Nikki Giovanni, bestselling American poet and civil rights activist, blazed on to the scene in the 1960s. In this documentary, completed before she died in December, we watch Giovanni in her late 70s, reigning over sold-out public appearances. On stage she recites poems about love, race and gender and in between, with the timing of a standup comedian, she has the auditorium erupting in whoops and laughter. Posing for selfies, a woman tells Giovanni she named her daughter after her; another says she wrote to her on the verge of dropping out of college. “You wrote back. I’m a teacher now!”
In archive footage, Giovanni as a young woman, reads her 1968 poem Nikki-Rosa, which has a line about how white people fail to understand the lives of black people: “they’ll probably talk about my hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while I was quite happy”. Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, during segregation and, after witnessing domestic violence at home, she went to live with her grandparents. Speaking in a radio interview she is blunt: “Either I was going to kill him” – she’s talking about her father – “or I was going to move.”
Filmed at home with her long-term partner Virginia, Giovanni comes across with tenderness. For fans she has all the time in the world, endlessly smiling for selfies. But clearly she was not a woman to suffer fools; as a documentary subject she is firm with her boundaries, refusing to budge on areas that she deems off-limits – that includes challenges in her childhood and the death of Martin Luther King.
Her poems, read by Giovanni herself and the actor Taraji P Henson, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. There are snippets too from a conversation – televised in 1971 – between Giovanni, still in her 20s, and the writer James Baldwin. Two utterly original and brilliant thinkers, a flicker of recognition sparks between them that here is someone on their level, a match for their fierce intellect. It’s electric.
• Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project is at Bertha DocHouse from 21 March
