be favorable. It was 5-4. It was really a bad decision. Close cases make bad law. There's no question Bakke should have come in 9-0 either way, if it's going to be definitive. Then you would have had a law. You don't have a law now.

I'm looking for a riot. I'm living in a city that kills cops like people kill flies. Cincinnati, Ohio is leading the nation in the number of policemen killed. We're number one. The black community seems to be saying, "Well, you can play Nazi, but we ain't playing Jew." And black folks have been shooting back. We're saying, "Wait a minute. Who do you think you're playing with?" Nobody's going back to 1954. No matter what the rollback is. It's not even going back to '64. No matter what "let's take the breather" is.

When people start to say "What happened to the sixties," we've got to remember, "Hey, this is the eighties and what are we going to do now?" Where are we going because it's going to continue. My generation didn't start the bus boycotts. But we decided where they should go. Now it's time again to decide on a direction. We weren't the first generation to say "This ain't right." But we were the first to know we had to fight in terms of our bodies. We recognized we were going to have to go to jail, and we were going to have to get killed. And all of that is really sad. We were going to get beaten; our houses were going to get bombed. But we went on the line. I mean bodies, a lot of bodies. I'm not the first poet, neither is Carolyn Rogers nor Gwen Brooks, to say, "Hey, this is intolerable." Neither was Langston Hughes, nor Claude McKay. We're talking about a struggle for freedom that keeps going on and on. People are tending to approach the whole problem like, "Oh! Wow! It's all over. It's been done." This is not a movie!

Sure the militant posture has left contemporary writing. First of all it was boring. That's a very serious word for me; I use it a lot, I realize, but what do you want? You want me to rewrite "Nigger can you kill/Can you kill/Nigger can you kill?" I wrote it. It's not just that it's written, but I wrote it. And I wasn't even the first person to write it. Nor will I be the last. But I did it my time. Now it's time for me to do something else.

Your earlier works, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgment and Re: Creation, seem very extroverted, militant, arrogant. The later work, The Women and the Men and Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day, seem very introverted, private, lonely, withdrawn. Does this shift in perspective, tone, and thematic focus reflect a conscious transition?

I'll tell you what's wrong with that question. The assumption inherent in that question is that the self is not a part of the body politic. There's no separation.

I'm not a critic of my own work. It's not what I'm supposed to be about. I think literary analysis gives academics something to do. Books are generally amusement parks for readers. They will ultimately make a decision about which book to ride. But as for critics, they have to write a book as interesting as the one they're criticizing or the criticism is without validity. If they succeed, then the book they're writing about is only their subject; it is not in itself necessary. The critics could have written about anything. And after all, they've got to have something to do. It's Friday and it's raining, so they write a critique of Nikki Giovanni. It's not serious. And I'm not denigrating myself; it's just that it's no more serious than that.

Is there a black aesthetic? If so, can you define it?

It's not that I can't define the term, but I am not interested in defining it. I don't trust people who do. Melvin Toison said you only define a culture in its decline; you never define a culture in its ascendancy. There's no question about that. You only define anything when it's on its way down. How high did it go? As long as it's traveling, you're only guessing. So too with the black aesthetic.

As the black-aesthetic criticism went, you were told that if you were a black writer or a black critic, you were told this is what you should do. That kind of prescription cuts off the question by defining parameters. I object to prescriptions of all kinds. In this case the prescription was a capsulized militant stance. What are we going to do with a stance? Literature is only as useful as it reflects reality. I talk about this in Gemini; I also say it's very difficult to gauge what we have done as a people when we have been systematically subjected to the whims of other people.

One essay in Gemini discusses the effects of slavery on Phillis Wheatley's life and work.

You talk to Margaret Walker about Phillis because I would like to be very clear about her. There is nothing wrong with the poems she wrote. And I dare say, from what I see of history, there was no particular reason why Phillis Wheatley didn't mean exactly what she said. There is no reason for me to reject what Phillis Wheatley had to say about her experience. And I don't. People get upset because she talks about Africa in terms of how delighted she was to discover Christianity. Well, from what little I know, she might have been damned delighted. Life for an African woman can be very difficult even today, and she was writing in the eighteenth century. We can't talk about freedom for the African woman now. That's a battle yet to be fought.

