"We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained"
About this Quote
Writing, for Nikki Giovanni, isn’t a hobby or a career choice; it’s a refusal. “We write because we believe the human spirit cannot be tamed and should not be trained” lands like a manifesto from a poet who came of age with Black Arts militancy, civil rights urgency, and the constant pressure to make Black life legible on someone else’s terms. The first move is communal: “We write,” not “I write.” Giovanni positions art as collective practice, a shared tactic for staying unmanageable in a culture that rewards compliance.
The phrasing is doing double work. “Tamed” evokes the violent intimacy of domination: the leash, the cage, the expectation that certain people soften their anger, lower their voice, shrink their ambition. “Trained” is sharper, more modern, and more insidious. Training sounds like school, professionalism, etiquette, even “self-improvement” - the respectable vocabulary of conformity. Giovanni rejects both the obvious forms of control and the polite ones.
The subtext is a warning about what institutions do to language. They don’t only silence; they shape what counts as articulate, what counts as “good,” what kinds of emotion are acceptable, which stories are “universal” and which are “too specific.” Her answer is to keep the spirit undomesticated by putting it on the page - not to tidy experience into palatable lessons, but to preserve its wildness, its contradiction, its heat.
In Giovanni’s hands, writing becomes an act of untraining: a way to unlearn obedience and to make freedom sound like a voice that won’t behave.
The phrasing is doing double work. “Tamed” evokes the violent intimacy of domination: the leash, the cage, the expectation that certain people soften their anger, lower their voice, shrink their ambition. “Trained” is sharper, more modern, and more insidious. Training sounds like school, professionalism, etiquette, even “self-improvement” - the respectable vocabulary of conformity. Giovanni rejects both the obvious forms of control and the polite ones.
The subtext is a warning about what institutions do to language. They don’t only silence; they shape what counts as articulate, what counts as “good,” what kinds of emotion are acceptable, which stories are “universal” and which are “too specific.” Her answer is to keep the spirit undomesticated by putting it on the page - not to tidy experience into palatable lessons, but to preserve its wildness, its contradiction, its heat.
In Giovanni’s hands, writing becomes an act of untraining: a way to unlearn obedience and to make freedom sound like a voice that won’t behave.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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