Today on "Generational Anxiety," would someone, anyone, please sing a love song?

Today, we begin the show where all great things begin -- in love, how we talk about it, how we think about it, and how the digital age has changed how we love.

Woman: And that's what love is.

Love's got your back.

Woman #2: It's a reaching.

It's a yearning.

It's an aching.

Man: I think silence prohibits expectations.

Man #2: Are we being heard?

Are we being seen?

Woman #3: I think people feel safe when they can define you.

Vivion: We created this show because the world is changing.

I'm joined by two incredible women, both of whom have influenced how I think about love a great deal.

My first guest could easily be called the greatest living American poet.

She's a legendary wordsmith, changemaker, and literary icon, the winner of an astounding seven ACP Awards, author of three "New York Times" best sellers, a distinguished university professor at Virginia Tech, and my personal literary hero, Ms. Nikki Giovanni.

Thank you for joining us.

-It's my pleasure.

I take no issue in calling my next guest the smartest person in print.

A prolific young culture critic and writer named to Forbes 30 under 30 emerging figure in media and a national magazine award winner and now a columnist for "The New Yorker."

Please welcome Ms. Doreen St. Félix.

Thank you for having me, Bianca.

I'm so happy to be with you, Nikki.

It's a pleasure.

I subscribe to your magazine.

Oh, thank you.

The reason I can eat.

Today, we're talking about love and Ms. Giovanni, I would be so remiss if I passed up the chance to say I love you.

In fact, I built the show around you back in the summer of 2018, I had just finished at Columbia, and I saw that it had gone viral.

The video that you did in 1971 with James Baldwin and you were 28, you were Doreen and I's age and he was about 52.

And you all had this incredibly prolific revolutionary conversation about love, tenderness, revolution.

And I thought we should have conversations like that all the time.

A guy is going with girl, you're going with Mabel.

And Mabel gets pregnant.

All of a sudden, you can't speak to me, Bill, because you don't have the money for a crib.

He doesn't need a crib.

The baby's going to sleep someplace.

But what she needs is a man to come by and say, "Hey, baby, you look good."

And black men refuse to function like that because they say, I want to bring the crib when I come.

They never going to get the crib.

Baby.

In this civilization, a man who cannot support his wife and his child is not a man.

Vivion: There was this passion that you had, you know, youthful passion and he was so patient with you.

And so I thought to myself, we need intergenerational conversations like that.

And I said, my first guest has to be Nikki Giovanni.

And so thank you for being here today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's totally my pleasure.

But I was patient with Jimmy.

-Yeah.

-I know he was patient with me, but I was patient.

Doreen, you've seen the conversation.

Absolutely.

So many times I can't even count.

There's a time when you tell him that you wish that the lies that a man goes out and tells to the world in order to survive, in order to, you know, bring back money to the family, that those same lies you wish I could just tell you, lie to me.

Of course you can lie to me.

And you will if you love me.

And you're going off with Maddie some place, you're lying to me.

Jimmy is speechless.

And he's stuck.

And I never seen James Baldwin stuck in my life.

And I said, this is something special.

And so that's really where the show came about, is I was like, we need young people coming together with the legends and the icons and really talking about the state of the world today.

And so I wanted to start it with love because that's where it started for me.

In that interview with James Baldwin, you say love is a tremendous responsibility.

To which Baldwin replies, it's the only responsibility to take.

There isn't any other.

This may be very meta, so interpret it however you will.

But have we failed in that responsibility?

I think that we confuse love with sex.

Basically.

It's an easy thing to do because sex is really, you know, totally a lot of fun.

I certainly recommend it, not a lot of it.

But, you know, every now and then it's a good idea.

And love it is a responsibility because you make a commitment.

And that's what love is.

Love is that I'm here for you or as our friend and we were talking about earlier and we all miss her.

Toni Morrison said, you know, love is a bench, and a bench is something that no matter what, when you're tired, when you're sad, you can sit.

It's going to be right there and it's got your back.

And that's what love is.

Love is got your back.

-Doreen, what do you think?

-So it's so interesting.

My first encounter with love was within religion, which is not where anyone should meet the idea of love, because in that case, love is coercion.

I was raised in the Catholic Church.

My family is West Indian.

They're from Haiti.

And so we have a very complicated relationship with the church in that it was the cipher through which a lot of the indigenous practices that have been brought back from the continent could be kind of, you know, funneled through some of the sacraments.

You know, so you have people who are praying to the Virgin Mary, but it's not really the Virgin Mary.

She's a representation of a goddess that we haven't been allowed to to praise outright.

And that's all to say that for me, growing up, love was something that I thought I always had to give to an entity with nothing in return.

I was very much raised in that tradition of love is conditional, right?

So you have to be good enough in order to be loved.

And so at this point in my life, just turned 30.