I just want to be clear on Phillis because I think she gets a bad rap. People haven't read her and don't know a damn thing about her and don't want to empathize with her life. I think she had a difficult life. If she could say she was delighted to be on these shores, then we have to look at that.

Critics should do one thing and that is understand the work. It doesn't make any difference whether they are white or black, they should try to understand the work. I've been so consistent on this point that I would just like to point out my consistency. (People never read what I say, and I don't know where they get what they come up with.) I can both read and appreciate literature, as I was taught to do. I can do this with Shakespeare, though I am not a great lover of Shakespeare. Therefore, it is incomprehensible to me that Robert Bone, a white critic, can't read and appreciate Nikki Giovanni, a black poet. I think I'm probably brighter and more sensitive than he is, and I'm saying Bone because he's the first white critic who comes to mind. I have not created a totally unique, incomprehensible feat. I can understand Milton and T. S. Eliot, so the critic can understand me. That's the critic's job.

We have made literature in the Western world a big bugaboo. I remember when I was in a humanities class, we read Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie because it was short enough to be put intoa six-week course. But if you're going to read Dreiser, there's only An American Tragedy. He didn't write anything else! If you're going to read Tom Wolfe, you're going to read Look Homeward, Angel. That's what you're going to have to do. If you're going to read Thomas Mann, you're going to read The Magic Mountain. But we generally don't read a writer's best work. So people end up not liking literature. And they are discouraged, absolutely discouraged from reading literature because we've given them the worst but what was most convenient. What we've been taught for the last five generations of public education is expediency. And that's what we are dealing with right now. Kids say, "If I'm going to read shit why should I read?" That's exactly what it comes down to. Why should I read the worst of some author? Because it's safer; it's sanitized, and he or she didn't use bad words. And all of us let this happen, because we have our jobs or whatever.

Poetry is the most mistaught subject in any school because we teach poetry by form and not by content. I remember reading Edna St. Vincent Millay—and nobody was reading Millay, you know, except me and the teacher. I really liked "I Burned My Candle at Both Ends," and I wanted to discuss the poem in class. But I was told, "We don't discuss that." It had nothing to do with the fact of how one can read Edna St. Vincent Millay and not read that ooem. But we did! Another time I was reading The Well of Loneliness [by Radclyffe Hall] and I wanted to do a book review on it. Miss Delaney said, "My dear, we don't reviev 'ooks like that." What the hell! If you can't review what yov vant, if schools aren't interested in teaching literature 01. the level of serious reading, how are we going to get a critic?

I read an article called "The Great Literary Hoax" in Atlantic magazin. The guy says every book that comes out is treated as a literary event. Of course, they mostly aren't. If you look at the Nobel list and the Pulitzer list, you'll be lucky if you find two books worth reading. I'm serious! You're a Ph.D. and I would bet that you haven't read ten books on both lists. Nobody does. You know why? Because they're shit. These books get awards because they're safe. But they're shit. The National Book Award list isn't a whole lot better, but at least I was able to read ten or so books on that list. I can't say that for the Pulitzer Prize list. These lists don't reflect our best literature. They don't support excellence in any way, shape, or form. Mediocrity is safe.

If there were just one critic, and it doesn't matter what color, race, none of that, who looked at literature and decided he or she was going to write a book saying what was really great for whatever reason, it would never see the light of day. The critic controls nothing. He or she has to submit their book to a publisher. For example, you have to submit your book to an editor who will probably be Jewish and won't like the fact that you're black. If you were white, you would have to submit it to an editor who probably won't like the fact that you're a woman. Even if you were a white man, you would have to submit it to an editor who probably can't read. Winning is very hard. And I'm just being serious. I'm not saying give up because I'm not a give-up. Something's got to change. Sure, people say what's the point in trying. But of course, there's a point in trying. At some point those of us who are about what is called "truth" have to be as willing to fight for our reality as those who are fighting against us. I could grow up in America and think the Civil War was an awful thing, and I grew up black in Tennessee. And it might be a long time before I'd realize, hey, you motherf—ers are crazy! This is me you're talking about. I know we're talking about a lot of different things here; it's all got to be connected. Otherwise I could answer yes or no.

