© by owner.
The title and inspiration for this poem came from a line in Paul Dunbar's poem "Sympathy"
http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/11717-Paul-Laurence-Dunbar-Sympathy .
It was also the title of the first volume of Dr. Angelou's autobiography published in 1969.
| Maya Angelou |
|---|
Angelou reciting her poem "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, January 1993
|
| Born |
Marguerite Annie Johnson
April 4, 1928
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
| Died |
May 28, 2014 (aged 86)
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, U.S. |
| Occupation |
Poet, civil rights activist, dancer, film producer, television producer, playwright, film director, author, actress, professor |
| Language |
English |
| Ethnicity |
African American |
| Period |
1969–2014 |
| Genre |
Autobiography |
| Notable works |
|
| Spouse |
- Tosh Angelos (1951–54, div.)
- Paul du Feu (1973–81, div.)
|
| Website |
| www.mayaangelou.com |
Maya Angelou (
i;
[1][2] born
Marguerite Annie Johnson;
April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014) was an American author, poet, dancer,
actress, and singer.
She published seven autobiographies, three books of
essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of
plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years.
She received
dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees.
[3]
Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which
focus on her childhood and early adult experiences.
The first,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
She became a poet and writer after a series of occupations as a young
adult, including fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer and performer,
cast member of the opera
Porgy and Bess, coordinator for the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and journalist in
Egypt and
Ghana during the
decolonization of Africa.
She was an actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and
public television programs.
In 1982, she earned the first lifetime
Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at
Wake Forest University in
Winston-Salem,
North Carolina.
She was active in the
Civil Rights movement, and worked with
Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Malcolm X.
Beginning in the 1990s, she made around 80 appearances a year on the
lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties.
In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "
On the Pulse of Morning" (1993) at President
Bill Clinton's inauguration, making her the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since
Robert Frost at President
John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.
With the publication of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,
Angelou publicly discussed aspects of her personal life.
She was
respected as a spokesperson for black people and women, and her works
have been considered a defense of Black culture.
Attempts have been made
to ban her books from some U.S. libraries, but her works are widely
used in schools and universities worldwide.
Angelou's major works have
been labeled as
autobiographical fiction,
but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies.
She made a
deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the
autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.
Her
books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel.
Life and career
Early years
Marguerite Annie Johnson
[4] was born in
St. Louis, Missouri,
on April 4, 1928, the second child of Bailey Johnson, a doorman and
navy dietitian, and Vivian (Baxter) Johnson, a nurse and card dealer.
[5][note 1]
Angelou's older brother, Bailey Jr., nicknamed Marguerite "Maya", derived from "My" or "Mya Sister".
[6]
When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage"
[7] ended, and their father sent them to
Stamps, Arkansas, alone by train, to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson.
In "an astonishing exception"
[8] to the harsh economics of African Americans of the time, Angelou's grandmother prospered financially during the
Great Depression and
World War II because the
general store she owned sold needed basic commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments".
[5][note 2]
Reviewer John McWhorter, The New Republic (McWhorter, p. 36)
To know her life story is to simultaneously wonder what on earth you
have been doing with your own life and feel glad that you didn't have to
go through half the things she has.
Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning"
[11]
and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis.
At the age of
eight, while living with her mother, Angelou was sexually abused and
raped by her mother's boyfriend, a man named Freeman.
She told her
brother, who told the rest of their family.
Freeman was found guilty but
was jailed for only one day.
Four days after his release, he was
murdered, probably by Angelou's uncles.
[12]
Angelou became mute for almost five years,
[13]
believing, as she stated, "I thought, my voice killed him; I killed
that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never
speak again, because my voice would kill anyone ..."
[14]
According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a
biography about Angelou, it was during this period of silence when
Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and
literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her.
[15]
Shortly after Freeman's murder, Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother.
[16]
Angelou credits a teacher and friend of her family, Mrs. Bertha
Flowers, with helping her speak again.
Flowers introduced her to authors
such as
Charles Dickens,
William Shakespeare,
Edgar Allan Poe,
Douglas Johnson, and
James Weldon Johnson, authors who would affect her life and career, as well as black female artists like
Frances Harper,
Anne Spencer, and
Jessie Fauset.
