I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS
MAYA ANGELOU, 1969.
By Clarice Taylor.
Introduction
The majority of us end up living lives barely worthy of one memoir, so when someone not only writes but publishes seven memoirs (feature-length), the author is either extremely pretentious or they have had a pretty damn interesting ride. Fortunately for Maya Angelou (and the reader), the latter is very much the case.
Biography
Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was born in St Louis, Missouri, and rose from near-poverty and very basic education in the racist deep-south during the Depression, to become one of the most important and respected writers and figures of the twentieth century.
With a list of friends, colleagues and peers that rivalled most American presidents, Angelou worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and a few years before her death received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, and has received over fifty honorary degrees in her lifetime.
Angelou notably worked as a poet, journalist, singer, actress, civil and women’s rights activist and screenwriter, but is perhaps most recognised for her career as an author and memoirist. In 1969, when Angelou was penning this first memoir, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing and had seen several important triumphs, including the success of the ‘Brown vs the Board of Education’ case (a long and drawn-out but no less successful court case which ended the black and white segregation in schools across America in 1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 (the first globally-publicised Civil Rights incident started by a female, Rosa Parks), the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which supposedly outlawed discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin, as well as several shocking landmark tragedies, including the Freedom Summer Murders of 1964, which sparked a national outrage and was the basis for the film Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, 1988) and, of course, the assassination of Martin Luther King in the April of 1968.
Outline
In this groundbreaking and one-of-its-kind novel, we see Angelou from her earliest memory, at aged three, being shipped off from the comfort of their laid-back mother and father in Long Beach, California, to their God-fearing disciplinarian grandmother in the small town of Stamps in Arkansas, to then being pulled away again by her mother four years later, and suffering the sexual abuse and ultimate rape by her mother’s partner. This book is not an easy read. It deals with the cruelty and viciousness of early twentieth century southern American racism. A particular scene involves a lynched black man (whom we find out in the second memoir has had his genitals hacked off) who is pulled from a pond, bloated and decaying, and is ‘jokingly’ placed by the white sheriff and his posse in the local jail with the local black inmates, simply for the amusement of the distress at having the stinking body of one of their possible friend/family member’s thrown in with them.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is tactful yet honest, with Angelou’s memory being immaculate. The first chapter opens with an embarrassing incident in church as a small child, asserting the reader that the what’s to come will be a truthful, objective and in some ways, derogatory.
The book is a modest account of how an individual trapped in a period of oppression with two physical attributes (race and gender) that automatically exempt her as a worthy candidate for anything but being a mother and/or a maid, and with other obstacles (limited education, brutal trauma, financial and family insecurity…
To be continued.
clarataylor 