The Shortest Way Home: On Nikki Giovanni

Throughout her poetry, and in her poems here, Nikki Giovanni has metaphorically used cooking and food to explore human relationships. “Bay Leaves” describes the different experiences with food the poet has with her mother, her grandmother, and herself. As many other poems Giovanni has written affirm, her grandmother offered an important, significant counterpoint to her nuclear family. The most striking difference is how the speaker shifts from observer to participant; the poet is often an observer—of her mother and of her parents’ marriage. The third stanza describes the ingredients her mother uses to make greens and seems to refer to more than those ingredients in its closing lines: “Not everything together/All the time but all the time/Keeping everything.”

“Her Dreams” uses music, another recurring theme in Giovanni’s oeuvre, both to describe her mother’s dream of being a success through singing with her two daughters, and the poet’s own separation from her mother and sister, which is emphasized in the last two stanzas but also suggested earlier by the poet’s inability to harmonize with them.

“Her Dream #2 (Runner-Up)” explores the impact of segregation on the mother’s dreams of being a tennis star. The trophy she won for making it to the finals of “The Colored Tournament” was prized by the poet; even though the trophy was for being “Runner-Up,” her mother lost in the finals not to just anyone, but to Althea Gibson. Like so many other things valued by the poet, the “Runner-Up” trophy was broken by her father out of jealousy that he did not have such a prize. Despite her father’s destruction of the trophy, her mother remains a winner in her daughter’s eyes.

If the first three poems here all present the poet’s effort to understand her mother and her mother’s continued marriage to the poet’s father, the final poem asserts the truth of the children’s book her mother taught, The Longest Way ’Round (Is the Shortest Way Home). The poet finally recognizes that her parents’ marriage “Is none of your business” and that “Your parents don’t owe you anything.” In the end, what she actually wants is the memory of three things: “this Blue Book/With a wonderful title,” “My Mother West Wind Stories,” and her mother “singing/‘Time After Time.’”

Together, these poems describe a childhood that was lonely because the poet was outside the relationship her mother and sister shared; a childhood in which the poet was forced to be an observer—either by her family or as a self-employed survival mechanism; a childhood in which her father’s destructive behavior taught the poet that material objects do not matter. Yet, as the fourth poem’s final stanza asserts, her own values—developed, perhaps, in reaction to those of her parents—have resulted in happiness.