Taraji P. Henson on the Power of Poet Nikki Giovanni: "She Gave Me a Voice"

Taraji P. Henson on the Power of Poet Nikki Giovanni: “She Gave Me a Voice”

In late 2023, Taraji P. Henson created headlines for her outspoken candor on the press tour for The Color Purple. In various conversations supporting the Warner Bros. film – a musical adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, previously adapted for film in 1985 by director Steven Spielberg – Henson has tearfully relayed her frustrations as a Black woman in Hollywood.

Despite an Oscar nomination and four Emmy nods, Henson has admitted that finding roles that represent her stature as a respected leading lady still proves difficult. “The industry had me thinking I was too edgy, I’m street, I’m this, I’m that, and I ain’t Hollywood pretty. But the fight in me and my purpose, once I understood I had a purpose in this thing, I was like, ‘Oh no,'” she told The Hollywood Reporter in December. “There’s a place for me because there’s a girl out there that needs to see herself on this screen.”

But while The Color Purple has made Henson an awards contender once again, she’s also involved with another film gunning for an Oscar nomination. Directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s Oscar-shortlisted documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project, now streaming on Max, is an intimate portrait of the renowned poet and activist who gained fame in the late 1960s as a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement. Henson provides the voice of Giovanni in the film, reading some of her most iconic poetic works interspersed throughout the feature.

For Henson, who first discovered Giovanni as a student at Howard University, it’s literary icons like Giovanni who paved the way for her and gave her the courage to be similarly unapologetic. “She doesn’t hide behind things. She is the walking, living breathing truth,” Henson told THR in a conversation about her love for Giovanni and the cinematic portrait of the artist. “I’m very proud of this project. I really, really am.”

Do you remember your introduction to Nikki Giovanni’s work?

I went to a historically Black college. That’s where I met and fell in love with the work of Nikki Giovanni. When you’re in college, you’re learning who you are as a young adult. And I’m grateful that I went to an HBCU because I learned a lot about my history as an African American, as a Black woman – I learned my place in the world. It’s poets like Nikki Giovanni who gave me a voice, who made me come out to Hollywood and stand up for the things that I believe – that’s [me] standing on her shoulders and her wisdom and her words. I didn’t seek this; this project came to me, and I believe it came to me for a reason.

What was your first reaction when the project came your way? An immediate yes?

They had me at two words: “Nikki Giovanni.”

Do you have a favorite poem or piece of writing of hers?

My favorite [is the] conversation between her and James Baldwin when they talk about the plight of the Black man. She’s like, you can go out into the world and you can put on a face and you can lie to the white man, then you come home and you beat on me. Why don’t you come home and you lie to me like you do to [others]? I get chills down my back thinking about it. Her way [of cutting] through the BS and to get right to it – she had a way of doing it with such grace and elegance. It wasn’t like she was raising her voice from her neck and screaming out loud. That’s a lesson in how people don’t have to agree. This is how you sit down and have an intellectual, intelligent debate. And that means that requires one to speak and the other to listen, to truly listen – not be listening to try to get your own word in, but to listen to what the person said, take that in, process it.

There’s a moment in the film I keep thinking about, when someone at a Q&A asks her what she was doing the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. She gracefully, but forcefully, says she doesn’t want to answer that question anymore. But it’s not out of disrespect, and it’s not dismissive – she’s just standing her ground.

That’s what makes her who she is. And that’s why her work is so effective and visceral. It makes you feel because she’s unapologetically herself. She speaks her truth. She doesn’t hide behind things. She is the walking, living, breathing truth.

How did you approach reading her poetry in the film?

There wasn’t a script. Yes, there are words, and I have to say the words, but if this is a movie about Nikki Giovanni, then these words need to sound like Nikki Giovanni, right? This is not Taraji – like, “Here’s the poem, now make it yours.” You know what I mean? I’m going to be honest with you: When I first came in. I did a little bit of [the readings, the filmmakers were like], “Can you just pull it back?” We talked it out until it all made sense.

Did you need to find her voice in your head as well as in her words?

I listened to her speak. You have to remember that this was the ‘70s. There was a certain cadence to the way people spoke. I’ve done films set in the ‘70s, and I’m a ‘70s kid, so I understood there was a certain rhythm. It was almost poetic the way they spoke – “when you get up on the get down.” I had to add a little bit of that in there with the tone of her voice. But like I said, I listened to her so many times.

How was it different from how you’d approach playing a character?

Like I said, there wasn’t a real script, but there were things that I identified with that touched me and moved me. Again, it’s not my story to tell. I understood what she was talking about, especially when she got to the part about the relationship with her son. That touched me. But again, I’m reading it as Nikki Giovanni. This is not my story to tell, but I could totally identify with it, and that’s what I do with my characters. There’s the pain of Suge Avery in The Color Purple. She sings the blues because she has the blues. I have the blues, too. Maybe not the same blues as hers, but I know what the blues feels like.

Had you met Nikki Giovanni before you made the film?

I didn’t. I felt like I knew her, but I didn’t. We did a Q&A after a screening here in L.A., and I was so freaking nervous, because it was my first time meeting her. I was like, is she going to think I’m a goofball? They want me to be the moderator? What if I say something wrong? I’d never been the moderator before. (Laughs.)

You mentioned The Color Purple. Between Going to Mars and that film, you’re really elevating the work for two literary icons for a new generation. What is so important about Nikki Giovanni and also Alice Walker, and why did you want to be a part of these two projects?

Because of these women, I am able to stand here and talk to you. They paved the way for me so that I can have a voice. Now, they’re not actors, but the work that they did is very important to what I do and where I am as a Black woman. They were visible. I saw them. They made it possible for me to dream. Watching Nikki Giovanni be unapologetically herself and standing up for herself in the way she does gave me the wind beneath my wings to have a voice so that I can show the ones behind me. Speak up for yourself. That’s how change happens.

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