Writers have to fight. Nobody's going to tell you that you're going to have to change three words in your book. It doesn't come down like that. People think, "Oh, they're going to mess with my work." They're not. It never happens like that. It's just going to be that you get no response. We who are interested have to be as willing to fight as those who fight against us. "Life is not a problem," as I said in Cotton Candy [on a Rainy Day]. "It is a process," and we have to make choices. We frequently act like life is a drama, think there's a problem to be resolved with a climax. So we're always dissatisfied because there are no answers.

Is there validity to "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf" and "Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, " and the subsequent criticism these works incite?

Evidently there is validity or it wouldn't fly. You're essentially asking does it have a motor? It's got to have a motor or it wouldn't fly. Otherwise it'd just sit out on the runway. I have problems with this man-woman thing because I'm stuck on a word. The word's "boring."

I can't think of anything that could interest me less. I've turned down a lot of contracts on this topic. The man-woman thing is a boring subject. It's essentially a dead end. It's going to come down to one of two things: either you're going to take off your clothes or you're not. Men and women do that. Show me a man and a woman and that's what's going to happen. You show me a man without a woman and something else will happen. Show me a woman without a man and something else will happen. But as long as there are men and women, there's no race; there's no color; there's no age. As long as they're men and women, they're going to do what men and women have been doing for the last two million years. This man-woman thing is not even a case of making a mountain out of a mole hill. We don't even have a mole hill yet! It's sort of like cotton candy. We're just spinning around.

I remember in Harlem there used to be these "Save Our Men Meetings" and I was invited to one. I try to get along with people. I'm not as difficult to get along with as people think. I went to the Save Our Men Meeting, and I said, "What are we talking about? Which men do you own? Save my car, yeah. I've got a Peugeot out there on the street, and I'd like to save it. I'd like to save my record collection because I really like it. But I don't have a man." I have a relationship with a man, and he has a relationship with me. Certain things are going to happen to make it either a good or a bad relationship. If it's a good relationship, everybody's happy. If it's a bad one, there's going to be a change.

I'm not inextricably tied to black men. Black women who say "I don't want anybody but a black man" are saying they're afraid because there are men other than black American men. There are men all over the world. If you can't find one, try another. You could just be out of sync. If you're fat and you're living in Paris, you're going to have a problem with men. Because French men like their women thin. Hey, try the Caribbean, where they like them fat.

I loved "For Colored Girls." First of all Ntozake is an extremely bright, sensitive, good poet. She writes exceptionally well. She has a lot of developing to do and that's not meant as a negative comment. I don't see how anybody could take it as a negative statement. Furthermore, I don't see how anybody can be overly sensitive about her work. It's really a case of if the shoe fits, you simply have to wear it. I mean that's all she's done. She said, "Here I am. " Ntozake's naked on that stage. She's naked in that book. And if you don't like it, lump it. "For Colored Girls" is not a love poem. I love it. It's one of my favorite poems. But it's not a love poem.

Ntozake's naked on that stage, but not because she's writing from experience. I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don't write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don't. I want to be very clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. We cheapen anything written when we consider it an experience. Because if it's someone else's experience we don't have to take it seriously. We really don't. We could say, "That's what happened to Ntozake. Isn't that a shame?" No, that's not what happened to Ntozake! I don't know whether it did or it didn't. That's not the point. The point is that's what happened; that's what still happens. Writers write because they empathize with the general human condition.

I wrote a poem about a black man, and Don Lee wrote the most asinine thing I've ever read. His criticism was that Nikki Giovanni's problem is that she's had difficulty with a man. Kirkus Review's critical response to The Women and the Men was "Oh she's just in love." If Kirkus never reviews another book of mine I'll be more than happy. My life is not bound in anything that sells for $5.95. And it will never be. No matter what you're seeing, it's not me. If I'm not bigger than my books, I have a problem. I have a serious problem. I don't take my books personally because they're not personal. They reflect what I have seen, and I stand behind them because they are about reality, truth. I'm not America's greatest writer, but I'm credible.