[17][18][19]
When Angelou was 14, she and her brother moved in with their mother once again, who had since moved to
Oakland, California.
During World War II, Angelou attended the
California Labor School.
Before graduating, she worked as the first black female
streetcar conductor in San Francisco.
[20]
Three weeks after completing school, at the age of 17, she gave birth
to her son, Clyde (who later changed his name to Guy Johnson).
[21][22]
Adulthood and early career: 1951–61
Angelou's first album, Miss Calypso, produced in 1957, was made possible by the popularity of her nightclub act.
In 1951, Angelou married
Greek
electrician, former sailor, and aspiring musician Tosh Angelos, despite
the condemnation of interracial relationships at the time and the
disapproval of her mother.
[23][24][note 3]
She took modern dance classes during this time, and met dancers and choreographers
Alvin Ailey and Ruth Beckford. Angelou and Ailey formed a dance team, calling themselves "Al and Rita", and performed
modern dance at fraternal black organizations throughout San Francisco, but never became successful.
[26]
Angelou, her new husband, and her son moved to
New York City so she could study
African dance with Trinidadian dancer
Pearl Primus, but they returned to San Francisco a year later.
[27]
After Angelou's marriage ended in 1954, she danced professionally in clubs around San Francisco, including the nightclub
the Purple Onion, where she sang and danced to
calypso music.
[28]
Up to that point she went by the name of "Marguerite Johnson", or
"Rita", but at the strong suggestion of her managers and supporters at
the Purple Onion she changed her professional name to "Maya Angelou", a
"distinctive name"
[29] that set her apart and captured the feel of her
calypso dance performances.
During 1954 and 1955, Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera
Porgy and Bess.
She began her practice of learning the language of every country she
visited, and in a few years she gained proficiency in several languages.
[30]
In 1957, riding on the popularity of calypso, Angelou recorded her first album,
Miss Calypso, which was reissued as a CD in 1996.
[26][31][32]
She appeared in an off-Broadway review that inspired the 1957 film
Calypso Heat Wave, in which Angelou sang and performed her own compositions.
[31][note 4][note 5]
Angelou met novelist
John Oliver Killens in 1959 and, at his urging, moved to New York to concentrate on her writing career. She joined the
Harlem Writers Guild, where she met several major African-American authors, including
John Henrik Clarke,
Rosa Guy,
Paule Marshall, and
Julian Mayfield, and was published for the first time.
[34]
In 1960, after meeting civil rights leader
Martin Luther King, Jr. and hearing him speak, she and Killens organized "the legendary"
[35] Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC), and she was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator.
According to
scholar Lyman B. Hagen, her contributions to civil rights as a
fundraiser and SCLC organizer were successful and "eminently effective".
[36]
Angelou also began her pro-
Castro and anti-
apartheid activism during this time.
[37]
Africa to Caged Bird: 1961–69
Most of Angelou's time in Africa was spent in
Accra, Ghana, shown here in 2008.
In 1961, Angelou performed in
Jean Genet's play
The Blacks, along with
Abbey Lincoln,
Roscoe Lee Brown,
James Earl Jones,
Louis Gossett,
Godfrey Cambridge, and
Cicely Tyson.
[38]
Also in 1961, she met South African freedom fighter
Vusumzi Make; they never officially married.
[39]
She and her son Guy moved with Make to
Cairo, where Angelou worked as an associate editor at the weekly English-language newspaper
The Arab Observer.
[40][41]
In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to
Accra, Ghana, he to attend college, but he was seriously injured in an automobile accident.
[note 6]
Angelou remained in Accra for his recovery and ended up staying there until 1965. She became an administrator at the
University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community.
[43]
She was a feature editor for
The African Review,
[44] a freelance writer for the
Ghanaian Times, wrote and broadcast for
Radio Ghana, and worked and performed for Ghana's National Theatre. She performed in a revival of
The Blacks in Geneva and Berlin.
[45]
In Accra, she became close friends with
Malcolm X during his visit in the early 1960s.
