Earlier this week, Barbara Fant joined people around the world in mourning the passing of iconoclastic poet, author and activist Nikki Giovanni, who died Monday at the age of 81. (Here in Columbus, Streetlight Guild held a homegoing reading for the late author, while poets such as Ajanaé Dawkins posted to social media, offering thoughtful reflections on Giovanni’s life and her indelible impact on their work.)
“We’re all children of Nikki,” Fant said from her current home in Los Angeles, joined on the call by musician and Columbus expat P. Blackk. “And there’s no way we can function in this literary world, especially as poets, without acknowledging … that we come from that lineage. … She was a freedom fighter, a freedom teller, and we know her for so many things, and especially the way she wrote about the Black joy that exists in us all and that we should continue to strive for. And that’s one of the things that I love about her and will deeply miss about her work in the world.”
The ideas that surfaced as Fant discussed Giovanni and her influence – grief, gratitude, joy and a deep understanding that past generations continue to sing through us in the present – have long been intrinsic in her writing and surface in new ways on My Gangsta, My Garden, My God, a just-released EP on which Fant delivers spoken-word verses atop a lush, soulful musical backdrop crafted by Blackk.
Initially intended as the soundtrack to Fant’s previous book, Mouths of Garden, from 2021, the album also pulls from a new book due next year entitled Joy in the Belly of a Riot, serving as something of a bridge between the two, both of which find the poet processing deep-seated traumas while opening her heart and mind to the sense of possibility inherent in the future. On “Running,” which moves at a shuffling pace in spite of its title, Fant professes that “joy is your birthright,” a mantra she said she adopted for herself, the expression born from her evolving knowledge of scripture and theological texts.
“I have a right to have joy, but it is a fruit of the Spirit, and I need to believe that and have faith in that and fight to live in that,” she said. “During Covid I ended up finding this quote, and it was Lupita Nyong’o paraphrasing Khalil Gibran [Muhammad], and she said, ‘Joy is not the absence of pain but happiness in spite of it.’ And when I look at that, that is us trying to process our grief in our human fragility. It’s understanding there is joy, but there’s also going to be sadness and there’s going to be death, and you’re going to have to balance that. Joy doesn’t mean there isn’t going to be pain. Joy means that they can coexist, and that has been my consistent relationship with the work.”
These ideas resonated with Blackk as he took a variety of gospel-leaning songs and samples sent to him by Fant and transformed them into an immersive backdrop that the poet wanted to be “grungy and soulful,” reflecting her upbringing “in the hood, but also in the church.”
“My father had recently passed, and my best friend’s father had recently passed, and my close cousin’s father recently passed,” said Blackk, a protege of Vada Azeem who left Columbus for Los Angeles a decade ago and more recently settled in Oakland. “So, it was a release working on this project, and it was healing. I also grew up in the church, and on my own I found myself rediscovering my faith. There was a synchronicity to it that worked in mysterious ways, because I’d had discussions with my father about coming back to church, and then I’m chopping up these gospel samples when I’m in a place of grief, but Barbara’s message had me fighting to find joy.”
The two entered into collaboration with a natural comfort level, owing in part to a long-held awareness of and fondness for the other’s work. Blackk said he first encountered Fant’s poetry at a spoken word event in Columbus “11 or 12 years ago,” struck by her presence and diction and the way her poems could imbue those nearly imperceptible life moments with universal weight. Fant, in turn, first saw Blackk perform around the same time, drawn in by his knack for storytelling and more recently by his gritty production work, which she viewed as an ideal companion to her words.
Setting her poetry to music forced Fant to confront her words in new ways. “I feel like on the page, I can know the poem one way. And on the stage, I gather it another way,” she said. “But when I’m doing it in the studio with music, and I have to do multiple takes, I have to sit in the poem a whole different way. I have to live in the poem.”
The experience could be transformational, both for the poems (Blackk’s sepia-tinged production has a way of enhancing Fant’s backwards-looking words on “Memory Lane,” making the track an even more transportive experience) and for the collaborators themselves. In recent years, Blackk, an innately skilled MC, said he had taken a step back from rapping, sharing that he had grown tired of hearing his own voice and expressing fears that “my young ass wasn’t talking about nothing” on earlier tracks.
“And now, I definitely have been doing some writing, and I have to blame Barbara,” said Blackk, who recently wrote his first full verse in more than two years and expressed a desire to step back in the recording booth at some point in the future. “I hadn’t been in the place of rapping and writing as much as I was, and this really put that fire back under me.”