The truth I'm trying to express is not about my life. This is not an autobiography we're talking about. Gemini is barely one, and it comes close. It was what I said it was, an autobiographical essay, which is very different from autobiography. Even autobiographies are not real because we only remember what we remember. And the truth has to be bigger than that, and if it isn't there's something wrong with your life. What we remember is only a ripple in a pond. It really is. And where does the last ripple go and who sees it? You never see the end of your own life. We put too much emphasis in the wrong places. And what we do to writers, particularly, is we try to get away from what is being said. We brand them. Of course, I'm back to the critics again.

The point of the writer is to remind us that nuclear energy, for example, is not just some technical, scientific thing, not that Pluto is the last planet and it's freezing, but that such things are comprehensible to the human mind.

We've got to live in the real world. If we don't like the world we're living in, change it. And if we can't change it, we change ourselves. We can do something. If in 1956 I didn't like the way the world was, it was incumbent upon me to at least join a picket line. I didn't have to join a picket line happily. I didn't have to join it with full knowledge of what this could mean to me. None of that was required of me. It was only required that I try to make a change so that ten years later I'll be able to go to Knoxville, Tennessee, and I'll be able to walk down Gay Street without having to move aside for some cracker. And in ten years we did. That was a limited goal, but I won. All I'm trying to say is, okay, if you can't win today, you can win tomorrow. That's all. My obligation is to win, but winning is transitory. What you win today, you start from ground zero on the next plateau tomorrow. That's what people don't want to deal with.

You're only as good as your last book. And that's what writers have a problem with. You say you wrote a book twelve years ago. Hey, I'm real glad, but I want to know what you are doing now. I complained about [Ralph] Ellison in Gemini in this regard. And I think it's a valid complaint. God wrote one book. The rest of us are forced to do a little better. You can't live forever on that one book. No matter how interesting, or how great, or how whatever, you are forced to continue, to take a chance. Maybe your next book won't be as good as your last. Who knows?

A lot of people refuse to do things because they don't want to go naked, don't want to go without guarantee. But that's what's got to happen. You go naked until you die. That's the way it goes down. If you don't want to play, you're not forced to. You can always quit. But if you're not going to quit, play. You've got to do one or the other. And it's got to be your choice. You've got to make up your own mind. I made up my mind. If you're going to play, play all the way. You're going to sweat, and you're going to get hit, and you're going to fall down. And you're going to be wrong. Probably nine times out of ten you're going to be wrong, but it's the tenth time that counts. Because when you come up right, you come up right beautifully. But after that you have to start again. We as black people, we as people, we as the human species have got to get used to the fact we're not going to be right most of the time, not even when our intentions are good. We've got to go naked and see what happens.

Do women writers record human experience in fundamentally different ways than men?

I think men and women are different. I think most of these differences have to do with what would have to be considered as conditioning. A woman writer was expected to write little love stories. She was expected to deal with emotions. Women were not really allowed to encouraged to do anything else. So women's published works went down in a certain way. If you were a woman, and you were identifiably a woman, and you sent a manuscript to a publisher, it was not going to be about Buck Rogers because women didn't write science fiction. It wasn't Executive Suite [a popular novel published in 1977 by Cameron Hawley], not that Executive Suite is a great novel. But women weren't supposed to write business novels. They were supposed to write little homely, lovely novels that were quite safe, and they sold for a quarter and everybody lived happily ever after.

Do you see an evolution in Afro-American writing in terms of theme, craft, perspective?

There has never been a time since we discovered literature that we have not both petitioned white writers and recognized their basic bestiality. As black Americans living in a foreign nation we are, as the wandering Jew, both myth and reality. Black Americans have no home now or ever. We have been here too long to go any place else. I'm not saying we cannot migrate. Twenty of us or 20,000 of us can certainly go to Africa. We can go, but Africa would be a new experience, and we would also be strangers there. This is what black Americans reject. And it's probably human nature to reject the fact that we will always be strangers. But our alienation is our great strength. Our strength is that we are not comfortable any place; therefore, we're comfortable every place. We can go any place on earth and find a way to be comfortable.

