Contents:
I thought it uninspiring for a book, but the name drew me, Maya Angelou. This was Scotland in the early s. This author had music in her name. Momma runs a general store. Her customers are cotton pickers and young Maya witnesses the relentless hardship of their daily lives. His subsequent murder, for which the child mistakenly feels responsible, robs Maya of her voice.
She knows, and is afraid of, the power of words. She convinces Maya that she cannot truly love poetry until she can speak it out loud. The book ends with Maya living in San Francisco, where she graduates from high school and becomes an unmarried mother at the age of Angelou is no apologist.
Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the age of forty, Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as composer, singer, actor, civil rights worker, journalist, and educator. Banned and Challenged Books. University Press of Virginia. Then I started a crime thriller…and got really far into it before realizing I had a lot to learn about the craft of writing fiction. What best describes you? This laughter is liberating. While still in high school, Maya visits her father in southern California one summer and has some experiences pivotal to her development.
Like the abolitionist Frederick Douglass she is incensed by suggestions that slaves and cotton pickers sing because they are happy. One of the potentials Angelou identifies in the arts is the ability to propel individuals beyond their own existence. It may seem presumptuous, but there were moments when I met myself, a white, bookish Scot, in the life of the young, bookish Angelou. Her ability to involve me in an existence so different from my own was largely due to her writing style.
Rejected by her parents and society at large, Angelou is an outsider, something most teenagers, even those in comfortable circumstances, consider themselves. Walker, was thematic unity. One of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion, in order to achieve her political purposes, which were to demonstrate how to resist racism in America. The structure of the text, which resembles a series of short stories, is not chronological but rather thematic. According to Walker, critics had neglected analyzing its structure, choosing to focus instead on its themes, which he feels neglects the political nature of the book.
He states, "One serves Angelou and Caged Bird better by emphasizing how form and political content work together". The progression Maya goes through thematically unifies the book, something that "stands in contrast to the otherwise episodic quality of the narrative". For example, the incident with the "powhitetrash" girls takes place in chapter 5, when Maya was ten years old, well before Angelou's recounting of her rape in chapter 12, which occurred when Maya was 8.
Walker explains that Angelou's purpose in placing the vignettes in this way is that it followed her thematic structure. However, Hagen notes that instead of beginning Caged Bird chronologically, with Maya and Bailey's arrival in Stamps, Angelou begins the book much later chronologically by recounting an embarrassing experience at church, an incident that demonstrates Maya's diminished sense of self, insecurity, and lack of status.
In the course of Caged Bird , Maya, who has been described as "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America", [1] goes from being a victim of racism with an inferiority complex to a self-aware individual who responds to racism with dignity and a strong sense of her own identity. Feminist scholar Maria Lauret states that the "formation of female cultural identity" is woven into the book's narrative, setting Maya up as "a role model for Black women".
Maya's unsettled life in Caged Bird suggests her sense of self "as perpetually in the process of becoming, of dying and being reborn, in all its ramifications". As Lauret indicates, Angelou and other female writers in the late s and early s used autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. Up until this time, Black women were not depicted realistically in African-American fiction and autobiography, meaning that Angelou was one of the first Black autobiographers to present, as Cudjoe put it, "a powerful and authentic signification of [African-American] womanhood in her quest for understanding and love rather than for bitterness and despair".
As French and Lessing do in their novels, Angelou employs the narrator as protagonist and depends upon "the illusion of presence in their mode of signification". As a displaced girl, Maya's pain is worsened by an awareness of her displacement. She is "the forgotten child", and must come to terms with "the unimaginable reality" of being unloved and unwanted; [49] she lives in a hostile world that defines beauty in terms of whiteness and that rejects her simply because she is a Black girl.
Maya internalizes the rejection she has experienced — her belief in her own ugliness was "absolute". Angelou uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities throughout her books to illustrate how oppression and personal history are interrelated. For example, in Caged Bird , Angelou demonstrates the "racist habit" [47] of renaming African Americans, as shown when her white employer insists on calling her "Mary". Angelou describes the employer's renaming as the "hellish horror of being 'called out of [one's] name'".
