Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was an influential American author, poet, and civil rights activist known for her autobiographical works, including "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." Her writing often explored themes of identity, racism, and resilience, and she is celebrated for her powerful and evocative storytelling. Angelou's work continues to inspire and resonate with readers around the world.
8 Key excerpts on "Maya Angelou"
eBook - ePubRise
Extraordinary Women of Colour who Changed the World
- Maliha Abidi(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Saqi Books(Publisher)
...Maya Angelou Writer and Civil Rights Activist 4 April 1928 – 28 May 2014 United States of America St Louis-born Marguerite Annie Johnson would become famous as ‘Maya’, the nickname her brother, Bailey, Jr, gave her. After their parents’ divorce, Maya and Bailey, Jr moved to Arkansas to live with their grandmother, with whom Angelou shared a special bond. After a few short years with their grandmother, the children moved in with their mother, who now lived with a man named Freeman. When Angelou was only seven, Freeman raped her. She didn’t tell anyone for a while, but shortly after the truth came out, Freeman was found dead. The event traumatised young Maya, who now believed her words were capable of killing people. It triggered mutism: she didn’t speak for five years. Angelou and her brother moved back with their grandmother. During this time, she read copiously. One day, a woman Angelou’s grandmother called ‘Sister Flowers’ walked into the shop and invited the girl to tea. ‘Your grandmother says you read a lot,’ she said. ‘Every chance you get. That’s good, but not good enough.’ She introduced Angelou to poetry, and the importance of the spoken word. Slowly, she helped Angelou overcome her trauma. As an adult, Angelou worked as a San Francisco cable car driver, sex worker, actress, newspaper foreign correspondent and editor, modern dancer and – significantly – an influential coordinator in the Civil Rights Movement, collaborating with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (the first of seven works that expanded and innovated the autobiographical form) launched her literary career. She would write poetry, plays, essays and screenplays as well, and recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ at Bill Clinton’s first inauguration as US President. Writer, performer, activist, mother: Angelou began in silence, but left a legacy of words that will endure for generations to come....
eBook - ePub- Linda Wagner-Martin(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...It is a classic. Angelou was amazed that her carefully written memoir was on bookstore shelves, and sometimes prominently displayed in bookstore windows. It seemed as if every newspaper and magazine that Angelou came across carried a review of her autobiography. And then the essays started – eventually these would run to over 100 scholarly works, all focused on I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. For Angelou, who had never read academic literary criticism, it was amazing that professional critics had found so much to say about her story, her life, her writing. In the apt words of Joanne Braxton, one of Angelou’s best critics, “Angelou inscribes her resistance to racism, sexism, and poverty within the language, the imagery, the very meaning of her text: her truth-telling vision confronts stereotypes old and new, reversing perspective and discomforting the reader seeking safety in the conventional platitudes of the status quo. Simultaneously, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ s profoundly moral stance challenges its audience to confront the contradictions of life and to create positive change, beginning with oneself and with one’s community.” Braxton was one of the earliest critics to praise Angelou’s double narrative voices – the adult who sees events retrospectively and the “girlchild,” the “Maya voice,” or young Marguerite – and the fact that such a seemingly effortless double vision allows Angelou to comment on both history and memory. “To borrow from the blues idiom of Ralph Ellison, the mature autobiographer consciously fingers the jagged edges of her remembered experience, squeezing out a tough lyric of black and blue triumph. Maya Angelou … emerges miraculously through a baptismal cataract of violence, abuse, and neglect.” Much critique of both Angelou’s prose and poetry speaks to its basis in speech, in African American speech. Angelou frequently called herself a “recorder.” She also said: “I write for the Black voice and any ear which can hear it...
