Maya Angelou

5 Key excerpts on "Maya Angelou"

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  Icons of African American Literature

  The Black Literary World

  • Yolanda Williams Page(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Maya Angelou Maya Angelou is one of the premier U.S. poets of the 20th century. (National Archives) 2 Icons of African American Literature “I will not allow anybody to minimize my life, not anybody, not a living soul—nobody, no lover, no mother, no son, no boss, no President, nobody” (119). These words spoken by Maya Angelou (1928–) to writer Judith Pat- terson during an interview in the September 1982 issue of Vogue provide the unofficial thesis for the writer’s entire career. Heralded as one of the great contemporary writers of African American and women’s literatures, through- out her life and career, Angelou has done it all. In a life that has spanned eight decades and several continents, she has been a singer, dancer, actress, direc- tor, the first black female railcar conductor in San Francisco, and part-time madam. The vast majority of what readers know about Angelou stems from her six-volume autobiography that spans the nearly 40 years of her life, from the day she boarded the train for Stamps, Arkansas, to the day she wrote the first line of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Angelou has turned the modern autobiography into an art form. She accepted the challenge of friends who encouraged her to write about her life. She set out, determined to bring liter- ary value to the autobiography. She has done so by masterfully using language and speech to articulate identity. Angelou’s iconic significance comes from her extraordinary ability to tell her story as a black woman in America in a fash- ion that validates the experiences of those like her. However, Angelou’s writ- ings transcend race, sex, and class and simply speak to the human condition, making her a favorite among scholars and everyday readers. Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou was the second child born to Vivian Baxter Johnson and her husband Bailey Johnson Sr. Angelou adored and idolized her brother Bailey Jr., who was only a year older than she.

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  Maya Angelou

  The Iconic Self

  • Mary Jane Lupton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 1

  The Life and Works of Maya Angelou

  Maya Angelou: The Iconic Self examines the six autobiographical volumes of noted African American writer Maya Angelou. Although all of these volumes are distinct in style and narration, they are unified through a number of repeated themes and through the developing character of the narrator. In their scope they stretch over time and place, from Arkansas to Africa to California to New York City, from confused child to accomplished adult. With so expansive a project, Angelou is required to de-emphasize the standard autobiographical concern for the individual and to focus on her interaction with others: with the jazz singer Billie Holiday; with the actor Godfrey Cambridge; with the African American community in Ghana; with the writer James Baldwin; with the world leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

  Maya Angelou, in having created these six autobiographies, has assured herself a prominent place in American literature. She has expanded the scope of the typical one-volume book about the self, creating a slightly fictionalized saga that covers the years 1931 to 1968—from the years of the Great Depression to the days following the death of Martin Luther King. She guides the reader through almost 40 years of American and African American history, revealed through the point of view of a strong and affectionate black woman. By opening up the edges of her narrative, Maya Angelou, like no one before her, transcends the autobiographical tradition, enriching it with contemporary experience and female sensibility.

  Information about Angelou’s abundant life has been recorded in numerous interviews, journals, yearbooks, prefaces, and appendices. At times there are errors or inconsistencies among these sources—the date of her first marriage, the names of awards received, the titles of plays directed, and other details. These inconsistencies arise possibly because Angelou, in her interviews, speaks eloquently but informally about her past, with no time chart in front of her, and possibly because her interviewers are so taken by her presence that they lose sight of the smaller details. The bulk of the facts presented in this chapter derive from the sources listed in the bibliography, under the category Biographical Sources. The remaining material is taken either from Angelou’s published writings or from my interview with her in June 1997.

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  Maya Angelou (Revised and Updated Edition)

  Adventurous Spirit

  • Linda Wagner-Martin(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. They also make clear that the poetry of Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove is universally significant because it collectively “shows the courage, strength, and resourcefulness” of black women through history.) (Hine 294, 4). As Sandi Russell said about Angelou’s oeuvre, her books “resonate with the love, wit, energy and spirit of an indomitable woman” (Russell 150). As Wallis Tinnie had said, Angelou “has become the people’s poet and world cultural griot (keeper of the story to be passed on).” She has also become “a national matriarch who speaks to the world with a depth of wisdom” that this critic equates with the powerful writing of Twain, Faulkner, and Hurston. There is a unifying spirit in Maya Angelou’s writing: “For Angelou, everyone is ‘We’” (Tinnie 524).