[note 7]
Angelou returned to the U.S. in 1965 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the
Organization of Afro-American Unity;
he was assassinated shortly afterward.
Devastated and adrift, she
joined her brother in Hawaii, where she resumed her singing career, and
then moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career.
She
worked as a market researcher in
Watts and witnessed the
riots in the summer of 1965.
She acted in and wrote plays, and returned to New York in 1967.
She met her lifelong friend
Rosa Guy and renewed her friendship with
James Baldwin, whom she had met in Paris in the 1950s and called "my brother", during this time.
[47]
Her friend
Jerry Purcell provided Angelou with a stipend to support her writing.
[48]
Angelou's friend
James Baldwin was instrumental in the publication of her first autobiography.
In 1968,
Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Angelou to organize a march. She agreed, but "postpones again",
[35] and in what Gillespie calls "a macabre twist of fate",
[49] he was assassinated on her 40th birthday (April 4).
[note 8]
Devastated again, she was encouraged out of her depression by her
friend James Baldwin. As Gillespie states, "If 1968 was a year of great
pain, loss, and sadness, it was also the year when America first
witnessed the breadth and depth of Maya Angelou's spirit and creative
genius".
[49]
Despite having almost no experience, she wrote, produced, and narrated
Blacks, Blues, Black!,
[51] a ten-part series of documentaries about the connection between
blues music and black Americans' African heritage, and what Angelou called the "Africanisms still current in the U.S."
[52] for
National Educational Television, the precursor of
PBS.
Also in 1968, inspired at a dinner party she attended with Baldwin, cartoonist
Jules Feiffer, and his wife Judy, and challenged by
Random House editor
Robert Loomis, she wrote her first autobiography,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969, which brought her international recognition and acclaim.
[53]
Later career
Angelou's
Georgia, Georgia, produced by a Swedish film company and filmed in Sweden, the first screenplay written by a black woman,
[54]
was released in 1972.
She also wrote the film's soundtrack, despite
having very little additional input in the filming of the movie.
[55][note 9]
Angelou married
Welsh carpenter and ex-husband of
Germaine Greer, Paul du Feu, in San Francisco in 1973.
[note 10]
Over the next ten years, as Gillespie has stated, "She [Angelou] had
accomplished more than many artists hope to achieve in a lifetime".
[57]
Angelou worked as a composer, writing for singer
Roberta Flack,
[note 11]
and composing movie scores. She wrote articles, short stories, TV
scripts, documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry, produced plays, and
was named visiting professor at several colleges and universities.
She
was "a reluctant actor",
[59] and was nominated for a
Tony Award in 1973 for her role in
Look Away.
[60]
As a theater director, in 1988 she undertook a revival of
Errol John's play
Moon on a Rainbow Shawl at the
Almeida Theatre in
London.
[61]
In 1977, Angelou appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series
Roots.
She was given a multitude of
awards during this period, including over thirty honorary degrees from colleges and universities from all over the world.
[60]
In the late 1970s, Angelou met
Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a
TV anchor in Baltimore, Maryland; Angelou would later become Winfrey's close friend and mentor.
[62][note 12]
In 1981, Angelou and du Feu divorced. She returned to the southern
United States in 1981 because she felt she had to come to terms with her
past there, and despite having no bachelor's degree, accepted the
lifetime Reynolds Professorship of
American Studies at
Wake Forest University in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she was one of only a few full-time professors.
[64][65]
From that point on, she considered herself "a teacher who writes".
[66]
Angelou taught a variety of subjects that reflected her interests,
including philosophy, ethics, theology, science, theater, and writing.
[67]
The Winston-Salem Journal
reported that even though she made many friends on campus, "she never
quite lived down all of the criticism from people who thought she was
more of a celebrity than an intellect...[and] an overpaid figurehead".
[65]
The last course she taught at Wake Forest was in 2011, but she was
planning to teach another course in late 2014.
Her final speaking
engagement at the university was in late 2013.
[68]
Beginning in the 1990s, Angelou actively participated in the lecture circuit
[69] in a customized tour bus, something she continued into her eighties.
