Columns:: Worth Repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::March 4, 2002

Worth repeating

As part of the university’s observance of Black History Month, poet Nikki Giovanni spoke to an estimated audience of 700 on Feb. 13 at the Tate Student Center. An excerpt:
“I’m a big fan of outer space and actually had a chance to talk to NASA fairly recently about going to Mars.
“It’s not a question of going to Mars, and it’s not a question of coming back from Mars. Because we’re going to go. . . . The question is what are you going to be when you get there, and what are you going to be when you get back?
“My response to going to Mars--and I was asking NASA--is where’s the music? So you look at the scientists and they’re like, ‘Excuse me?’ And I said, ‘If you’re going to go to Mars, it’ll take you a year to get there, right? You’re in a spaceship. You’ve flown through space. You’ll be all right--everybody knows that. You’ll take off and you’ll be all right as long as you can look back and see the blue planet.’
“And, now--this is when it becomes a black story--when you look back, and you cannot see that blue planet. When you do not know where your home is, the only way to know how to survive is to ask black people, ‘How did you all survive the Middle Passage?’ Because we are the only people who have done that and who have remained intact. So there was a sanity that we know about, and NASA is going to have to ask us about.
“You know what we’re going to say? We hummed a song. . . . That’s what got us over. So I just want to know what is the music that you are going to take when you go to Mars? Because if you don’t take a spiritual, you can get to Mars but you’re going to be crazy. . . . They’re going to have to come to us to find out how to survive.”

--Juliett Dinkins

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