"Nikki-Rosa" by Nikki Giovanni Analysis

  A while back Nikki Giovanni came to school during announcements one day and performed a few of her poems.  They were magnificent and I really enjoyed her presence!  So I decided to analyze one of her poems since I've previously enjoyed some of her work so much.  Here is the poem:


childhood remembrances are always a drag
if you're Black
you always remember things like living in Woodlawn
with no inside toilet
and if you become famous or something
they never talk about how happy you were to have your mother
all to yourself and
how good the water felt when you got your bath from one of those
big tubs that folk in Chicago barbecue in
and somehow when you talk about home
it never gets across how much you
understood their feelings
as the whole family attended meetings about Hollydale
and even though you remember
your biographers never understand
your father's
pain as he sells his stock
and another dream goes
and though you're poor it isn't poverty that
concerns you
and though they fight 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
and I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me
because they never understand that Black love is Black wealth and they'll
probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that
 all the while I was quite happy.


This was a very interesting poem because I think that its always pretty intriguing to read about someones hardships and struggles but to then see how they were content and happy in the end.  I noticed a lot throughout this poem.  Right off the bat I noticed that she didn't start her poem with a capital letter and that there is no punctuation throughout the entire poem besides the very last period.  No commas, quotation marks, periods or anything.  So then as I observed the poem more closely and re-read it, I noticed that the line breaks were sort of odd (I copied the line breaks in the poem on my blog as they are from the book) and I thought that the line breaks could possibly replace the punctuation marks.  I also noticed, from the begging that there were no stanzas and that it was just one big long poem.

  Besides things that have to do with spelling and placement of punctional marks, I also noticed a few deeper thinking things.  If you'll notice, the author doesn't ever address who she is writing to or about, she just consistently uses the replacement words "you" and "they."  I highlighted all of these places in my poem book because there were a lot of them!  Something else I realized by the end of reading the poem is that the author capitalized the "B" in the word black in the 3 times she used it throughout the poem.  I'm kind of curious as to why she would do that.  Something that I interpreted in the poem that could have been read in another way was about gratefulness.  In the lines, "but only that everybody is together and you and your sister have happy birthdays and very good Christmases" I thought that the author was referring to be grateful and thankful for what you have.  In conclusion, I noticed that the author talked about how happy she was to receive certain opportunities throughout her life and talked about how life was hard but then she concludes by saying that she was perfectly content and happy with the way her life was and she makes it seem like she wouldn't want it any other way.