I'm always saying to the kids—and it's a big joke—that if I were anything from outer space, I would make a point to come into a black community because that's the only place where I would at least be given a chance. The first response of black people would not be to shoot me, stamp me out, poison me, or somehow get rid of me. They would be curious about me. They would not do what your average cracker would do which is to wipe me out.

We who are black have to recognize our basic powerlessness, and that's a strength. It's not power; it's strength. We have nothing to protect. What was especially great during the period between '68 and '74 was the mass consciousness that there was nothing for us to protect. We said if the best you have to offer is Richard Nixon, then go to hell! That attitude blew the country's mind. The country said how can we get back to those people. The country sent a lot to us. It sent the women [women's liberation]. It sent "the man." It offered jobs. But you don't hear blacks saying "God Bless America." In fact, nobody cares if the flag goes up or down. When you hear the national anthem, you know we're going to play ball. That's all the anthem seems to be for—to open a ball game. When they finish singing it, the proper expression is "play ball."

Black American consciousness has finally assumed dominance all over the world. I'm serious about this. We're setting the tone. If we function well, we will continue to set it. There's little alternative to the black American consciousness. The alternative is essentially destruction.

We talk about what writers should be doing. Well, we've got to look beyond the block. We've got to do a lot of thinking. You asked a question a while back about my evolution as a writer. A lot has happened. I don't want anybody to think it's just me. It's all of us. It has to do with the way we conceptualize the world. We are earthlings. When Viking II took off we became earthlings. Nobody knows what an earthling is, and how an earthling relates to other earthlings. Is a whale an earthling? If it is, do we have a right to kill it? Is a baby seal an earthling? If it is, is it all right to hit it in the head? And if it's all right to hit a baby seal in the head, which it is, then it's perfectly all right to napalm the Vietnamese. It's also all right to shoot elephants because they're eating up tree bark. We don't have to draw the line. Then it's okay to shoot blacks because they want some land. And if it's not all right, then who's going to stop it?

The choice is between what we do and what they do. As blacks—and I've been consistent on this point—we are not seeking equality. We're seeking superiority. I happen to be a black American chauvinist. I think black Americans are potentially the political tone-setters of the world, though our interest in power has been very low. If black Americans were as interested in power as we are in basketball, we would dominate. There's no question about it. We can do anything we want to do. We ought to quit listening to what people are saying about us. We were talking earlier about Black Macho. Hey, they won't even be real. Who will remember? Hey, it's the latest chewing gum. It's Mellow Yellow, the fastest soft drink in the world. So when you look at what we've done as a people, you see we've taken our consciousness and used it for survival.

The fact that we have survived says something for humanity. We are a part of the oldest people on earth, and as black Americans we are also the latest distinct group. Black Americans are different. It's the attitude. The black American attitude is a strange thing. It can really get you. It bothers me sometimes. Everything is so "f—ing laidback." But that's a black attitude. Laid-back is not a country or Western attitude. Laid-back is a colored attitude; it always was. It's an attitude blacks have adopted to survive because if we couldn't take it easy, we couldn't take it at all. If we stayed hot, we'd burn up. I'm a hot person and therefore a bit apart from that attitude. I stay hot. I think things can be changed. If you were to look at my personality you'd see I'm always hot. I can't take intolerable situations. Somebody's got to go down. You or me. It "don't" matter. But my attitude, in effect, is not necessarily atypical, if you put me in the group. The group as a whole learns to take it easy. I'm not worried that the white boys are playing with DNA because I'll change them before they change me. I come from a people who learned how to run with hot people.

What makes a poet different from a John Doe who's cleaning gutters?

