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Nikki Giovanni wants to die in zero gravity.
“We don’t have poets in space,” he says in a speech featured in “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” a documentary about the elusive artist, directed by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson.
Giovanni would like to travel to the space station to record what he sees, adding that when the time comes to leave, it can simply be released into the ether. This desire, part joke and part genuine, drives the biographical project, in which the directors attempt to capture Giovanni’s legacy and her Afrofuturist vision of black women.
“Going to Mars” combines archival footage of Giovanni and moments from black history, space footage, and current interviews and speeches to paint a broad picture of the poet’s evolution from young firebrand to old man. Giovanni posits that viewers should turn to black women to learn how to survive in space because of our ability to survive all the hardships that come our way on Earth. At all times, the scenes are punctuated by his poetry, read by both Giovanni herself and actress Taraji P. Henson.
The documentary offers only what the poet is willing to give. And Giovanni is a challenging subject: he has firm boundaries and there are questions he refuses to answer. “You want me to go somewhere I’m not going to go because it will make me unhappy,” he says in response to a question about his childhood. “I refuse to be unhappy about something I can’t do anything about.”
However, other times Giovanni’s work speaks for itself. He won’t talk about how he felt after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., for example, but what follows is a powerful performance of his poem “Reflections on April 4, 1968,” in which he expresses his anger at injustice . Here, and in general, viewers must fill in their own blanks.
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Not qualified. Duration: 1 hour 42 minutes. On cinemas.