[70][71]
Maya Angelou speaking at a rally for Barack Obama, 2008
In 1993, Angelou recited her poem "
On the Pulse of Morning" at the inauguration of President
Bill Clinton, becoming the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since
Robert Frost at President
John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961.
[69]
Her recitation resulted in more fame and recognition for her previous
works, and broadened her appeal "across racial, economic, and
educational boundaries".
[72] The recording of the poem won a
Grammy Award.
[73]
In June 1995, she delivered what
Richard Long called her "second 'public' poem",
[74] entitled "
A Brave and Startling Truth", which commemorated the 50th anniversary of the
United Nations.
Angelou achieved her goal of directing a feature film in 1996,
Down in the Delta, which featured actors such as
Alfre Woodard and
Wesley Snipes.
[75]
Also in 1996, she collaborated with
R&B artists
Ashford & Simpson on seven of the eleven tracks of their album
Been Found. The album was responsible for three of Angelou's only
Billboard chart appearances.
[76]
In 2000, she created a successful collection of products for
Hallmark, including
greeting cards and decorative household items.
[77][78]
She responded to critics who charged her with being too commercial by
stating that "the enterprise was perfectly in keeping with her role as
'the people's poet'".
[79]
Over thirty years after Angelou began writing her life story, she completed her sixth autobiography
A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in 2002.
[80]
Angelou campaigned for the
Democratic Party in the 2008 presidential primaries, giving her public support to Senator
Hillary Clinton.
[50]
In the run-up to the
January Democratic primary in South Carolina, the Clinton campaign ran ads featuring Angelou's endorsement.
[81]
The ads were part of the campaign's efforts to rally support in the Black community;
[82] but Obama won the South Carolina primary, finishing 29 points ahead of Clinton and taking 80% of the Black vote.
[83]
When Clinton's campaign ended, Angelou put her support behind Senator
Barack Obama,
[50] who went on to win
the election
and become the first African-American president of the United States.
She stated, "We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and
sexism."
[84]
In late 2010, Angelou donated her personal papers and career memorabilia to the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in
Harlem.
[85]
They consisted of over 340 boxes of documents that featured her handwritten notes on yellow legal pads for
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a 1982 telegram from
Coretta Scott King, fan mail, and personal and professional correspondence from colleagues such as her editor Robert Loomis.
[86]
In 2011, Angelou served as a consultant for the
Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial
in Washington, D.C. She spoke out in opposition to a paraphrase of a
quotation by King that appeared on the memorial, saying,
“The quote
makes
Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit",
[87]
and demanded that it be changed. Eventually, the paraphrase was removed.
[88]
In 2013, at the age of 85, Angelou published the seventh autobiography in her series, titled
Mom & Me & Mom, that focuses on her relationship with her mother.
[89]
Personal life
I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.
I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I
suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of
my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and
over my face.
Nothing so frightens me as writing, but nothing so satisfies me. It's
like a swimmer in the [English] Channel: you face the stingrays and
waves and cold and grease, and finally you reach the other shore, and
you put your foot on the ground—Aaaahhhh!
Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from the
Mende people of West Africa.
[93][note 13]
A 2008
PBS documentary found that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the
Civil War,
became pregnant by her white former owner, John Savin.
Savin forced Lee
to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father of
her child.
After Savin was indicted for forcing Lee to commit perjury,
and despite the discovery that Savin was the father, a jury found him
not guilty.
Lee was sent to the Clinton County
poorhouse in
Missouri
with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother.
Angelou described Lee as "that poor little Black girl, physically and
mentally bruised."
[95]
The details of Angelou's life described in her seven autobiographies
and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles tended to be
inconsistent.
Critic Mary Jane Lupton has explained that when Angelou
spoke about her life, she did so eloquently but informally and "with no
time chart in front of her".
[96]
For example, she was married at least twice, but never clarified the
number of times she had been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous";
[70]
according to her autobiographies and to Gillespie, she married Tosh
Angelos in 1951 and Paul du Feu in 1973, and began her relationship with
Vusumzi Make in 1961, but never formally married him.
