On Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was an African American poet who is one of the most famous voices of modern American poetry and author of 8 autobiographies, 18 poetry collections, essays, cookbooks, children’s books, plays, as well as recordings, spoken-word albums etc. Her long and prolific work was characterized by fierce, expressive emotion and activism against opression, racism and misogyny. In many of her poems, abuse of women and racial injustices are referenced as important issues and she is one of the leading examples how we can deal with social issues through writing and literary interpretation. Because fighting for human rights can be done on many different platforms, just like today where we use social media to address them. This proved especially important now during the war in Ukraine where people use them to communicate with the world outside. I’m sure Maya Angelou would have a lot to write or say about it too, but today we’re going to focus on her life and the work. We can most definitely learn a lot about her work by studying her biography. Her childhood was precarious because she was sent with her siblings to her grandparents by her father who could not provide for them. It turned out to be a lucky escape from a difficult family to, for that time, unusually prosperous African-American grandmother. Later on, when she was returned to her mother, Angelou was a victim of sexual assault by her mother’s boyfriend who was jailed for one single day. A testimony of how violent crimes against African Americans were treated by authorities, which culminated in the movement that was ignited by the murder of George Floyd. Later on, Angelou turned mute for several years, which she later described as a consequence of the trauma. During this period, she allegedly developed her love for books and reading. She witnesses that familiar circumstances are crucial for a child’s physical and mental health.
Today, mental health is no longer taken for granted or pushed back as it used to be, and vulnerability isn’t a social taboo, though misogyny paints it as something primarily related to women and men who show their feelings as well tend to be labelled as feminine. This is the other side of the coin in patriarchal societies, since these things are only seemingly related only to the treatment women because the stereotype of masculinity is about virility, physical strength and domination. Maya Angelou goes against all of this through her work and especially some emblematic poems. She credited her teacher Mrs Bertha Flowers with helping her to overcome her trauma by saying “you don’t love poetry, not until you speak it”. Besides classical authors like Shakespeare, she was influenced by Black female artists like Frances Harper, Anne Spencer and Jessie Fauset. Angelou admired streetcar drivers in San Francisco so much she became the first Black streetcar conductor. Later her mother described it as her dream job. Her career spans a whole array of genres from her appearance in the opera Porgy and Bess in the 1950s to recordings like the album Miss Calypso (1957) and appearing in Jean Genet’s play The Blacks (1961). Her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) won her first international acclaim.
We can never fully divorce a writer’s literary work from his own values and ideology (prominent examples are Knut Hamsun and Elfriede Jelinek). Maya Angelou is was known for her activism regarding racism, human rights and feminism in particular. In 1969, Martin Luther King asked her to organise a march. She was an avid believer and supporter of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and among the crowd who welcomed Fidel Castro upon his 1960 visit to the UN General Assembly in New York. Malcolm X, a historical human rights activist for black empowerment, was her close friend with whom she started The Organisation of Afro-American Unity, before his assassination. Martin Luther King’s death in 1968 profoundly affected her, after which she wrote and produced a series of documentaries called “Black, Blues, Black!” where she ponders on African American culture, music and poetry.
In the video linked at the end, we hear her talking with B.B. King and recite a poem “Letter To an Aspiring Junkie”. The rhythm and poetic of the song can be traced all the way to today’s rap music. Angelou is not the only one dedicating her work to dangerous effects of racial discrimination on the fabric of society. Caleb Femi, a British-Nigerian poet writes about the very same issues in his own country in poems like “On Magic/Violence” that properly describes gentrification of prosperous people in working class areas:
When hipsters take selfies
On the corners where our
Friends died, the rent goes up.
It shows Black people as collateral damage of development, which is indeed a global phenomenon, where the underprivileged are deemed as socially unacceptable because they show a face of prosperity none of the privileged want to see. Poetry is a loud microphone for important problems when it is properly put to good use. Due to her own personal trauma, she turned into an important voice against sexual harassment which resonates still today even with those who are beyond the reach of poetry, because of to her status as a global cultural icon. Though in many cases it’s deemed as merely a phase in every poet’s development (myself included), in quite a few cases, people like Maya Angelou tend to be a symbol of resilience, humanism and the fight against prejudices. Just like Elfriede Jelinek, Angelou was an advocate of feminism. Her poem “And Still I rise” can be treated as a lyrical manifesto of feminism. My personal favourite feminist quote of hers is:
I love to see a young girl go out and grab life by the lapels. Life is a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.
The global discourse on social, political and racism culminated with Barack Obama and his ascension to the presidency in 2009. Maya Angelou was one of his most prominent supporters, taking part in the campaign. With those developments as a natural extension of the historical fight of African Americans for their rights, the values she fought for through her work for so long finally came to the forefront in public circles with the attention that they needed. Obama awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. This once again confirmed her role in the emancipation of African Americans through arts and literature.
Poetry is the ultimate level of perception: it reaches beyond, over into the area where physics and metaphysics stop. It requires not only an open mind but an open soul. Our education system does not offer us true immersion into most profound poetry today because we are distracted by its restrictions on one side, and by social media and various digital platforms on the other side. This considerably shrinks our ability to focus, which is a prerequisite for true understanding of poetry and communicating with the poet’s intention from which the reader draws his conclusions. Since poetry is like a tunnel with two open ends, it can also be described as a communication channel between disconnected minds. It’s a window into what is possible, sometimes only on paper, but Maya Angelou’s life is a proof that sometimes, paper cuts better than a knife. This is particularly exacerbated in the aforementioned poem And Still I Rise, one of her most famous ones:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
Maya Angelou portrays herself as self-confident, strong figure that doesn’t bow down or lets others speak out for her. Her bravery is embedded into the poem as its axis. She may not have the upper hand, but hers is a hand that writes and controls the narrative. As it says:“and still I rise”. She treats her vulnerability as a super power, contradicting the prevalent stereotype, and her fierce delivery leaves no room for disagreement. These are words of encouragement for those that suffer against what she calls “nights of terror and fear”. Poetry can’t solve problems created by politics, just like the Live Aid didn’t solve the problem of famine, but it did create an important moment of solidarity that helped put much more focus on the issue, bringing together many of the most famous artists around the world. Everything we do is created within its historical context related to our past and present. It’s a new chapter of the continuum that started a long time ago and we might chose not to relate to it, but Maya Angelou expresses her own writing as a part of fighting against racism which is plaguing us still today:
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave
I am the dream and the hope of the slave
Her work deserves admiration for its particular accent on building a better present for a future that seems more and more like a utopia where there is no room for something as subtle and profound as poetry. When the guns start to speak, the muses shut up, so the saying goes. Maya Angelou would disagree and this is why we need poetry more than ever, to show us that all the answers are within and that words are futile when left to themselves, without someone to read. As she once said:
Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning.
We should use this as a guidance point and key to the countless doors poetry opens to our mind, to treat is as a healing for our focal system gone numb from all the technology that we’re surrounded by. You could theorise that the most proper poetry for today would be haiku, since its form doesn’t require lots of time. But that would be a rookie mistake, because the time you need to recognize a colour in the voice of birds takes infinitely more spiritual investment than what is sometimes presumed. We are no longer able to reach Matsuo Basho’s level of observance and focus that helped haiku poets create masterpieces. We are available online all the time, glued to our screens and devices. Today, you would need to be drug addict to come up with visions like those in haiku. With the difference that in Japanese poetry, it’s a state of mind, not a short-term excitement with the promise of a bad hangover. Poetry forces us to slow down, it’s not a race to the last page. Like an expensive steak, it takes a special sort of person to appreciate and fully digest it. And those who do, are aware of the immensity of its rewards.
