If Black History Month is not viable then wind does not carry the seeds and drop them on fertile ground rain does not dampen the land and encourage the seeds to root sun does not warm the earth and kiss the seedlings and tell them plain: You’re As Good As Anybody Else You’ve Got A Place Here, Too
BLK. MLK.
Viable
BOTANY
(of a seed or spore) able to germinate.
I am always going to wonder why she wrote BLK instead of Black in the title. Was it meant to call attention to the way we tend to shorten things to diminish their importance? Or was it a refrain on the familiarity of shortening something we're accustomed to--something lived in, a part of our lives in the same way as TV and PoC? Or was it that reverberation between B L K and M L K--one referring to a color, the other to a great man of color--Martin Luther King Jr.? Or does it hearken back to other poets of the day like yesterday's poet, Ntozake Shange who liked to challenge readers of her poems by changing things up a bit--capitalizations and punctuation--and even the words themselves?
I think the truth may be a little bit of all of those things, and I love all the different ways it allows us to look at the idea of Black History Month. We sometimes joke about how we made Black History Month the shortest month of our calendar year, but it's also sad as well--knowing that there are people for whom relegating black history to the shortest month is their ideal on how black people and people of color should be viewed: unimportant, not worthy of time or place.
And I think this poem means to call our attention to those things--the little things that shape our world views and color our lives. I mentioned it earlier in a blog post that growing up, we weren't really exposed to black poets, or really any poetry that was outside of the white, European norm. Going through high school (a public one, I might add,) without experiencing that kind of diversity, I think, is harmful. It saturates our thoughts with only one way of thinking. It sets a precedent for "what is important in life." And there are moments when I'm writing this blog that I am disheartened that I am only learning about so much of black poetic culture now and realizing it for the incredible loss it is--that I hadn't learned or seen it sooner.
And if it's having this much of a profound effect upon me at my age, imagine how much more of an impact it could have on the lives and budding minds of young people?
This last bit is so important that Nikki Giovanni dedicated this whole poem to trying to make us understand that:
and kiss the seedlings and tell them plain: You’re As Good As Anybody Else You’ve Got A Place Here, Too
Black History Month isn't just about celebrating the accomplishments of black people and their contributions to America, but also about showing people that people that look like them, people who are left out of textbooks and who have gone unremarked for hundreds of years in this country, are as important as those people in those textbooks and set up as statues and given to schools' names. It's a rekindling of the black spirit to recognize itself in the accomplishments of the America we all know and love. And it's a time to inspire the next generation of great, black Americans in the process.
It plants the seeds. It encourages them to grow. And it celebrates the many and varied cultures that represent the black experience in America--from Africa, to the Caribbean, and all the various lands and points in between.
I love that she chose the word viable in that second stanza--able to germinate.
Nikki Giovanni is saying here that Black History Month is important, and that anyone who says otherwise isn't seeing it as they could, and in my opinion should: it is a way to celebrate the black men and women who have made America what it is today. It is a way to tell a minority within this country that they are just as important as the majority. And it is vital for children to see this and to know this and to understand that "BLK" is:
...As Good As Anybody Else You’ve Got A Place Here, Too
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