I'm still doing that unlearning and I'm still kind of convincing myself that I am worthy of love, just as I am not necessarily in the context of earning it.

Which, you know, when I was a child, I had no idea how deeply I was being indoctrinated by the church.

And it's taken a very long time to even notice that that indoctrination isn't natural because it can feel so natural, I think.

Well, one thing you said about earning it for me, that's really where it comes in for millennials and Gen Z, I feel like we're a city girls generation.

You know, we're very transactional when it comes to love and I think it's because patriarchy still very much exists.

But a lot of the responsibilities of patriarchy where, you know, a man was supposed to bring the bread home and the dinner and, you know, work and be present, we don't even have that part of patriarchy anymore.

So now it's kind of like especially among black women, I think it's one of those, what are you going to do for me?

But don't you think that that fantasy of, you know, the 1950s relationship that was toxic, but the man did bring something to the table, don't you think that was a fantasy in some ways?

Oh, I reject it entirely.

I don't know if that -- But that was like maybe not even historically really true.

No, it wasn't.

But I think that's the thing.

It's the popular fantasy that's now, especially with social media, where people, they want picture portrait love, picture portrait marriage.

You know, they fall in love with the fantasy of, oh, someone's going to come and rescue me.

What do you think?

We're just talking, you know, fairy tales.

Mm-hmm.

We're just talking fairy tales.

We forget.

Everybody said, you know, Snow White is out there.

Mm-hmm.

And the prince comes along and kisses your -- that's not what happened.

If you study the fairy tale, Snow White didn't wake up until she had the baby.

Which means she was raped.

Of course.

I want to intervene here because I think what you're saying, that's so much of authorship, it's about authority and taking authority.

And so I'll maybe I'll ask you to direct it to you first.

Where does love fit into your process of maybe self-authority, but also actual authorship, Like when you're writing about culture, about society, about the way things are moving, is love at the origin of it, or is it the achievement of it?

I think being in the position of the critic, it's so funny because the critic has a terrible rap out of all the writers that exist.

And for me it's all about a kind of uncontrollable adulation for the arts.

Like, I am obsessed with people who make art.

I'm obsessed with people who are willing to put their opinion in some shape or form and put it out into the world.

And I kind of think of the critic as, if anything, providing a service nominally that service is to the reader.

Maybe it's to the artist, but really the service is to your own self.

It's that I have been so moved that you have to extract what you think about this thing on the page.

And so I don't even know process.

Process is a word that if I'm using it, I'm not being honest about what my writing life is like.

When I think this process for me as a writer literally means sitting in front of a computer or a notebook and then typing like, that's it for me.

I don't sip tea or, you know, put on mood lighting.

That was never -- I'm not -- I'm not whatever people's version of that.

You're not professionalizing something.

Right.

A typewriter.

Yeah, it's very for me -- it's like it's an urge like, I mean not like sex but close to where it's like, oh, I got something to say, I got something to say.

It's not unlike sex.

It's not unlike sex.

I mean, it is like the ecstasy of finishing it.

I have another question as an old woman, being a Haitian, you talking about smart.

One of the great writers in the world is Edwidge Danticat, who is... And I'm wondering, what's the water you people are drinking?

Good writing.

Brilliant folks out in Haiti.

You know, there's a -- don't you think?

I mean, look at what you're producing.

Oh, my gosh.

I mean, I can't look at you while you tell me.

It's too much.

It's too much.

It's too much.

I'm doing good work.

But I don't know.

I think Haitians we're artists as a people and were also fighters.

We're warriors.

-Oh, right.

We like to dance, too.

We like to party.

Well, I was telling you about backstage about dancing with Haitians is a little bit different.

But when I say serious, I mean like, you know, I feel like Westerners and even American black people, we utilize the word revolution and radical even now, not necessarily carelessly, but it's definitely, especially for our generation, the word radical has definitely shifted its meaning.

When I think of someone just saying love is a radical act, I don't think getting up, you know, having sex, going to bed, cooking dinner, there's nothing to me like that that's inherently radical, even if it's loving.

But when I think of radical love, I think of intervention for the other.

Like I am going to put myself on the line for you in some way to love you.

And so I think when I think of Haitians just connecting the two, I really think like revolution to Haiti is a word that means something radical is a word that deeply means something.

And I think even for you, Ms. Giovanni, radical is a word that meant something very serious to your generation.

You know, to my generation, we use radical literally at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

As far as I know.

-Words are alive.

-Yeah.

-And so words grow.

-Yes.

And so if we're looking at words, my generation, but if we look at words, it was radical in the 1800s, or maybe it's '70s to run away from slavery, but it was also radical to stay.

Right.

And when I think of, I live in Virginia now, when I think of the peanut, which is a wonderful thing, Virginia calls itself the peanut state, and Virginia didn't know diddly squat about peanuts.

