Maya Angelou - Poet, Activist, Storyteller and more
Maya Angelou
An
acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer,
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou
had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and
Hollywood’s first female black director, but became most famous as a
writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. As a civil rights
activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
She was also an educator and served as the Reynolds professor of
American Studies at Wake Forest University. By 1975, wrote Carol E.
Neubauer in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, Angelou
was recognized “as a spokesperson for… all people who are committed to
raising the moral standards of living in the United States.” She served
on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy
Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal of
Arts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the
U.S., by President Barack Obama. Angelou was awarded over 50 honorary
degrees before her death.
Angelou’s most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
(1969), deals with her early years in Long Beach, St. Louis and Stamps,
Arkansas, where she lived with her brother and paternal grandmother. In
one of its most evocative (and controversial) moments, Angelou
describes how she was first cuddled then raped by her mother’s boyfriend
when she was just seven years old. When the man was murdered by her
uncles for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and stopped talking.
Angelou remained mute for five years, but developed a love for language.
She read Black authors like Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar, as well as canonical works by William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.
When Angelou was twelve and a half, Mrs. Flowers, an educated African
American woman, finally got her to speak again. Mrs. Flowers, as Angelou
recalled in her children’s book Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship (1986),
emphasized the importance of the spoken word, explained the nature of
and importance of education, and instilled in her a love of poetry.
Angelou graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.
Angelou attended George Washington High School in San Francisco and took
lessons in dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor
School. When Angelou, just seventeen, graduated from high school and
gave birth to a son, Guy, she began to work as the first African
American and first female street car conductor in San Francisco. As she
explained in Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas (1976), the third of her autobiographies,
she also “worked as a shake dancer in night clubs, fry cook in
hamburger joints, dinner cook in a Creole restaurant and once had a job
in a mechanic’s shop, taking the paint off cars with my hands.” Angelou
married a white ex-sailor, Tosh Angelos, in 1950. After they separated,
Angelou continued her study of dance in New York City, returning to San
Francisco to sing in the Purple Onion cabaret and garnering the
attention of talent scouts. From 1954 to 1955, she was a member of the
cast of a touring production of Porgy and Bess. During the late
1950s, Angelou sang in West Coast and Hawaiian nightclubs, before
returning to New York to continue her stage career.
Angelou joined the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s and met James
Baldwin and other important writers. It was during this time that
Angelou had the opportunity to hear Dr. Martin Luther King speak.
Inspired by his message, she decided to become a part of the struggle
for civil rights. She was offered a position as the northern coordinator
for Dr. King’s SCLC. Following her work for Dr. King, Angelou moved to
Cairo with her son, and, in 1962, to Ghana in West Africa. She worked as
a freelance writer and was a feature editor at the African Review.
When Angelou returned to the United States in the mid-1960s, she was
encouraged by author James Baldwin and Robert Loomis, an editor at
Random House, to write an autobiography. Initially, Angelou declined the
offers, but eventually changed her mind and wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
The book chronicles Angelou’s childhood and ends with the birth of her
son. It won immediate success and was nominated for a National Book
Award.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first of Angelou’s six
autobiographies. It is widely taught in schools, though it has faced
controversy over its portrayal of race, sexual abuse and violence.
Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in
her autobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to
complicate the genre’s relationship with truth and memory. Though her
books are episodic and tightly-crafted, the events seldom follow a
strict chronology and are arranged to emphasize themes. Other volumes
include Gather Together in My Name (1974), which begins when Angelou is seventeen and a new mother; Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry like Christmas, an account of her tour in Europe and Africa with Porgy and Bess; The Heart of a Woman (1981), a description of Angelou’s acting and writing career in New York and her work for the civil rights movement; and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), which recounts Angelou’s travels in West Africa and her decision to return, without her son, to America.
It took Angelou fifteen years to write the final volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung up to Heaven (2002).
