Ego Tripping

In colloquial use, an ego trip is an experience that increases a person’s satisfaction with one’s self and/or enhances a person’s feelings of self-importance. The title of Giovanni’s poem signals that this poem is an unabashed celebration of personal identity; moreover, the images and allusions contained in the poem lift not only the poet’s sense of self as a Black woman, but that of the entire Black race and female gender. The musical rhythm of the poem enhances its celebratory feel, as joyful events are often accompanied by music complete with lively rhythms and interesting beats.

Structurally, “Ego Tripping” consists of eight stanzas, and they are neither uniform nor patterned. The free verse of the poem allows the rhythms of the language and the internal rhymes to dominate the poem’s aural experience. The poem’s distinctively musical quality means it is well-suited to performance, and Giovanni’s many recordings of “Ego Tripping” attest to the poem’s success as a piece of spoken word.

Though the poem is full of proper nouns like place names and names of individuals, the only capitalized words in the poem are the pronouns “I” and “My” which start most of the lines of the entire poem. The capitalization of “I” is both grammatically correct and attention-seeking, which is consistent with the spirit of the poem’s title. Individuals on an ego trip seek to make events “all about them,” as the cliché goes, and the repetition of the pronoun “I” combines with the lack of capitalized proper nouns elsewhere in the poem to ensure that the speaker of the poem, who figuratively represents the Black race and female gender, remains the focus.

Giovanni gives the speaker’s voice some humor as well as self-satisfaction; this humorous tone mocks anyone who believes that Black people, and Black women in particular, do not deserve to go on ego trips. The speaker also employs a daring tone throughout the poem, challenging readers and listeners to resist her boastful claims. The speaker’s confidence in her assertions of power is highly robust, suggesting that thinking or believing otherwise is foolish. Though Giovanni’s use of hyperbole has a literary purpose, it also reveals a kind of cultural insecurity: Through the use of hyperbole, the speaker asserts that widespread negative assumptions about Black people and Black culture are completely wrong.

While the speaker might be going on an ‘ego trip,’ she is likewise going on a trip through history, touching on some of the greatest accomplishments of Black culture across the millennia. For instance, in the first stanza, the speaker begins in the heart of Africa, stating “I was born in the congo” (Line 1) where human evolution likely began. From there, she moves to the “fertile crescent” (Line 2) where she builds the Sphinx and the pyramids, using technology so advanced that the pyramid seems to catch a star that can only be seen every 100 years. Giovanni goes on to touch on accomplishments that are not only rooted in African culture—such as the advent of Islam (Line 9), the advent of trading routes across the vast and hostile Sahara (Line 17), and Hannibal’s attack on Rome (Line 24)—but which undermine the myth of the superiority of Western European culture. In fact, many of  the speaker’s claims and accomplishments echo the belief of many historians that Western civilization is indebted to the cultures of ancient Egypt and the Arab world, which originated in Africa. These ancient Egyptian and Biblical cultures influenced the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and are thereby a critical component of the foundation of Western civilization as humans now know it. Conversely, the mention of Hannibal, who is largely seen as a catalyst for the ‘fall of Rome’ and Western culture for centuries, and Islam, with the mention of “allah” (Line 9), inserts additional non-Western forces that challenged and disrupted Western hegemony across history. The speaker herself “sent an ice age to europe” (Line 10), just to cool her own thirst. In this way, Giovanni reminds the reader that first, Western culture is not infallible or inherently superior, despite the dominant narratives of the 1960’s, and that African culture has played a deep and lasting role in world history.

By beginning the poem with these images of a journey that bridges Africa to the Middle East and circles the globe, the speaker reminds the reader of the long journey African culture has taken across the millennia, replacing the dominant, but narrow, narrative of enslavement in the Americas. The poem’s speaker goes beyond these achievements, at once making them deeply personal—as evidenced in the first-person speaker—but likewise universal for all Black women. The speaker’s place as the descendant of these cultures makes her also the inheritor of their glory. But the accomplishments are also her own, as Giovanni’s speaker sheds centuries of forced subservience to claim all glories as her own. The speaker asserts her right, if not necessity, to take an ego trip; in other words, as the subtitle of the poem suggests, “there may be a reason why” this ego trip is warranted.

With the end of the poem, Giovanni allows her speaker to ascend above the mundane, embracing her full divinity, which at this point borders on the “surreal” (Line 47). Like a divine goddess, the speaker “cannot be comprehended / except by my permission” (Line 48-49), emphasizing her complete superiority over creation. As the poem gains in abstraction, the speaker seems to soar ever higher, as if out of view, flying away like “a bird in the sky” (Line 51). The last stanza, as it slows down, embraces the metaphor of the bird, which is often seen as a connection between the earth and the heavens, but also symbolizes the unending possibilities for Black women to continue to grow and succeed with each generation.