Angelou had one
son Guy, whose birth was described in her first autobiography, one
grandson, and two great-grandchildren,
[97] and according to Gillespie, a large group of friends and extended family.
[note 14]
Angelou's mother Vivian Baxter died in 1991 and her brother Bailey
Johnson, Jr., died in 2000 after a series of strokes; both were
important figures in her life and her books.
[98][note 15]
In 1981, the mother of her son Guy's child disappeared with Angelou's grandson; it took four years to find him.
[99][note 16]
In 2009, the gossip website
TMZ
erroneously reported that Angelou had been hospitalized in Los Angeles
when she was alive and well in St. Louis, which resulted in rumors of
her death and according to Angelou, concern among her friends and family
worldwide.
[10]
She did not earn a university degree, but according to Gillespie it
was Angelou's preference that she be called "Dr. Angelou" by people
outside of her family and close friends.
She owned two homes in
Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a "lordly brownstone"
[101] in
Harlem, which was purchased in 2004
[102] and was full of her "growing library"
[103]
of books she collected throughout her life, artwork collected over the
span of many decades, and well-stocked kitchens.
Younge reported that in
her Harlem home resides several African wall hangings and Angelou's
collection of paintings, including ones of several jazz trumpeters, a
watercolor of
Rosa Parks, and a
Faith Ringgold work entitled "Maya's Quilt Of Life".
[101]
According to Gillespie, she hosted several celebrations per year at her
main residence in Winston-Salem; "her skill in the kitchen is the stuff
of legend—from haute cuisine to down-home comfort food".
[71]
The Winston-Salem Journal stated, "Securing an invitation to one of Angelou’s
Thanksgiving dinners,
Christmas tree decorating parties or birthday parties was among the most coveted invitations in town".
[65]
The New York Times, describing Angelou's residence history in New York City, stated that she regularly hosted elaborate New Year's Day parties.
[102]
She combined her cooking and writing skills in her 2004 book
Hallelujah! The Welcome Table, which featured 73 recipes, many of which she learned from her grandmother and mother, accompanied by 28 vignettes.
[104]
She followed up with her second cookbook,
Great Food, All Day Long: Cook Splendidly, Eat Smart in 2010, which focused on weight loss and portion control.
[105]
Beginning with
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same "writing ritual"
[19]
for many years.
She would wake early in the morning and check into a
hotel room, where the staff was instructed to remove any pictures from
the walls.
She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed, with
only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play
solitaire,
Roget's Thesaurus,
and the Bible, and would leave by the early afternoon.
She would
average 10–12 pages of written material a day, which she edited down to
three or four pages in the evening.
[106][note 17]
Angelou went through this process to "enchant" herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the
British Broadcasting Corporation, "relive the agony, the anguish, the
Sturm und Drang."
[108]
She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences like her rape in
Caged Bird, in order to "tell the human truth"
[108]
about her life.
Angelou stated that she played cards in order to get to
that place of enchantment and in order to access her memories more
effectively.
She stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once
I'm in it—ha! It's so delicious!"
[108]
She did not find the process cathartic; rather, she found relief in "telling the truth".
[108]
Death
Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014.
[109]
She was found by her nurse. Although Angelou had reportedly been in
poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was
working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with
national and world leaders.
[65][79]
During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son Guy
Johnson stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing
career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten
years of her life.
He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of
acuity and no loss in comprehension".
[110]
Tributes to Angelou and condolences were paid by artists,
entertainers, and world leaders, including President Bill Clinton, and
President Barack Obama, whose sister was named after Angelou.
[79][111]
Harold Augenbraum, from the
National Book Foundation, said that Angelou's "legacy is one that all writers and readers across the world can admire and aspire to."
[112]
The week after Angelou's death,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings rose to #1 on
Amazon.com's bestseller list.
[79]
On May 29, 2014, Mount Zion Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, of which
Angelou was a member for 30 years, held a public memorial service to
honor Angelou.
[113]
On June 7, a private memorial service was held at
Wait Chapel
on the campus of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem.
The memorial
was shown live on local stations in the Winston-Salem/Triad area and
streamed live on the university web site with speeches from her son,
Oprah Winfrey,
Michelle Obama, and Bill Clinton.
