Nikki Giovanni on Seung-Hui Cho
One of my biggest regrets when I was at Tech was that I didn’t get to study with Nikki Giovanni, or “Nikki,” as everyone who had studied under her called her. Her classes were in high demand, as she was new to the campus, and as a double-major, I was listed as a Communication Studies major first, so my English classes choices were put in the pile with all the non-major students. Still, it’s always been a point of pride that such a noted writer was teaching at my alma mater.
And now I have even more reason to be proud of my indirect association with her, based on her relationship with Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter in the Virginia Tech massacre:
The mood in the basketball arena was defeated, funereal. Nikki Giovanni seemed an unlikely source of strength for a Virginia Tech campus reeling from the depravity of one of its own.
Tiny, almost elfin, her delivery blunted by the loss of a lung, Giovanni brought the crowd at the memorial service to its feet and whipped mourners into an almost evangelical fervor with her words: “We are the Hokies. We will prevail, we will prevail. We are Virginia Tech.”
Nearly two years earlier, Giovanni had stood up to Cho Seung-Hui before he drenched the campus in blood. Her comments Tuesday showed that the man who had killed 32 students and teachers had not killed the school’s spirit.
“We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid,” the 63-year-old poet with the close-cropped, platinum hair told the grieving crowd. “We are better than we think, not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imagination and the possibility we will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears, through all this sadness.”
In September 2005, Cho was enrolled in Giovanni’s introduction to creative writing class. From the beginning, he began building a wall between himself and the rest of the class.
He wore sunglasses to class and pulled his maroon cap down low over his forehead. When she tried to get him to participate in class discussion, his answer was silence.
“Sometimes, students try to intimidate you,” Giovanni told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. “And I just assumed that he was trying to assert himself.”
But then female students began complaining about Cho.
About five weeks into the semester, students told Giovanni that Cho was taking photographs of their legs and knees under the desks with his cell phone. She told him to stop, but the damage was already done.
Female students refused to come to class, submitting their work by computer instead. As for Cho, he was not adding anything to the classroom atmosphere, only detracting.
His work had no meter or structure or rhyme scheme. To Giovanni, it was simply “a tirade.”
“There was no writing. I wasn’t teaching him anything, and he didn’t want to learn anything,” she said. “And I finally realized either I was going to lose my class, or Mr. Cho had to leave.”
Giovanni wrote a letter to then-department head Lucinda Roy, who removed Cho.
When she and Giovanni learned of the shootings and heard a description of the gunman, they immediately thought of Cho.
Roy wonders now whether things would have turned out differently had she continued their sessions. But Giovanni sees no reason for people who had interactions with Cho to beat themselves up.
“I know that there’s a tendency to think that everybody can get counseling or can have a bowl of tomato soup and everything is going to be all right,” she said. “But I think that evil exists, and I think that he was a mean person.”
Giovanni encountered Cho only once after she removed him from class. She was walking down a campus path and noticed him coming toward her. They maintained eye contact until passing each other.
Giovanni, who had survived lung cancer, was determined she would not blink first.
“I was not going to look away as if I were afraid,” she said. “To me he was a bully, and I had no fear of this child.”
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I had semi-promised to only lurk and not post here, but I noticed that Professor Giovanni had spoken at Bradley University last Wednesday and I thought I would pass this link along. Note: My family moved to Hesperia from Peoria, IL (Bradley’s home) and I frequent the Peoria Journal Star website.
http://www.pjstar.com/php/index.php?/news/watch_nikki_giovanni_speak_at_bradley_university/
Comment by Chris — April 20, 2007 @ 18:47