it's okay as long as you're black, i guess... thoughts on nikki giovanni and seung cho

Note: I originally wanted this column to run on my magazine, Fanzine, (actually i wanted my co-editor to write this) but was snaked by other bloggers (notably, Steve Sailer's very good blog]) and writers, due to our own time and work constraints.

Introduction: When i was in my third year at the University of Delaware i had this korean roommate Joe. For whatever reason the school always paired me up with Asians, the previous year being with an over-achieving, slightly older, pretentious pre-med Punjab-Indian roommate named Ramin. Joe was about as annoying as Ramin was, but in a separate way: he was, for one, a chronic masturbator who didn't care if i was trying to sleep in the room we both shared. He also was one of the worst snorers i've ever experienced, which, prior to the chronic masturbation revelation that came in the first few weeks, made me seek out another roommate early on. He also always sang over my Iron Maiden records. he also had a weird habit of looking up Internet porn in the computer labs, printing out the images on the communal printers, and bringing them home. He hated fags, as my friend Chris would jokingly post homoerotic pictures he stole from the Philadelphia City Paper on my front door. But the fucked up thing about Joe was that a few weeks before spring break he stopped going to classes, locked himself in the room we once shared (i moved into the living room after the porn and masturbation, which like poetry [which will become relevant later in some sense] should only be done in one's own room, on one's own time, got too much for me... plus for some reason i had a girlfriend at the time), smoked constantly when we couldn't open the windows (our room was was the 20-something floor of a dorm tower), and started breaking all of his electronics. i could hear him on the other side of his room smashing plastic things and crunching metal, throwing chairs, arguing with a friend of his, whose name i can't remember. i let this go on for several weeks, but not before i gave him some acid i had stashed in the freezer, then, while he was tripping hard, running into his room acting like i was being chased and eaten alive by invisible insects. it was my backhanded way of retribution for all the bullshit i'd put up with.

well, it turns out joe was going textbook paranoid schizophrenic. he told me one morning he wasn't going to school, nor leaving the apartment anymore because people (usually the CIA or FBI) were out to kill him. he smashed our phone which i had drawn a pentagram on months earlier. he broke all his electronics: TV, VCR, stereo; went out and bought new ones, then broke those too. he did manage to hold on to the vcr and tv long enough to rent porn—i know because i watched some of them once. i usually went to sleep with a knife or a fork under my pillow.

One day during spring break i went back to the apartment to grab some records and saw Joe was there. I looked in his room and saw papers, trash, movies, clothes, books, etc. thrown around everywhere—like there had been a fight or a whirlwind in his room. Joe and his friend were lying on the floor looking exhausted, smoking cigarettes. I didn't ask what happened, but a few days later his family started calling my apartment, asking about Joe, how he was, if he was acting strange. I told them about the CIA, his broken electronics, his paranoia. They seemed to know of a history of him acting like this, but, as is the Asian way, didn't divulge much information to the person who had to deal with it every day. A few days later, I came home from class to see all of Joe's shit in the hallway, thrown about like it had been ransacked. At first i was tripping thinking he'd thrown my stuff out too, then i saw a note by my (new) phone in the apartment telling me to call the university police and the RA. Joe had gone totally nuts, thrown all of his shit out, started threatening people in the dorm, and the RA called the cops on him, who hauled him away to the hospital. I called the police—and was immediately freaked out because of all the acid i had in the freezer, but i did a quick check and it was still there. Joe was in the hospital, they told me. His family would take care of it from here. Finally i was free of this douchebag. Chris and I took all the school books of his we could find in the trash and hallway, and sold them back for beer money and got drunk.

A day later he started calling me at the apartment. I'm fine, man, he said. I'm in a safe place, not in a hospital, he said, while clearly i could hear all the blips and beeps and intercom pages so familiar with hospitals. he wanted me to give him the phone number a girl he worked with at the university, some girl he had a crush on who obviously didn't need this bullshit. please, he said. just help me out. get me her number. he gave me her name. i gave him a fake number and never heard from him again.

a rant: By now, everyone has heard about Seung Cho, the 23-year-old kid who slaughtered all those people at Virginia Tech. One might be tempted to think I'm trying to draw some sort of parallel between Joe and Seung Cho, their respective mental states and paranoia—and to some degree i think Joe may have been capable of murder in his schizophrenic episodes, but mostly i think he was more a danger to himself—and i do think most korean women are crazy, but that's another post altogether—but really that's too circumstantial and simplistic. Joe was a fucking retard who lied about his age (he told me he was 23, but after the police hauled him away i found out he was really 31). Seung Cho was a troubled kid, mostly ignored and left to his own destructive—internally, and later, externally—devices. There's been a lot of talk amongst the hype, the pomp and circumstance surrounding the aftermath of his awful rampage in Virginia, about his writings, particularly the plays Richard McBeef and Mr. Brownstone, and how all the signs were there for anyone to glean, that Cho was indeed fucked-up in the head and headed for an outcome such as what came to someone's fruition last week.