[114][115][116][117]
On June 15, a memorial was held at
Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, where Angelou was a member for many years. Rev.
Cecil Williams, Mayor
Ed Lee, and former mayor
Willie Brown spoke.
[118]
In 2015 a
United States Postal Service stamp was issued commemorating Maya Angelou with the
Joan Walsh Anglund
quote "A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because
it has a song", though the stamp mistakenly attributes the quote to
Angelou.
[119][120]
The quote is from Anglund's book of poems
A Cup of Sun (1967).
[119]
Works
Angelou wrote a total of seven autobiographies. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou's third autobiography
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas marked the first time a well-known African-American autobiographer had written a third volume about her life.
[121]
Her books "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and
back to the U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World War II to
the assassination of
Martin Luther King, Jr.[122]
She published her seventh autobiography
Mom & Me & Mom in 2013, at the age of 85.
[123]
Critics have tended to judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first",
[124] with
Caged Bird receiving the highest praise.
Angelou wrote five collections of essays, which writer
Hilton Als called her "wisdom books" and "homilies strung together with autobiographical texts".
[35]
Angelou used the same editor throughout her writing career,
Robert Loomis, an executive editor at
Random House; he retired in 2011
[125] and has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors."
[126]
Angelou said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers".
[127]
All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just
bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While
one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.
Angelou's long and extensive career also included poetry, plays,
screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public
speaking.
She was a prolific writer of poetry; her volume
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the
Pulitzer Prize, and she was chosen by President Bill Clinton to recite her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" during his inauguration in 1993.
[69][129]
Angelou's successful acting career included roles in numerous plays,
films, and television programs, including her appearance in the
television mini-series
Roots in 1977.
Her screenplay,
Georgia, Georgia
(1972), was the first original script by a black woman to be produced
and she was the first African-American woman to direct a major motion
picture,
Down in the Delta, in 1998.
[75]
Chronology of autobiographies
Reception and legacy
Influence
When
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published in 1969,
Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first
African-American women who were able to publicly discuss their personal
lives.
According to scholar Hilton Als, up to that point, black female
writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present
themselves as central characters in the literature they wrote.
[35]
Scholar
John McWhorter
agreed, seeing Angelou's works, which he called "tracts", as
"apologetic writing".
He placed Angelou in the tradition of
African-American literature as a defense of black culture, which he
called "a literary manifestation of the imperative that reigned in the
black scholarship of the period".
[130]
Writer Julian Mayfield, who called
Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description",
[35]
argued that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent for not only
other black women writers, but also African-American autobiography as a
whole.
Als said that
Caged Bird marked one of the first times
that a black autobiographer could, as he put it, "write about blackness
from the inside, without apology or defense".
[35]
Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou became recognized and
highly respected as a spokesperson for blacks and women.
[131]
It made her "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer",
[131] and "a major autobiographical voice of the time".
[132]
As writer
Gary Younge said, "Probably more than almost any other writer alive, Angelou's life literally is her work."
[70]
Als said that
Caged Bird helped increase black
feminist writings in the 1970s, less through its originality than "its resonance in the prevailing
Zeitgeist",
[35] or the time in which it was written, at the end of the American
Civil Rights movement.
Als also claimed that Angelou's writings, more interested in
self-revelation than in politics or feminism, have freed other female
writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world".
[35]
Angelou critic Joanne M. Braxton stated that
Caged Bird was "perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing" autobiography written by an African-American woman in its era.
[131]
Angelou's poetry has influenced the modern
hip-hop music community, including artists such as
Kanye West,
Common,
Tupac Shakur, and
Nicki Minaj.
[133]
Critical reception
Reviewer
Elsie B. Washington,
most likely due to President Clinton's choice of Angelou to recite her
poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at his 1993 inauguration, called her "the
black woman's poet laureate".
[134]
Sales of the paperback version of her books and poetry rose by 300–600% the week after Angelou's recitation.
Random House,
which published the poem later that year, had to reprint 400,000 copies
of all her books to keep up with the demand.