The fact that I write poetry and do it well makes me different. I dare say I probably wouldn't clean gutters nearly as well. Though if it came to cleaning gutters, I could do it. If I am a better poet, it's because I'm not afraid. If artists are different from ordinary people, that's because we are confident about what we are doing. That's the difference between what I would consider to be a serious artist and those who are in it for the fun. A lot of people are always into thinking they can become famous. Kids are always asking how one becomes famous. Well, I don't know. You know if you're talking fame, you're not a serious person.

If you didn't think this book is important and that you could do it, you wouldn't be here. You think it's important. I don't have to think it's important and I'm part of it. Margaret doesn't; Gwen doesn't. Nobody has to think it's important but you. It's your book; it's not my book. What people have to realize is, the difference between those who are serious and those who are not is simply that the former take it seriously. It wouldn't matter to you if nobody else took your book seriously. If it did, you wouldn't write it. You wouldn't care if all of us wrote you back and said this is not a serious project. You'd just go out and find yourself fourteen other writers. But we didn't respond to you that way because you take it seriously. But if you had written and said what you think we should do, you wouldn't get a response from anybody. You know people write me and say, "I want to be a writer. What should I write about?" How the hell should I know what one should write about?

Nobody's going to tell me what to write about because it's about me dancing naked on that floor. And if I'm going to be cold, it's going to be because I decided to dance there. And if you don't like to dance, go home. It's that simple. So the artistic attitude is that you take your work seriously. However, we writers would all be better off if we didn't deceive ourselves so frequently by thinking everything we create is important or good. It's not. When you reread something you need to be able to say, "Gee, that wasn't so hot. I thought it was really great ten years ago." But sometimes you can say, "Hey, it's not so bad."

What about the prose?

I don't reread my prose because I'm kind of afraid. I suppose one day I will. At least I would like to think so. But I'm very much afraid to be trapped by what I've said. I don't think life is inherently coherent. I think what Emerson said about consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds is true. The more you reread your prose the more likely you're going to try to justify what you've said. I don't really object to being an asshole. I don't take it personally.

If I never contradict myself then I'm either not thinking or I'm conciliating positions and, therefore, not growing. There has to be a contradiction. There would be no point to having me go three-fourths of the way around the world if I couldn't create an inconsistency, if I hadn't learned anything. If I ever get to the moon, it would be absolutely pointless to have gone to the moon and come back with the same position.

That's been a quarrel I've had with my fellow writers of the sixties. If you didn't learn anything what was the point of going through a decade? If I'm going to be the same at thirty-eight as I was at twenty-eight, what justifies the ten years to myself? And I feel that's who I've got to justify it to—ME.

Though I don't reread my prose, I do reread my poetry. After all that's how I earn my living.

How do you polish the poems?

A poem is a way of capturing a moment. I don't do a lot of revisions because I think if you have to do that then you've got problems with the poem. Rather than polish the words, I take the time to polish the poem. If that means I start at the top a dozen times, that's what I do. A poem's got to be a single stroke, and I make it the best I can because it's going to live. I feel if only one thing of mine is to survive, it's at least got to be an accurate picture of what I saw. I want my camera and film to record what my eye and my heart saw. It's that simple. And I keep working until I have the best reflection I can get. Universality has dimension in that moment.

Do you have a particular writing method—a special place, a special time for writing?

One thing for sure I can say about me is that if my book is going to bust, it's going to bust in public. It is either going to be so bad or so good. That's true of most of my books. Nothing is ever half way with me. It's shit or it's great. That's my attitude. I think that's the only way to go. Now other people are much more cautious. They'll do the safe thing and handle it right. Jean Noble put twelve years into Beautiful Are the Souls of My Black Sisters. Jean's book is beautiful, and I'm glad she did. Alex put twelve years in Roots. I couldn't be happier he did. I'm glad for Alex; I'm glad for me because I've got galleys. But I could no more put twelve years into anything. Nothing is worth twelve years to me. I can't grow a garden. I can't see waiting that long just for some vegetables. Some people can do it; I'm not one of them. I believe in accepting the limits of my competency.