Maya understands that she is being insulted and rebels by breaking Mrs. Cullinan's favorite dish, but feels vindicated when, as she leaves her employer's home, Mrs. Cullinan finally gets her name right. Contrasted with her experience in Stamps, Maya is finally "in control of her fate". These two incidents give Maya a knowledge of self-determination and confirm her self-worth. Scholar Mary Burgher believes that female Black autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African-American mothers as "breeder[s] and matriarch[s]", and have presented them as having "a creative and personally fulfilling role".
Maya's feelings for and relationship with her own mother, whom she blames for her abandonment, express themselves in ambivalence and "repressed violent aggression". These strong feelings are not resolved until the end of the book, when Maya becomes a mother herself, and her mother finally becomes the nurturing presence for which Maya has longed.
Stamps, Arkansas, as depicted in Caged Bird , has very little "social ambiguity": Kelley calls Caged Bird a "gentle indictment of white American womanhood"; [68] Hagen expands it further, stating that the book is "a dismaying story of white dominance". Caged Bird has been called "perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era".
Walker expresses a similar sentiment, and places it in the African-American literature tradition of political protest. Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with Caged Bird , contain a sequence of lessons about resisting oppression. The sequence she describes leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest".
Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives her autobiographies their thematic unity and underscores one of their central themes: For example, in Angelou's depiction of the "powhitetrash" incident, Maya reacts with rage, indignation, humiliation, and helplessness, but Momma teaches her how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism, and that it is an effective basis for actively protesting and combating racism. Angelou portrays Momma as a realist whose patience, courage, and silence ensured the survival and success of those who came after her.
Cullinan, her white employer, and, later on in the book, breaks the race barrier to become the first black streetcar operator in San Francisco. At first Maya wishes that she could become white, since growing up Black in white America is dangerous; later she sheds her self-loathing and embraces a strong racial identity.
Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text. Jacobs and Angelou both use rape as a metaphor for the suffering of African Americans; Jacobs uses the metaphor to critique slaveholding culture, while Angelou uses it to first internalize, then challenge, twentieth-century racist conceptions of the Black female body namely, that the Black female is physically unattractive.
Arensberg notes that Maya's rape is connected to the theme of death in Caged Bird , as Mr. Freeman threatens to kill Maya's brother Bailey if she tells anyone about the rape. After Maya lies during Freeman's trial, stating that the rape was the first time he touched her inappropriately, Freeman is murdered presumably by one of Maya's uncles and Maya sees her words as a bringer of death. As a result, she resolves never to speak to anyone other than Bailey.
Angelou connects the violation of her body and the devaluation of her words through the depiction of her self-imposed, five-year-long silence. African-American literature scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe calls Angelou's depiction of the rape "a burden" of Caged Bird: She also wanted to prevent it from happening to someone else, so that anyone who had been raped might gain understanding and not blame herself for it.
As Lupton points out, all of Angelou's autobiographies, especially Caged Bird and its immediate sequel Gather Together in My Name , are "very much concerned with what [Angelou] knew and how she learned it". Lupton compares Angelou's informal education with the education of other Black writers of the twentieth century, who did not earn official degrees and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms".
Angelou is influenced by writers introduced to her by Mrs. Angelou states, early in Caged Bird , that she, as the Maya character, "met and fell in love with William Shakespeare". Vermillion maintains that Maya finds comfort in the poem's identification with suffering. She is so involved in her fantasy world of books that she even uses them as a way to cope with her rape, [93] writing in Caged Bird , " I was sure that any minute my mother or Bailey or the Green Hornet would bust in the door and save me".
According to Walker, the power of words is another theme that appears repeatedly in Caged Bird. For example, Maya chooses to not speak after her rape because she is afraid of the destructive power of words. Flowers, by introducing her to classic literature and poetry, teaches her about the positive power of language and empowers Maya to speak again.
The public library is a "quiet refuge" to which Maya retreats when she experiences crisis. Angelou was also powerfully affected by slave narratives , spirituals , poetry, and other autobiographies. In Caged Bird , Mrs. Flowers encourages her to listen carefully to "Mother Wit", [99] which Hagen defines as the collective wisdom of the African-American community as expressed in folklore and humor.