They sold more of her
books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, accounting for a
1200% increase.
[135]
Angelou famously said, in response to criticism regarding using the details of her life in her work, "I agree with
Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'".
[70]
Younge, speaking after the publication of Angelou's third book of essays,
Letter to My Daughter
(2008), has said, "For the last couple of decades she has merged her
various talents into a kind of performance art—issuing a message of
personal and social uplift by blending poetry, song and conversation".
[101]
Angelou's books, especially
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, have been criticized by many parents, causing their removal from school curricula and library shelves.
According to the
National Coalition Against Censorship, parents and schools have objected to
Caged Bird's depictions of lesbianism, premarital cohabitation, pornography, and violence.
[136]
Some have been critical of the book's sexually explicit scenes, use of language, and irreverent religious depictions.
[137]
Caged Bird appeared third on the
American Library Association (ALA) list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 and sixth on the ALA's 2000–2009 list.
[138][139]
Awards and honors
Angelou was honored by universities, literary organizations,
government agencies, and special interest groups.
Her honors included a
Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book of poetry,
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie,[129] a
Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play
Look Away, and three
Grammys for her spoken word albums.
[140][141]
She served on two presidential committees,
[124][142] and was awarded the
Spingarn Medal in 1994,
[143] the
National Medal of Arts in 2000,
[144] and the
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
[145]
Angelou was awarded over fifty honorary degrees.
[3]
Uses in education
Angelou's autobiographies have been used in
narrative and multicultural approaches in
teacher education.
Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at
George Washington University, has trained teachers how to "talk about race" in their classrooms with
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and
Gather Together in My Name.
According to Glazier, Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery,
humor, and irony have left readers of Angelou's autobiographies unsure
of what she left out and how they should respond to the events she
described.
Angelou's depictions of her experiences of racism have forced
white readers to explore their feelings about race and their own
"privileged status".
Glazier found that critics have focused on where
Angelou fits within the genre of African-American autobiography and on
her
literary techniques,
but readers have tended to react to her storytelling with "surprise,
particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about
the genre of autobiography".
[146]
Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book
Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in
Caged Bird
to illustrate resiliency in children.
Challener argued that Angelou's
book has provided a "useful framework" for exploring the obstacles many
children like Maya have faced and how their communities have helped them
succeed.
[147]
Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has reported using
Caged Bird to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of
child development
topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego
resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting
styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive
development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence.
He found
Caged Bird a "highly effective" tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.
[148]
Poetry
Angelou is best known for her seven autobiographies, but she was also
a prolific and successful poet. She was called "the black woman's poet
laureate", and her poems have been called the anthems of African
Americans.
[134]
Angelou studied and began writing poetry at a young age, and used
poetry and other great literature to cope with her rape as a young girl,
as described in
Caged Bird.
[17]
According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, literature also affected
Angelou's sensibilities as the poet and writer she became, especially
the "liberating discourse that would evolve in her own poetic canon".
[149]
Many critics consider Angelou's autobiographies more important than her poetry.
[150]
Although all her books have been best-sellers, her poetry has not been
perceived to be as serious as her prose and has been understudied.
[5]
Her poems were more interesting when she recited and performed them,
and many critics emphasized the public aspect of her poetry.
[151]
Angelou's lack of critical acclaim has been attributed to both the
public nature of many of her poems and to Angelou's popular success, and
to critics' preferences for poetry as a written form rather than a
verbal, performed one.
[152]
Zofia Burr has countered Angelou's critics by condemning them for not
taking into account Angelou's larger purposes in her writing: "to be
representative rather than individual, authoritative rather than
confessional".
[153]
Style and genre in autobiographies
Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue,
characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language
has often resulted in the placement of her books into the genre of
autobiographical fiction.
[154]
Angelou made a deliberate attempt in her books to challenge the common
structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding
the genre.
[155]
Scholar Mary Jane Lupton argues that all of Angelou's autobiographies
conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single
author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character,
technique, and theme.
[156]
Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books;
Lupton agrees, stating that Angelou tended to "diverge from the
conventional notion of autobiography as truth",
[157] which parallels the conventions of much of African-American autobiography written during the
abolitionist
period of U.S. history, when as both Lupton and African-American
scholar Crispin Sartwell put it, the truth was censored out of the need
for self-protection.