And I always think of it as a boy, as a black boy who was sold by Africans, because we have to remember that the slave trade went that there was a train running.

And so the Africans sold to the Europeans, who sold to other Europeans who us here, right.

That's a long story.

I'm not going to carry through that.

But I always think of the grandmother because it's to me, everything is a grandmother putting a peanut in the hands of this boy and saying, don't forget me.

-Mm.

-And somehow going through the all of a middle -- going down that tunnel and in Ghana going through middle passage, coming to Richmond.

Being stood naked on a podium, being sold.

He held on to that peanut and in holding on to it, he finally is sent to a plantation where he's going to work for the rest of his life.

He's going to die there.

But he plants this peanut.

Now he's like all the black men that we know in Harlem or in Bronx or anyplace else, right?

They're just black men being foolish.

But he plants that peanut.

So when his friends say, we're going to run away tonight, Harriet's coming.

Come on, you can come with us.

He said I gave my word.

I'm going to be here.

And he doesn't try to explain to them that I put this peanut in the ground, and I'll be here until it grows.

But he stays, and that's radical.

This changes me.

Honestly, this changed me so instantly, because now that does makes like sitting at the dinner table, you know, radical.

Coming home to a wife and a kid, radical.

You know, the things that I think now I just hear it and it sounds sometimes so trite, but when I think about how hard it's been and how hard it even is now to live a normal life, to go home and come back every day, like that's not a guarantee, you know, that could be radical.

It seems even in the last few weeks like that is a radical thing to go to the grocery store and come home.

I feel like you're reacting to the commercialization.

of people's experiences.

Exactly.

It's like when you go on the subway and you see a billboard for a some.

Black is beautiful.

Selling you some hair conditioner.

I don't feel love.

I feel like don't then sell it to me as razors or tampons.

It's like I just want to be if you call me radical, it's like, you know, I love your poem Revolutionary Woman.

That is one that is my favorite poem.

I just say that.

That is one of my favorite -- Where she says, oh, you know, I used to think, you know, I don't know if you want to quote yourself.

-Oh, no.

-No, you can't.

But it's like, yeah, I mean, I'm going to butcher it, obviously.

But you basically say, like, I used to think that I was going to be the one to start the revolution to stop the gun.

But then I dug, she says.

Then I dug that if I could be a natural woman doing what a natural woman does, I would have a revolution.

And that changed me.

And that for me, when I think of like being as a radical act, it's really that poem like it's embodied.

Oh, I'm definitely a student.

I just think it's so important.

And I say this as a grandmother, as an older woman here, and I do recommend old age I really love it that you like yourself.

And what worries me about your generation is that most of you don't.

-Yeah.

-Most of you are not fond of, you know, when you wake up in the morning and I laugh at my students about that and you're brushing your teeth, the first thing you have to say is, you know I love you because it may be the only time you hear I love you in the day.

You say it to yourself.

Yeah.

The first thing you do is smile to yourself.

Well, that's because I feel I mean, for me, I spent my whole life wanting to be somebody else besides myself.

And it was a product of a generation that love is just so hard to find.

It was hard to find in the house, like between my mother and father.

It was hard to find when my body started changing and it didn't look like the Beyoncé or whoever they were marketing at the time.

It became very difficult to be like, this is the person that I love as well.

I'll direct it back as a question like, where do you find it?

You don't find it, you give it.

It isn't lost, you give it and somebody will take it.

But your job is to.

But what -- what if someone takes it and doesn't give it back?

And I know people are watching wondering that.

It's their loss.

That comes back to that transactional thing that I was mentioning earlier.

It's a generation that that they say if I give it, where am I going to get it?

And it's kind of like a fix, you know, it's like, where do.

I go to be twice as happy giving somebody.

And if they don't get that's their loss.

I heard that.

When my mother died, I called Toni because we were friends.

Toni Morrison, and she listened, and Toni wasn't a great listener.

I don't know if you knew Toni, but you wouldn't waste your time like that.

And I'd talk for about an hour because I would say and she finally said, Nikki, write.

And she said, I have to go now.

You go write, which was good advice.

But Toni loved me and I love Toni.

And that's the way we showed it.

And I don't know what you are saying here that you expect.

Of love.

You give love.

And when people ask you for something, you do that you help.

That's love is a responsibility.

What makes love love is that it's you stepping out of yourself in order to relate to another person.

Right.

And if our generation is plagued by something is that it's very difficult to step out of yourself because we live in a hall of mirrors.

You look at your phone, you're looking at yourself.

You go on Instagram, looking at yourself, looking at yourself, and then on and on and on.

And so sometimes, you know, I'll be talking to a girlfriend or a they friend who has met someone and they feel like they're giving of themselves to them.

But in reality, you hear the story, you hear all the interactions, and they're not really interactions because they've been filtered by so many filters.