The book covers four years, from the time Angelou returned from Ghana
in 1964 through the moment when she sat down at her mother’s table and
began to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1968. Angelou hesitated so long to start the book and took so long to finish it, she told Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
interviewer Sherryl Connelly, because so many painful things happened
to her, and to the entire African-American community, in those four
years. “I didn’t know how to write it,” she said. “I didn’t see how the
assassination of Malcolm [X], the Watts riot, the breakup of a love
affair, then [the assassination of Dr.] Martin [Luther] King [Jr.], how I
could get all that loose with something uplifting in it.” A Song Flung up to Heaven
deals forthrightly with these events, and “the poignant beauty of
Angelou’s writing enhances rather than masks the candor with which she
addresses the racial crisis through which America was passing,” Wayne A.
Holst wrote in Christian Century.
Angelou was also a prolific and widely-read poet, and her poetry has
often been lauded more for its depictions of Black beauty, the strength
of women, and the human spirit; criticizing the Vietnam War; demanding
social justice for all—than for its poetic virtue. Yet Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie, which was published in 1971, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. According to Carol Neubauer in Southern Women Writers,
“the first twenty poems describe the whole gamut of love, from the
first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful
loss.” In other poems, “Angelou turns her attention to the lives of
black people in America from the time of slavery to the rebellious
1960s. Her themes deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by
blacks forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and
with protest and basic survival.”
As Angelou wrote her autobiographies and poems, she continued her career
in film and television. She was the first Black woman to have a
screenplay (Georgia, Georgia) produced in 1972. She was honored with a nomination for an Emmy award for her performance in Roots in 1977. In 1979, Angelou helped adapt her book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, for a television movie of the same name. Angelou wrote the poetry for the 1993 film Poetic Justice and played the role of Aunt June. She also played Lelia Mae in the 1993 television film There Are No Children Here and appeared as Anna in the feature film How to Make an American Quilt in 1995.
One source of Angelou’s fame in the early 1990s was President Bill
Clinton’s invitation to write and read an inaugural poem. Americans all
across the country watched as she read “On the Pulse of Morning,” which
begins “A Rock, a River, a Tree” and calls for peace, racial and
religious harmony, and social justice for people of different origins,
incomes, genders, and sexual orientations. It recalls the civil rights
movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I have a dream”
speech as it urges America to “Give birth again / To the Dream” of
equality. Angelou challenged the new administration and all Americans to
work together for progress: “Here, on the pulse of this new day, / You
may have the grace to look up and out / And into your sister’s eyes, and
into / Your brother’s face, your country /And say simply / Very simply /
With hope—Good morning.”
During the early 1990s, Angelou wrote several books for children, including Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993), which also featured the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat; My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994), and Kofi and His Magic (1996), both collaborations with the photographer Margaret Courtney-Clark. Angelou’s poetry collections include The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994) and Phenomenal Woman (1995), a collection of four poems that takes its title from a poem which originally appeared in Cosmopolitan
magazine in 1978. The poem’s narrator describes the physical and
spiritual characteristics and qualities that make her attractive.
Angelou also wrote occasional poems, including A Brave Startling Truth (1995), which commemorated the founding of the United Nations, and Amazing Peace (2005), a poem written for the White House Christmas tree-lighting ceremony.
Angelou published multiple collections of essays. Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now
(1993) contains declarations, complaints, memories, opinions, and
advice on subjects ranging from faith to jealousy. Genevieve Stuttaford,
writing in Publishers Weekly, described the essays as “quietly inspirational pieces.” Anne Whitehouse of the New York Times Book Review observed that the book would “appeal to readers in search of clear messages with easily digested meanings.” Even the Stars Look Lonesome
(1997) is the sister volume, a book of “candid and lovingly crafted
homilies” to “sensuality, beauty, and black women” said Donna Seaman in Booklist. Letter to my Daughter was published in 2008.
Angelou’s poetry often benefited from her performance of it, and
during her lifetime Angelou recited her poems before spellbound crowds.
Indeed, Angelou’s poetry can also be traced to African-American oral
traditions like slave and work songs, especially in her use of personal
narrative and emphasis on individual responses to hardship, oppression
and loss. In addition to examining individual experience, Angelou’s
poems often respond to matters like race and sex on a larger social and
psychological scale. Describing her work to George Plimpton, Angelou
said, “Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition
established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the
first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always
saying I meaning ‘we.’ And what a responsibility. Trying to work with
that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger,
richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a
great challenge for me.”
In 2013 she was the recipient of the Literarian Award, an honorary
National Book Award for contributions to the literary community. She
died in 2014 at the age of 86.
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