eBook - ePub- Khalilah L. Brown-Dean(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...1 The Personal is Political I first discovered the work of poet and essayist Maya Angelou in middle school. Even though the themes in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings were mature, I felt a deep connection to the story she told of growing up in Stamps, Arkansas. I flinched when she recounted being raped by her mother’s boyfriend. I cried when Uncle Willie hid in the potato bin to avoid the Ku Klux Klan. Klan leaders throughout the United States included sheriffs, judges, prosecutors, and ministers. It seemed ominous that the very people responsible for protecting vulnerable communities routinely engaged in terrorizing them. Maya Angelou’s voice let me know that it was OK to be a little brown girl with a big Arabic name in a place called Lynchburg, Virginia, with the audacity to imagine possibilities unbound by geography. I vowed to someday thank Dr Angelou in person for inspiring me. At seventeen I finally had the chance – or so I thought. That year Angelou arrived at my high school as part of a citywide Black History Month observance. I was selected as one of the students who would get to speak with her. Being a nerd has its perks. I rehearsed what I would say to her a thousand times. I was determined not to come across as some naïve kid in search of an autograph. With dog-eared copy of my notebook in hand I patiently waited for my turn. But I was awe-struck. The words simply wouldn’t come. Angelou looked at me and said with that beautiful, commanding lilt, “Would you like to say hello?” I eagerly shook my head and squeaked out, “Hello?!” She smiled and took the time to nod her reassurance. I knew in that moment she realized the impact she had on me. Angelou was my intellectual rock star. Quite literally, Angelou made it possible for me to be the first person in my immediate family to earn a four-year degree. I competed in oratorical competitions in high school and earned college scholarships using a number of her poems and essays...
eBook - ePubPoetry 101
From Shakespeare and Rupi Kaur to Iambic Pentameter and Blank Verse, Everything You Need to Know about Poetry
- Susan Dalzell(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Adams Media(Publisher)
...It was a new kind of memoir, innovative for its time and nonlinear, and used many fiction techniques to tell the story of Angelou’s childhood and teens. Her candid portrayals of racism and sexual violence attracted both controversy and praise. The book was nominated for a National Book Award and launched Angelou’s career as a writer. Over the next thirty years, she would write five more memoirs, chronicling different stages in her life, culminating in 2002’s A Song Flung Up to Heaven covering the tumultuous civil rights years of 1964 to 1968. After the success of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou took up poetry. Her 1971 poetry collection, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She usually wrote in free verse with a flowing rhythm and cadence that begged to be read out loud. Just as she had with her nonfiction, Angelou looked unflinchingly at racial and political concerns. Her poems are unapologetically feminist and honest about her personal struggles as a black woman. There’s a strong thread of hope in her poetry too. Despite her early struggles in life, she held strongly to a belief in a shared humanity. Her subsequent collections include Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well in 1975; Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? in 1983; I Shall Not Be Moved in 1990; Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now in 1993; The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou in 1994; and A Brave and Startling Truth in 1995. Honors and Accolades Of all her honors, the most visible one was given to her by President Bill Clinton, who asked Angelou to deliver his Inauguration Day poem. Angelou was only the second poet in history—the first was Robert Frost—to be so honored. On January 20, 1993, Angelou welcomed the new president with an original poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” which celebrated the commonality of humankind and struck a hopeful and optimistic tone for social justice for all...
eBook - ePubModern Women
52 Pioneers
- Kira Cochrane(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Aurum(Publisher)
...The volumes describe her years as a high-achieving school pupil, a teenage mother, San Francisco’s first black streetcar conductor, a sex worker and madam, part of a dance team with renowned choreographer Alvin Ailey, and a cast member for the opera Porgy and Bess. She was a calypso singer, a civil rights activist, and lived in Cairo, then Ghana, working as a journalist. ‘Life loves the liver of it,’ Angelou often said, and she honoured that outlook in full. On her birthday in 1968, her friend Martin Luther King Jr was killed, plunging Angelou into a deep depression. She had gone to live in New York, determined to write, and at a dinner party with James Baldwin, she and the other guests told stories of their early years. An editor called Robert Loomis heard about her recollections, and suggested she become a memoirist. Angelou told him she wanted to be a playwright and poet, but he devised a strategy to convince her. ‘You may be right not to attempt autobiography,’ he said, ‘because it is nearly impossible to write autobiography as literature. Almost impossible.’ ‘I’ll start tomorrow,’ said Angelou. She would go to a hotel room to write, asking for the pictures to be removed from the walls, carrying yellow, lined legal notepads, a bottle of sherry, a Bible, thesaurus and deck of cards, in case she was minded to play solitaire. The books she wrote were loved, and influential. Earlier black women writers were ‘frozen into self-consciousness by the need to defend black women and men against the vicious and prevailing stereotypes,’ writes academic Mary Helen Washington, but Angelou wrote openly about her experiences of a deeply divided America. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings describes her early years with Bailey, her grandmother and Uncle Willie in the small Arkansas town of Stamps, where ‘the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than that they were different, to be dreaded’...