  In the words of the Governor of North Carolina, in June 2014, “Maya Angelou was a poet, civil rights activist, dancer, film and television producer, playwright, actress and professor; she may be best known for her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings  . . . [she was] a ‘Phenomenal’ woman who touched many individuals through her writing, performance and teaching: she leaves a legacy of hope, determination and belief in oneself and abilities despite circumstances” (Resolution, Pat McCrory, Governor).

  The fact that editors throughout the twenty-first century have continued to clamor for Maya Angelou to write an essay, or a letter, or a poem that they might include in their books adds urgency to the writer’s still-evolving reputation, a reputation that combines name recognition with unqualified respect in a fusion so superior to that of most living writers as to be of a different ilk. Maya Angelou appears, with a cadre of nonliterary figures, in Voice of America, Interviews with Eight American Women of Achievement

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  Black Internationalist Feminism

  Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995

  • Cheryl Higashida(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • University of Illinois Press

    (Publisher)

  6 Reading Maya Angelou, Reading Black Internationalist Feminism Today

  In reflecting on the relevance of African American women writers of the postwar anticolonial Left today, it is useful to look closely at the work of Maya Angelou. Not only has she attained the most mainstream visibility and commercial success of all the women affiliated with the African American Left, but her Black internationalist feminist autobiography, The Heart of a Woman (1981), has become part of U.S. mass culture. Although this attests to the co-optation of radicalism, Angelou’s autobiographical series (composed of five other volumes) should also be examined as a site of contestation over national identity, race, and the goals of feminist and queer critiqued.1 For as I will argue, these texts reproduce competing claims of postcolonial citizenship versus multicultural nationalism and of Black internationalist versus liberal feminism. The fact that these oppositional narratives exist within a body of work that has so visibly shored up hegemonic Americanism indicates the residual influence of postwar Black internationalist feminism and its salience to the challenges twenty-first-century race radicals face.2

  The Heart of a Woman, the fourth volume of Angelou’s autobiographical series, was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club in 1997. This was in many ways a logical choice. The woman-centered topics that often recur in the books Oprah selects—paralleling the topics that frequently appear on her shows—include “love, motherhood, friendship, self-discovery, overcoming adversity, negotiating difference, surviving.”3 While some of the books she selects are socially engaged, their relevance is generally framed by a focus on the individual rather than the collective, on interpersonal rather than structural sources of oppression. Oprah’s books are not politically revolutionary: it is unimaginable that we would find among them the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, or Elaine Brown, much less that these women would host a televised pajama party in their homes for Oprah’s viewers to discuss their books, as Angelou did. By contrast, Angelou’s life story, pivoting around “the joys and burdens of a black mother in America,” was prime material for the liberal feminism of a show “focuse[d] on identity and self-help,” one that “discourage[d] broader social critique or efforts at political change.”4

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  Black American Women's Writings

  • Eva Lennox Birch(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  5 Maya Angelou (b. 1928) Autobiography: The creation of a positive black female self DOI: 10.4324/9781315504094-5

  When Claudia Tate asked Angelou if her writings are novels or autobiographies, the emphatic reply was ‘autobiography’.

  1

  Implicit in this definition is recognition of a clear generic difference between the novel and autobiography: the former is a fiction in which the author employs narrative techniques to disguise authorial control, the latter where the author is subject. Nevertheless, it is a nonsense to assume that autobiographical writing is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, nor should the reader expect it to be. Not only does memory play us all false, but autobiography is an intensely subjective reconstruction of past events and past selves, wherein the desire to be honest is mitigated by the desire to protect the self. Image protection involves the autobiographer in a process of selection and retrospective ordering of a past experience in which the adult offers a reconstruction of that remembered self. As such it gives the reader an image of the author’s self which is self-reflective, the eye is the ‘I’. When the adult Angelou tries to reconstruct the self who had been raped as a child, she insists ‘But that happened … ‘. She is aware that the process of memory is a constant re-creation of experience in which disguise and distortion are protective strategies: a process which is enlarged in any sustained autobiographical restructuring of the author’s past. Angelou’s is truly life-writing, in that it is ongoing and, as yet, after five volumes, unfinished. These autobiographical volumes are an instance of a propitious historical conjuncture in the 1970s. Stephanie M. Demetrakspoulos, in Jelinek’s Women’s Autobiography in America: Essays in Criticism,

  2

  points the connection:

  Certain kinds of autobiographies have flourished and clustered around specific historical events. The large number of American female autobiographies recently published can be connected to a new self-consciousness in women, attributable to the latest feminist movement, which centres in the United States. (p. 181)

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