Seduction By Nikki Giovanni Analysis

Nikki Giovanni is an African American author and poet, also known to be as a member of the Black Arts Movement. Giovanni as an author and poet was very much underestimated. Much of Giovanni’s works focus on the racial digression of the African American race. Giovanni’s rebellious nature through her works was what galvanized others to fight the fight. She was an activist when activism was threatening. She was a feminist when feminism was ostracized. Giovanni was a womanist before the term was even refined. In the books Black Feeling, Black Talk and Re: Creation Giovanni writes a multitude of poetry expressing her innervation toward racial digression of the African American race. In the poems “Seduction,” “Revolutionary Dreams,” and “The True …show more content…
The poem presents itself as an intimate moment between the narrator and her lover. However Giovanni’s metaphorical use of seduction displays itself once an analytical view of the text is used. Giovanni uses the role of seduction in the poem to exemplify women’s roles in the Black Arts Movement. They were deemed distractions rather than engagers in the movement. As the poem opens it seems that the narrator is falling under the stereotype. However, when looked at through a feminist standpoint the narrator’s seductive acts are a form of activism. In the article ““Isn’t This Counter Revolutionary?” Discourse and Silence in the Erotic Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Kalamu ya Salaam, and Etheridge Knight” Anna M. Esquivel states “The speaker is the “activist,” not the revolutionary. She does not speak to him, she acts upon him. She undresses him, revealing the deep insecurities of the revolutionary and the revolution itself. By undressing the revolutionary, she is asking him to be vulnerable in his sexuality with her and to reflect on what it means to engage actively in social transformation.” (515). Thus explaining Giovanni’s metaphoric message through the text. She uses the lover of the narrator’s nakedness to display vulnerability to open his eyes to see the power that a woman can possess in a time of revolution. The poem …show more content…
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These very lines are what demonstrate and conclude Giovanni’s feminist stance on the inheritance of freedom. The narrator’s ability to bring the “revolutionary” to such a vulnerable state with merely her sex appeal poses as the the weapon women can contribute to the revolution. The seduction of the “revolutionary”is what reveals the neglect of ostracizing women and their feminine magnitude.

The poem “Revolutionary Dreams” manifests Giovanni’s ideology that freedom is interminable through the proficiency of one’s world, as well as one’s self. The poem opens with the narrator articulating her concept of the word “revolution.” The narrator begins her journey with one perception of revolution as involving the profound reversal of racial oppression in America:

I used to dream militant dreams of taking over america to show these white folks how it should be done