That's weakness. Yeah, I'll admit it. I just don't get a thrill out of seeing tomatoes grow. I do get a thrill seeing my poems, and I will take the time for them. But if after a year I was working on a poem, not a book but a poem, I would say something's wrong with either the poem or me. That's probably not the best way to be a writer. I wouldn't even want to consider myself an example. I'm essentially undisciplined. I do a lot of thinking, a lot of reading, but I wouldn't recommend my writing method. On the other hand I can't be like Hemingway and get up at six o'clock every morning and write for two hours. He had a wife who got up and cooked his breakfasts. I don't have time to sit there and write for two hours whether I have something to say or not. I write when it's compelling.

I'm not good at moving. I understand why Andrew Wyeth felt that if he left Brandy wine he wouldn't be able to paint. It's very difficult for an artist to move. Richard Wright moved to Paris, and people said his work suffered. He didn't live long enough to re-establish his connection with his new place. I think people really overlook this. I never knew Wright, but I'm sure there was a lack of connection. It was very difficult for me to move from Cincinnati to New York. And it was equally difficult for me to move from New York back to Cincinnati. I have to feel at home in order to write. No matter what kind of little shack home is; I have to be at home. I'm very territorial.

How do you regard your audience?

I have always assumed that whoever is listening to a reading of mine, whether it be from my first book [Black Feeling, Black Talk] to the most recent, whether a kid or a senior citizen, deserves to hear my best. I think a lot of writers make the assumption that the people in the audience are not generally very bright. So they don't give them their best because they think they won't understand it. I also think there ought to be improvement in every subsequent piece of work.

We were talking about my writing habits. If my next book isn't at least an emotional improvement over my last book, I would never submit it to a publisher. I like to think there's growth. If there's no growth, there's no reason to publish. But I think the people who read me are intelligent. That's one reason I continue to be read because I do make this assumption: if you're reading me, you've got something going for yourself. That's arrogant. Writers are arrogant.

I would really feel badly if somebody said, "Well, I read you in '69 and I'm glad to say, you haven't changed. That would ruin my day. That would send me into a glass of something, and I don't drink. I'd have to say who are you and what have you read because I think I've changed. I mentioned Don [Lee] earlier; he doesn't really understand my work. Michèle has not read me. There's no way I can be convinced that Michele Wallace has read me. She quoted the wrong books. I have written fifteen books. You can't quote the last book as if it were the first. You can't make a critical judgment based on one book. It doesn't work. She was not only quoting out of context in terms of time, she was quoting out of context in terms of the books. "Black Macho" is bad history.

We were talking about the sixties. I think what happened to a lot of writers—as well as some other people—was they decided what they wrote in '65 was right, and they began to repeat it. If I've grown, and I have, if I share that growth, and I do, then my readers are allowed to grow. I expect growth. I expect a better question from my audience this year than last year. I really do. If I don't get it I'm prone to say, "I'm really bored with you people." I expect intelligence, and I think I have a right to expect it. I don't care if they're paying me. I expect them to be as interested in talking to me, whether they're asking a question or making a statement, as I am in talking to them. And if they're not, one of us is in the wrong place. And since I don't make those kinds of mistakes, it's simple. They can say, "You can't put that on us." I say, "Sure I can, because if I don't who will?"

I have a heavy foot. And the advantage of that is not necessarily that I speed. It's that I will go in the wrong direction fast enough to recognize it and turn around and still beat you. We're going to make mistakes. It's not what so-and-so says that defines a mistake. It's what I decide is an error: that was wrong; that was dumb; that was insensitive; that was stupid…. But I've got to go on and try again. That's the only thing we really have to learn.

I'd like to beat the winners. That's the only fun. I wouldn't want to be the only black poet in America. It's not even interesting. I want to be among the best. And it's going to take a lot of poets because we don't even have enough to make a comparison. I'm looking for a golden age, and I would very much like to be a part of it. But there's no race now. In twelve years I produced fifteen books. That's not bad. I would like to have a little more attention.

I'm looking for a golden age, and the only way that's going to happen is for a lot of people to have a lot of different ideas. We don't need just one idea. That's my basic quarrel with some writers, and it remains. We don't need somebody telling us what to think. We need somebody to encourage us to think what we want to think. That was the problem with the black aesthetic. That's why Negro Digest went out of business—because it was boring.

