I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Essay

In her anthology Written by Herself, Jill Ker Conway discuses a central theme in black women’s autobiography that is fully shown in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) by Maya Angelou: â€Å"Because, from girlhood, these women faced the dual injustices of racial hostility and male exploitation, their life histories are told with no hint of romantic conventions. They describe, instead, a quest for physical and psychological survival† (3). Angelou’s illustration of her childhood and adolescence shows her frequent conflicts with racism, sexism, and injustice at the same time that the Maya describes her personal qualities, events, and the people that helped her to survive the destructive effects of her environment and served as positive role models for her. Despite the constant oppression she faced as a girl growing up lacking financial or other means of subsistence in the racially segregated town of Stamps, Arkansas, Angelou gives emphasis to the role models of her family members who sustained and raised her. These people contributed to Angelou’s development into a brave, independent young black woman. A Song of Transcendence: Maya Angelou Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published at the end of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and it carries with itself the bitter and hard-won fruit of this historical period. Angelou knows the cruel realities of life in the raciest Deep South in the mid-twentieth century. As the critic Roger Rosenblatt (1974) has stated, â€Å"No black American author has ever felt the need to invent a nightmare to make [her] point† (174). As Maya Angelou describes her childhood: â€Å"High spots in Stamps were usually negative: droughts, floods, lynchings and deaths† (Conway 45). Touched by the harsh effects of these negative forces, Maya Angelou goes through her life with sense of self-importance and self-respect. She moves forward toward a goal of freedom with a sense of self-knowledge, an understanding of the political realities of black life in the racist South, and a realization of the responsibility that such an understanding involves. Significant Others Maya describes several Black women nurturing a young Black girl in a racist and sexist society. These Black women characters serve as positive role models for Maya. This autobiography illustrates how Black women love themselves and each other in spite of living in a world that does not love or respect them. Angelou’s work describes a positive character of Black women who support each other and still remain individuals, free to choose their own paths to self-sufficiency. Angelou writes: â€Å"if growing up is painful for the Southern black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult† (4). Her autobiography illustrates the painful double strikes of becoming Black and female adult. As a young girl, Maya Angelou has a strong desire to be white, to be a member of what she considers as the more favored and lucky race. The girl dreams to wake up out of her â€Å"ugly black dream† and instead become a white girl with beautiful long blond hair and blue eyes (2). She is aware, even as a little girl, that her â€Å"nappy black hair† and dark skin are not valued highly. The girl begins her difficult life with the painful feeling of not being â€Å"good enough,† since Maya could not find girls who were black in any literature or movies. From the age of three Maya Angelou is raised and nurtured by her devoutly religious grandmother that is severely correct in attention to rules and morality. The girl calls her grandmother â€Å"Momma. † Although Maya realizes that she is often perplexed by her grandmother’s manners, she definitely loves and respects her. This substitute mother-daughter relationship provides some state of being secure for the young Maya. Some feminist literature emphasizes the meaning of the mother-daughter relationship for young women’s psychological development (Iglesias and Cormier 259). Maya gives prominence to the important role of her grandmother (and later, her mother). Angelou’s account strategy bears witness to the strong impact these relationships had on her life, and in the end on her literary work. Maya Angelou places emphasis on the role of the black woman that has played in shaping her unique individual characteristics and destiny. Nancy Chodorow (1978) asserts that â€Å"because of their mothering by women, girls come to experience themselves as less separate than boys, as having more permeable ego boundaries. Girls come to define themselves more in relation to others† (93). In A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, Sidonie Smith analyzes different theories of women’s autobiography and discusses among them â€Å"theories that distinguish women’s autobiographies by the way in which women seem to unfold their story through their relationship to a significant ‘other’† (18). Maya Angelou feels the pain of racism as she observes her dearly loved paternal grandmother endure embarrassment when white girls call her â€Å"Annie† instead of addressing her with respect as â€Å"Mrs. Henderson. † Being a teenager, Maya has a similar situation when she is â€Å"called out of her name† by a white female employer who calls her â€Å"Mary† (108). Momma Henderson’s painful experiences have prepared Maya Angelou for her own encounters with racist American society. The refusal of a white dentist, to whom Momma Henderson has provided loan, is another instance of the humiliation these two generations of Black women confront together. The dentist replied that he would â€Å"rather stick [his] hand in a dog’s mouth than in a nigger’s,† granddaughter and grandmother have to travel twenty-five miles to find the nearest Black dentist (189). The echo of Jim Crow, even so many years after slavery, places Black women at the very low position in a white patriarchal system. And yet despite the painful experience and examples of racism, Angelou’s autobiography is a story of victory and a praising of the strength and power of Black women. Maya portrays Momma Henderson as a strong, made by oneself, economically independent woman who has gained knowledge how operate and accomplish the goals in a world that believes women should be timid and dependent. Despite behavior conflicts with those who try to humiliate her, Momma Henderson is always the winner of any conflict because she never surrenders and retains her self-respect—and she teaches Maya Angelou to do the same. Vivian Baxter, Maya’s mother, is a woman of great ingenuity and has personal qualities like her own mother. She enjoys life, despite life’s troubles. From her mother, Maya learns the happiness of being a woman, delighting in the womanlike, and being proud of her Black female body. Mrs. Flowers, the â€Å"aristocrat† of Stamps, Arkansas, also encourages Maya to be â€Å"proud to be a Negro† (95). She helps Maya regain her self-confidence after the rape; she gives her lessons about the importance and beauty of language; she introduces to her great writers; and she gives her â€Å"lessons in living† so that Maya would learn to listen â€Å"carefully to what country people called mother wit †¦ couched in the collective wisdom of generations† (100). All of these black women teach Maya to love and respect herself, and to remember the generations of Black women who have come before her and helped pave a road of self-sufficiency in a strict world. Conclusion Maya Angelou played particular attention to the themes of motherhood within her autobiography. Angelou wrote a story in which both blackness and womanhood could be celebrated. What makes the work particularly powerful is her description of the vulnerable sexual positions in which black girls and women are placed. Readers see how Angelou presents black women among her family and friends and the significant role they play in providing the girl with security and love. Angelou describes black women as wise or trusted advisers in her intellectual development. Repeatedly Angelou expresses gratitude for the presence of these powerful and independent women in her life and credits them for the individual she becomes. Works Cited Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam Books, 1969. Chodorow, N. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Conway, Jill Ker ed. , Written by Herself: An Anthology, New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Iglesias, Elizabeth and Cormier, Sherry. â€Å"The Transformation of Girls to Women: Finding Voice and Developing Strategies for Liberation. † Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development. Vol. : 30 (4), 2002. Rosenblatt, Roger. Black Fiction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.