eBook - ePubMaya Angelou
Adventurous Spirit
- Linda Wagner-Martin(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...1 Marguerite Annie Johnson, April 4, 1928 In 1970, when she was 41, Maya Angelou became one of the world’s most visible writers. What is it that brings readers to some books, readers who have perhaps looked into a book only once every few years—if then? Why do other books remain closed to even those people who are fascinated by language? What is the synergy of story? The radiance of the word? The attraction of recognition? Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was not a story people wanted to read. Raped when she was seven and a half by her mother’s boyfriend, the child Marguerite Johnson barely survived. The violation brought her close to death; she separated herself from everyone except her brother. She dissociated herself from her mother and her St. Louis family—the mark of that dissociation was her chosen muteness. Later, recollecting that she would sometimes speak to Bailey, she describes her silence as the mark that her voice was “eluding” her. Instead of speaking, she wrote songs and taught them to Bailey; he in turn taught her songs to the children who were their friends. For five years, Bailey became her voice (Order 148). Maya Angelou traced her life as writer back to those silent years. She said, “We all bring almost unnameable information from childhood . .. If we are lucky, we make transitions, and don’t live in that time of pain and rejection and loneliness and desolation...
eBook - ePubBlack Internationalist Feminism
Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995
- Cheryl Higashida(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- University of Illinois Press(Publisher)
...Testifying to her place in the national imaginary, Bill Clinton chose Angelou as the poet for his presidential inauguration, making her the first African American and the first woman to assume this role. Angelou’s 1993 inaugural performance of “On the Pulse of the Morning” obtained the largest audience for poetry in history, and in addition to becoming a bestseller and canonical work of literature in its own right, the poem increased the sales of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by nearly 500 percent. 7 Caged Bird and “On the Pulse of the Morning” situate Angelou squarely within a U.S. national(ist) framework. Caged Bird, about Angelou’s childhood in Arkansas, Missouri, and California, is often read as an affirmation of American self-reliance and individual fulfillment. 8 Indeed, crucial to the book’s success was the fact that it was published just a few years before the development of U.S. multicultural nationalism in the wake of the civil rights and Black Power movements and the mobilization of other racial groups and women, lesbians, and gays. The radical demands of these movements for economic and social justice were met with a multicultural Americanism that the state supported in an effort to shore up its legitimacy while co-opting the militancy of the new social movements. 9 Multiculturalism emerged as a double-edged ideology that revised Eurocentric and patriarchal formulations of citizenship—for example, by incorporating works like Caged Bird into school curricula nationwide—while mystifying the intensification of structural racism evidenced by deindustrialization, deregulation, capital light, and the evisceration of welfare...
eBook - ePub- Eva Lennox Birch(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In the recognition scene in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, when Angelou’s grandmother is vilified and taunted by the obscenity of white children, Angelou claims that the experienced humiliation gave way to a feeling of triumph. In her reconstruction of that event, Angelou rejoices in a victory as Momma Henderson retains her dignity. Angelou seems to be less preoccupied than her black male counterparts with smashing angrily at the bars of the racial cage. Her concern is to explore the cage in order to salvage the means to transcend and escape. Like Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Native Son Angelou wants to fly, but recognises that a caged bird could batter itself to death on the bars in impotent rage: But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. 8 This poem crystallises the essential difference between Angelou’s personal search for self-definition and that of many black male writers, whose anger had hardened into a single-minded determination to shake white men into recognition of their own institutionalised inhumanity. The rage against the illogicality of white racism is no less apparent in Angelou’s writing than it is in black male writing, but its effectiveness is amplified for the reader because it is inscribed in the remembered experience of a joyous survivor. Although now a university teacher herself, circumstances had not enabled Angelou to pursue the education which Booker T. Washington had advocated as essential to success. Yet, like him, she too has been welcomed into the corridors of white power in Washington. She did more than just survive. Her poem of address to the nation when she stood in front of President Clinton during his inauguration was heard and seen by millions of people...