[157][158]
Scholar Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of
African-American autobiography, but claims that Angelou created a unique
interpretation of the autobiographical form.
[159]
According to African-American literature scholar Pierre A. Walker,
the challenge for much of the history of African-American literature was
that its authors have had to confirm its status as literature before
they could accomplish their political goals, which was why Angelou's
editor
Robert Loomis was able to dare her into writing
Caged Bird by challenging her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art".
[160]
Angelou acknowledged that she followed the slave narrative tradition of
"speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person
plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".
[124]
Scholar John McWhorter calls Angelou's books "tracts"
[130]
that defend African-American culture and fight negative stereotypes.
According to McWhorter, Angelou structured her books, which to him seem
to be written more for children than for adults, to support her defense
of black culture.
McWhorter sees Angelou as she depicts herself in her
autobiographies "as a kind of stand-in figure for the black American in
Troubled Times".
[130]
McWhorter views Angelou's works as dated, but recognizes that "she has
helped to pave the way for contemporary black writers who are able to
enjoy the luxury of being merely individuals, no longer representatives
of the race, only themselves".
[161]
Scholar Lynn Z. Bloom compares Angelou's works to the writings of
Frederick Douglass, stating that both fulfilled the same purpose: to describe black culture and to interpret it for their wider, white audiences.
[162]
According to scholar Sondra O'Neale, Angelou's poetry can be placed
within the African-American oral tradition, and her prose "follows
classic technique in nonpoetic Western forms".
[163]
O'Neale states that Angelou avoided using a "monolithic black language",
[164] and accomplished, through direct dialogue, what O'Neale calls a "more expected ghetto expressiveness".
[164]
McWhorter finds both the language Angelou used in her autobiographies
and the people she depicted unrealistic, resulting in a separation
between her and her audience.
As McWhorter states, "I have never read
autobiographical writing where I had such a hard time summoning a sense
of how the subject talks, or a sense of who the subject really is".
[165]
McWhorter asserts, for example, that key figures in Angelou's books,
like herself, her son Guy, and mother Vivian do not speak as one would
expect, and that their speech is "cleaned up" for her readers.
[166]
Guy, for example, represents the young black male, while Vivian
represents the idealized mother figure, and the stiff language they use,
as well as the language in Angelou's text, is intended to prove that
blacks can competently use standard English.
[167]
McWhorter recognizes that much of the reason for Angelou's style was the "apologetic" nature of her writing.
[130]
When Angelou wrote
Caged Bird
at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of
literature at the time was "organic unity", and one of her goals was to
create a book that satisfied that criterion.
[160]
The events in her books were episodic and crafted like a series of
short stories, but their arrangements did not follow a strict
chronology.
Instead, they were placed to emphasize the
themes of her books,
which include racism, identity, family, and travel.
English literature
scholar Valerie Sayers has asserted that "Angelou's poetry and prose are
similar".
They both rely on her "direct voice", which alternates steady
rhythms with
syncopated patterns and uses similes and metaphors (e.g., the caged bird).
[168]
According to Hagen, Angelou's works were influenced by both
conventional literary and the oral traditions of the African-American
community.
For example, she referenced over 100 literary characters
throughout her books and poetry.
[169]
In addition, she used the elements of
blues music,
including the act of testimony when speaking of one's life and
struggles, ironic understatement, and the use of natural metaphors,
rhythms, and intonations.
[170]
Angelou, instead of depending upon plot, used personal and historical events to shape her books.
[171]
Source: Wikipedia.org
Somebody Come and Play In the Traffic With Me! Earn as You Learn, Grow as You Go!
The Man Inside the Man
from
Sinbad the Sailor Man
A
JMK's Production
Share this page, If you liked It Pass it on, If you loved It Follow Me!
TTFN
CYA Later Taters!
Thanks for watching.
Donnie/ Sinbad the Sailor Man
P.S. Everybody Needs Traffic! Get Top Tier North American Traffic Here!