If anyone actually sat down and read the plays, however, they'd find an almost comic-book level intensity, the kind of embarrassing scribble any writer would hide long in their 9th grade journal, seething with an anger you can't quite articulate, but boiling over with a forced hand that's obvious and amateur. Yet, writing like this was enough to convince one teacher to fear Cho so much that during her individual studies with him, to establish a code with her assistant to phone the police. It was enough to cause one student to say (after Cho had actually done the act) that Cho "was the kind of person who is going to walk into class one day and start shooting." Well, it turns out he was right. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

But what really interests me here about Cho is that he was kicked out of an English class in 2005 by a professor named Nikki Giovanni. Aside from being a well-known poet, popular teacher at VT and one of Oprah's 25 "Living Legends," she has received numerous articles of praise during the shockwave phase after the Cho massacre, as someone who is keeping the Hokie spirit alive in the face of disaster, a heroine who stood up to this menacing student, a bully and a silent intimidator. In an article from itribe]:

It is interesting also to know that Giovanni did cross paths with Cho only once again after she booted him from class.

It happened one day when the platinum-white-haired Giovanni, 63, was walking a path on campus. Several yards ahead she noticed Cho walking the path toward her. And, indicative of this poet’s character, she decided to sustain eye contact with him as they moved closer and passed each other on the path.

Giovanni, a strong person in many ways, including her survival of lung cancer, was determined even in that brief passing moment with Cho that she would not display weakness. Rather, she would display her steely resolve, holding an eagle’s gaze on him without a blink.

“I was not going to look away as if I were afraid,” Giovanni said.

“To me he was a bully, and I had no fear of this child.”

And in the New York Times column, The Lede:
“Once I realized my class was scared, I knew I had to do something,” she told The Washington Post.

So she confronted him about the dark sunglasses and maroon cap he would wear in class and the darker poetry that he would write.

“You can’t do that,” she told him, referring to the “intimidating” poems.

“You can’t make me,” he replied.

“Yeah, I can.”

Her next step was to lobby the department head, Lucinda Roy, writing a letter requesting he leave the class, she told CNN. And she was ready to go all the way.

“I was willing to resign before I would continue with him,” she told CNN. “It was the meanness.”

She sounds like a strong, no-bullshit woman, someone who can hold together the marrow of the VT community after this tragedy(i'm not so cynical to opine that what happened at VT was anything but—32 people is, on a familiar scale if one considers his own family, including all living relatives—aunts, uncles, brothers, cousins, father, mother, 2 sets of grandparents—a complete wash; an annihilation of a whole family), and indeed she has stepped up to fill those needs within a campus that has experienced the worst shooting in U.S. history. She is indeed soaking in the interviews as an early whistle-blower of young Seung Cho's disturbances. She kicked him out her class because he was so intimidating and, apparently, dangerous.

She was right. Cho murdered 32 people, apparently without care or discretion. She's also a horrible hypocrite. In another life, Nikki Giovanni was a well-known and popular Black Power poet, a militant of sorts, who wrote far more "disturbing" texts than Cho. Take some "disturbing" literature written by Cho, from Richard McBeef:

John: "Eat this you giant tree trunk piece of ass!"
Richard: "Ahhhh!"
John: "Fuck you Dad!"

and:

John: "I hate him. Must kill Dick. Must kill Dick. Dick must die. Kill Dick."

Now lets look at Giovanni's poem, The True Import of Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro (For Peppe Who Will Ultimately Judge Our Efforts):

Nigger
Can you kill
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can a nigger kill a honkie
Can a nigger kill the Man
Can you kill nigger
Huh? nigger can you
kill
Do you know how to draw blood
Can you poison
Can you stab-a-Jew
Can you kill huh? nigger
Can you kill
Can you run a protestant down with your
'68 El Dorado
(that's all they're good for anyway)
Can you kill
Can you piss on a blond head
Can you cut it off
Can you kill
A nigger can die
We ain't got to prove we can die
We got to prove we can kill
They sent us to kill
Japan and Africa
We policed europe
Can you kill
Can you kill a white man
Can you kill the nigger
in you
Can you make your nigger mind
die
Can you kill your nigger mind
And free your black hands to
strangle
Can you kill
Can a nigger kill
Can you shoot straight and
Fire for good measure
Can you splatter their brains in the street
Can you kill them
Can you lure them to bed to kill them
We kill in Viet Nam
for them
We kill for UN & NATO & SEATO & US
And everywhere for all alphabet but
BLACK
Can we learn to kill WHITE for BLACK
Learn to kill niggers
Learn to be Black men

I'm not one to take things without a grain of salt, but to me Giovanni's poem can read far more inciting and hateful than Cho's hackneyed attempts at expressing anger and whatever fucked-up-edness he saw in the world. This poem obviously operates on different levels of understanding—something Cho couldn't seem to do himself. She kicked him out of her class. No one has talked about Seung Cho's inability to articulate himself eloquently and, at least accurately, except his family, who always hoped he would leave his shell, get over his insecurities and shyness, and begin to speak. In the end, Giovanni, who mimicked Tupac Shakur's "Thug Life" tattoo, claims, "I'm not prescient."

There are certain writers who come to mind that, if they weren't so eloquent and articulate, would be very fearsome in person. I would personally be afraid of the following authors if they were not such good writers: Peter Sotos, Dennis Cooper, Dennis Johnson, Brett Easton Ellis, to name a few. Seung Cho went another route. Ultimately, Giovanni was right. Got lucky maybe. But she's also full of shit.