Angelou's humor in Caged Bird and in all her autobiographies is drawn from Black folklore and is used to demonstrate that in spite of severe racism and oppression, Black people thrive and are, as Hagen states, "a community of song and laughter and courage".
These elements include the act of testimony when speaking of one's life and struggles, ironic understatement, and the use of natural metaphors, rhythms, and intonations. Hagen also sees elements of African American sermonizing in Caged Bird.
Angelou's use of African-American oral traditions creates a sense of community in her readers, and identifies those who belong to it. The other volumes in her series of seven autobiographies are judged and compared to Caged Bird. By the end of , critics had placed Angelou in the tradition of other Black autobiographers.
Poet James Bertolino asserts that Caged Bird "is one of the essential books produced by our culture". He insists that "[w]e should all read it, especially our children". Gross called Caged Bird "a tour de force of language". Guiney, who reported that Caged Bird was "one of the best autobiographies of its kind that I have read". Gross praised Angelou for her use of rich and dazzling images. By the mids, Caged Bird had gone through 20 hardback printings and 32 paperback printings.
Caged Bird had sold steadily since its publication, but it increased by percent. The page publication of "On the Pulse of Morning" became a best-seller, and the recording of the poem was awarded a Grammy Award. The Bantam Books edition of Caged Bird was a bestseller for 36 weeks, and they had to reprint , copies of her books to meet demand. Random House , which published Angelou's hardcover books and the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January than they did in all of , marking a 1, percent increase. The book's reception has not been universally positive; for example, author Francine Prose considers its inclusion in the high school curriculum as partly responsible for the "dumbing down" of American society.
Prose calls the book "manipulative melodrama", and considers Angelou's writing style an inferior example of poetic prose in memoir. She accuses Angelou of combining a dozen metaphors in one paragraph and for "obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously". Parents have also objected to the book's use of profanity and to its graphic and violent depiction of rape and racism.
When Caged Bird was published in , Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African-American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Up to that point, Black women writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters. Writer Julian Mayfield, who called Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description", [35] has insisted that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for African-American autobiography as a whole.
Als insisted that Caged Bird marked one of the first times that a Black autobiographer could, as Als put it, "write about blackness from the inside, without apology or defense". America's most visible black woman autobiographer". Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, freed many other women writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world".
Angelou's autobiographies, especially the first volume, have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches to teacher education. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University , has used Caged Bird and Gather Together in My Name when training teachers to appropriately explore racism in their classrooms.
Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony causes readers of Angelou's autobiographies to wonder what she "left out" and to be unsure how to respond to the events Angelou describes. These techniques force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their privileged status in society. Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African-American autobiography and her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".
Educator Daniel Challener, in his book Stories of Resilience in Childhood , analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency in children. Challener states that Angelou's book provides a useful framework for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya face and how a community helps these children succeed as Angelou did.
He has called the book a highly effective tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts. Caged Bird has been criticized by many parents, causing it to be removed from school curricula and library shelves. The book was approved to be taught in public schools and was placed in public school libraries through the U. It has been challenged in fifteen U. Educators have responded to these challenges by removing it from reading lists and libraries, by providing students with alternatives, and by requiring parental permission from students.
Caged Bird appeared third on the American Library Association ALA list of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of —, [] sixth on the ALA's — list, [] and one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms. Angelou and Leonora Thuna wrote the screenplay; the movie was directed by Fielder Cook. Constance Good played young Maya.
Also appearing were actors Esther Rolle , Roger E. Angelou added a scene between Maya and Uncle Willie after the Joe Louis fight; in it, he expresses his feelings of redemption and hope after Louis defeats a white opponent.
In the book, Henry Reed delivers the valedictory speech and leads the Black audience in the Negro national anthem. In the movie, Maya conducts these activities. She'd set the bar high. Her ambition was to write a book that would honor the Black experience and affirm the 'human spirit.
She wrote a coming-of-age story that has become a modern classic". Themes in Maya Angelou's autobiographies. The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of male prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom. It should be clear, however, that this portrayal of rape is hardly titillating or "pornographic.