-Projections, assumptions.

-Exactly.

And so sometimes I have to catch myself and really consider if the emotion that I'm experiencing is something that is a channel to love or is it a channel to desire?

Am I making... Is the feeling that I'm feeling really just inside of myself, and therefore it's just about me relating to myself and using this person as a surface for projection.

And I'm more often than not, a lot of like the crazy making crushes that I experience or whatever it is, is this me?

That person hasn't actually done anything for me because I won't let them.

-Yeah.

-I think love is important.

I think we have to know the difference between love and sex.

And I think the sex, as I say again, I think the sex is alive for anybody to use that is that bad sex and need to go and find some good sex.

And the only way you're going to find that is that you step outside of yourself at the end.

Yeah.

You want a sex that requires a vulnerability and it is very easy to have non-vulnerable sex these days.

Yeah.

You just download an app, you see somebody, you swipe, 10 text messages, there at your apartment.

That's it.

And so I think because we already have a culture that believes it's taboo to talk about sex, period.

So then we're not even at the point where we're talking about pleasure, right?

We're talking about it as a mechanical exchange versus the things that you might me as someone who identifies as a woman having sex with someone who identifies as a man.

Right.

That's a dynamic.

And then it changes if you're a woman having sex with a woman and there isn't a readily accessible vocabulary around pleasure.

We have to separate love and romance and marriage.

Marriage is an institution, right?

It's an institution that for some reason, people still want to participate in.

Not me.

Noted for millions of people.

But that doesn't mean you can't message me.

I just don't want to get married.

But marriage often kills romance.

It often strangles love because it puts people in these really strict positions where you can only move.

You know, it's like being on a like a checkerboard.

You can only move in like four directions, right?

Because you have this like this hole that you're stuck into and the radius is so short.

And so I think a lot of, you know, for my friends who are women and who are straight, often the things that they're complaining about, I'm like, this is a choice.

I understand that you feel like this is a script that we all have to follow, but you can get off the page.

You can, you know, write on the desk instead of staying on the loose leaf all the time.

And so I do see people making choices that feel enforced and that the choice doesn't necessarily come from inside of themselves, as opposed to a knowledge that in order to reach a certain status in society, there's like things that you have to do.

Although those things might not be what you want to do, they might not give you pleasure.

Well, I want to I want to intervene on what you just said about marriage, because I know that that is a very popular notion amongst our generation that marriage is a prison.

And being partnered to one person ad infinitum in the institution of marriage is daunting and it is hellish.

And it is something that we don't necessarily I mean, popularly across Gen Zers and millennials we don't necessarily want to participate in.

What do you think about that?

I think most people still do want to get married, though.

Well, I know I would say that our generation I mean, let's just say artists like Jagged Edge, which was a very popular R&B group, I mean, they were top of the charts.

They wrote the song "Let's Get Married."

You had popular singers singing like, it's time for us to lock this down and be serious.

You don't have the top R&B artist now singing anything about Let's Get Married.

Typically now, when you hear love songs, it's about escaping matrimony or escaping chosen partnership.

So I think that it is a popular notion in our generation that marriage is a prison, more so, not necessarily completely, you know, across everybody.

But it definitely is a growing notion of like, what is it good for?

If it is true that there is an increased focus on the tumult of romantic love, that's really us going back to the blues, right?

So it's kind of like the century looping back on it.

Right.

Which I think is really fascinating.

And the thing about whenever I'm thinking about what our generation thinks and what our generation does, there's always a such a large gap between our love of rhetoric, our love for talking about the things that we want, talking about the things that we want to do and the way we actually live our lives, which is often in like extreme conflict with each other.

Well, actually, bringing it back to your 1971 interview with James Baldwin, in it, you were so young and hopeful, and it seems now you're even brighter.

You know, you're happier, you're like looking and you're like, I'm sure that it gets better.

You know, I always every time, every day when I wake up, I say, God, you say that it gets better.

So show me how it gets better.

I think of that all the time.

God's got other things to do that look at you.

But I'm not on God's island.

But he does.

I want to end my conversation with this.

There are two turkeys.

They always are.

And the so-called president does something called forgives one, which is foolish.

They're going to eat it.

I've always loved the turkey that had to live on.

Hmm.

Because this is a turkey that lost its friend.

And it's going to have to find a way to be happy and content.

It comes to the school, which I've taught for 32 years.

Virginia Tech, we get the turkeys.

They're all in the same level of pain.

But then they have to say there's more to it than pain and they have to go through it.

And we study the turkeys, but we are the turkeys that didn't get chosen is the way I looked at we're the turkeys that have to live on.

We have to live on.

Thank you both so much for being here with me today.

Thank you.

This has been so wonderful.

We'll join you in a second with a poem from Ms. Nikki Giovanni.

[ Cheers and applause ]