Life's Pleasures Quote by Nikki Giovanni

Giovanni’s line lands like a rebuke disguised as a confession. “We eat up artists” turns admiration into appetite: the public doesn’t simply enjoy art, it consumes the people who make it, with the same casual entitlement reserved for a product on a shelf. The simile sharpens the critique. “Like there’s going to be a famine at the end” names the panic beneath the binge: a cultural anxiety that beauty, truth, or meaning might run out, so we hoard it in advance. It’s a brutal image because it points the finger at “we,” not at some abstract industry villain.

The intent isn’t to scold fans for loving poetry; it’s to expose a pattern of extraction. Giovanni is writing from a tradition where Black artists, in particular, have been expected to be endlessly available: to educate, console, perform pain, translate politics, and do it on demand. In that context, “eat up” also echoes commodification: bodies and voices turned into raw material, praised while being depleted.

The subtext is about time and attention as resources. A culture that can’t sit with silence or uncertainty treats artists as renewable fuel, then acts shocked when they burn out, disappear, or refuse access. Giovanni’s phrasing works because it refuses the polite vocabulary of “support” and “celebration” and replaces it with something bodily, slightly grotesque. It forces the reader to feel the violence that often hides inside fandom, media cycles, and even well-meaning praise.