On this level you critics do bear responsibility. I'm going to be very clear about this. You critics really praise what you understand. The fact that you understand it is almost suspect. Because once you get the critics all saying, "Well, that's really good," then you have to know something's wrong. If the ideas and concepts of a work are all that comprehensible, then the work hasn't broken any new ground. There has to be something new. That's why Toni Morrison is so great. Alice Walker's Third Life of Grange Copeland is great.

That book comes down to Grange, the father, who has to decide that Brownfield is not worth living. Before he will let Brownfield destroy the future, he will kill him. Only Grange could have killed him. He created him and it was an error. That's why pencils have erasers. He said I have made a mistake, but it cannot continue. Now that was a hell of a statement Alice made. A lot of people didn't like it. They can jump on Ntozake, but Ntozake didn't kill him. Alice killed him. She said Brownfield must die. Even he recognized that he shouldn't live, but he didn't have the strength to kill himself. It was up to his father. In Toni's Sula it is the mother who says, hey, you're a junkie; you've got to go. You're my own and I'm going to take care of you. In Song of Solomon, which was comprehensible on most levels, you have Milkman and if anybody should have killed his mother, Milkman should have killed his. Toni made a statement about flying away that people haven't dealt with yet—Milkman's act of wanting to just fly away. We know he didn't. He couldn't have. So where was he? Where is he? That's like the end of a horror movie. Toni made a statement in Solomon, but since it is easier to deal with than Sula the statement got obscured. Sula disturbed the critics because in the beginning there are two women and at the end there is Nel who remarks that "they were girls together." That's a hell of a statement because black women have never been allowed to say they were girls together in print. Critics have not gotten to Toni yet. They just don't understand Toni. That's probably one of the reasons she is very hesitant to talk to people. I don't blame her. If I wrote a book like that I wouldn't give interviews either. Because somebody is bound to ask a dumb question that shows he or she missed the point of the whole book. "Tell me, Ms. Morrison, why do you think Nel missed Sula?"

In terms of American writers, for the three novels Toni's written, let alone any to come, Toni's in. Who else is writing? Who else is doing it? There's no question. It's black women. What's happening with black women is great. Black women are flying. Ask a black woman what is she doing? She'll say, "I'm going to do what I have to do, and I'm really happy for you; I wish you no harm, but I've got to go." I think we are beginning to unleash a lot of energy because there's going to be competition, especially among black women writers. We haven't gotten to the point where black menand women compete, despite what you hear. The competition is among ourselves. What you're seeing in the media isn't important. Very few black women are writing out of respect or concern for what white people think. I don't care whether the [New York] Times reviews me or not. If it can review Michele, it doesn't need to review me. If the Times can review Michele, there's no way it can review Jean Noble. It had to make a choice, so it took what it understood.

If you look through Cotton Candy you'll hear a lot of music. 'Cause if you're in trouble, you don't whistle a happy tune and hold your head erect. You hummm. You hum a basic gospel tune. Can you imagine what a slave ship must have sounded like? Imagine what a slave ship must have sounded like to the women. All the slave-ship stories we've heard so far have been from men. All the men heard was the agony of the men. That's valid. But just imagine what a slave ship must have sounded like to a woman. The humming must have been deafening. It had to be there. The hum, the gospel, the call-and-response came over because it's here. The men didn't bring it over. I'm not knocking the men. They brought the drum for sure. But they didn't bring the hum; they didn't bring the leader-call; they didn't bring the field hollers, because they didn't know them. They were not field men. They were hunters. Hunters don't make noise. So what we're hearing in the music is the women. People have just continued to overlook the impact of the women. We women won't. We women were the ones in the fields in Africa. The music is not something we learned on these shores. We were communal even then, and as we got into bigger fields, we would call to one another. If you didn't answer back, we went to see about you. The hum, the holler, the leader-call are women things. The men didn't do them. Black men were out hunting in Africa, but in America they were in the fields with the women. They learned the women things from women. So what you're hearing in our music is nothing but the sound of a woman calling another woman.