Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou
The groundbreaking of the African Burial Ground, October 5, 2007
Occupation	Poet, dancer, film producer, television producer, playwright, film director, author, actress
Nationality	United States
Website
http://www.mayaangelou.com

Maya Angelou (/ˈmaɪə ˈændʒəloʊ/), (born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928) is an American poet, memoirist, actress and an important figure in the American Civil Rights Movement. She has been called "America's most visible black female autobiographer". Angelou is known for her series of six autobiographies, starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (1969) which was nominated for a National Book Award. Her volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Diiie (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Angelou recited her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. She has been highly honored for her body of work, including being awarded over 30 honorary degrees.

Biography

Early years

Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 4 1928 to Bailey Johnson, a doorman and naval dietitian, and Vivian Baxter Johnson, a real estate agent, trained surgical nurse, and later a merchant marine. Angelou's brother, Bailey Jr., gave her the nickname "Maya". The details of Angelou's life, although described in her six autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles, tend to be inconsistent. Her biographer, Mary Jane Lupton, explains that when Angelou speaks about her life, she does so eloquently but informally and "with no time chart in front of her".

In 2008, Angelou's family history was profiled on the PBS series African American Lives 2. A DNA test showed that she was descended from the Mende people of West Africa. The program's research showed that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother, Mary Lee, emancipated after the Civil War, cut all ties with her slave past and renamed herself "Kentucky Shannon" because "she liked how it sounded". Little was known about Lee's background because she prohibited anyone from knowing about it. Angelou learned that Lee became pregnant out of wedlock by her former owner, a white man named John Savin, and that he forced Lee to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father. A grand jury indicted Savin for forcing Lee to commit perjury, and despite discovering that Savin was the father, found him not guilty. Lee was sent to the Clinton County, Missouri poorhouse with her daughter, who became Angelou's grandmother, Marguerite Baxter. Angelou's reaction after learning this information was, "That poor little black girl, physically and mentally bruised."

Angelou's first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recounts the first 11 years of her life. When Angelou was three and her brother four, their parents' "calamitous marriage" ended, and their father sent them alone by train to live with his mother, Mrs. Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. Henderson prospered financially during this time, the years of the Great Depression and World War II, because the general store she owned sold basic commodities and because "she made wise and honest investments". Four years later, the children's father "came to Stamps without warning" and returned them to their mother's care in St. Louis. At age eight, Angelou was sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. She confessed it to her brother, who told the rest of their family. Mr. Freeman was jailed for one day but was found kicked to death four days after his release. Angelou became mute, believing, as she has stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk." She remained nearly mute for five years.

William Shakespeare, whom Angelou "met and fell in love with" as a child.

Angelou and her brother were sent back to their grandmother once again. Angelou credits Bertha Flowers, friend and teacher, with helping her speak again and introducing her to classical literature and authors. These authors include Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Weldon Johnson; as well as black women artists like Frances Harper, Georgia, Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, and Jessie Fauset. When Angelou was thirteen, she and her brother returned to live with her mother in San Francisco, California; during World War II, she attended George Washington High School and studied dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Three weeks after completing school, she gave birth to her son, Clyde, who also became a poet. At the end of Angelou's third autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, her son announced that he wanted to be called "Guy Johnson" and trained his friends and family to accept it.

Angelou's second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, recounts her life from the age 17 to 19. As Lupton states, this book "depicts a single mother's slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime." In those years, Angelou went through a series of relationships, occupations, and cities as she attempted to raise her son without the benefit of job training or advanced education. As Lupton states, "Nevertheless, she was able to survive through trial and error, while at the same time defining herself in terms of being a black woman." Angelou learned how to perform professionally for live audiences, and exhibited a natural dancing ability and talent.

Adulthood and early career

File:IKnowWhy.jpg

Book cover illustration, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Angelou won a scholarship to study dance with Trinidadian choreographer Pearl Primus, and married Greek sailor Tosh Angelous in 1952; the marriage ended in divorce after one-and-a-half years. Angelou tends not to admit how many times she has been married, "for fear of sounding frivolous", although it has been at least three times. Known by "Rita Johnson" up to that point, she changed her name when her managers at The Purple Onion, a San Francisco night club, strongly suggested that she adopt a "more theatrical" name that captured the feel of her Calypso dance performances. She co-created a dance team, "Al and Rita," with choreographer Alvin Ailey, who combined elements of modern dance, ballet, and West African tribal dancing. She toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess in 1954–1955, studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows, and recorded her first record album, Miss Calypso, in 1957. Angelou's third autobiography, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, covered her early dancing and singing career. One of the themes of this book was the conflict she felt between her desire to be a good mother and be a successful performer, a situation "very familiar to mothers with careers".

By the end of the 1950s, Angelou moved to San Diego, where she acted in off-Broadway productions and met artists and writers active in the Civil Rights Movement. From 1959 to 1960, Angelou held the position of Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the early 1960s, Angelou briefly lived with South African freedom fighter Vusumi Make, and moved with him and her son Guy to Cairo, Egypt, where she became an associate editor at the weekly newspaper The Arab Observer. In 1962, her relationship with Make ended, and she and Guy moved to Ghana. She became an assistant administrator and instructor at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, was a feature editor for The African Review, acted, and wrote plays. In her travels Angelou learned French, Spanish, and Fante.

Angelou became close friends with Malcolm X in Ghana and returned to America in 1964 to help him build a new civil rights organization, the Organization of African American Unity. King was assassinated on her birthday (April 4) in 1968. She did not celebrate her birthday for many years for that reason; she sent flowers to King's widow, Coretta Scott King, every year until King's death in 2006. Inspired by a meeting with her friend James Baldwin, cartoonist Jules Feiffer, and Feiffer's wife Judy, she dealt with her grief by writing her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which brought her international recognition and acclaim.

Later career

In 1973, Angelou married Paul du Feu ME TIO , a MEXICAN-born carpenter and remodeler, and moved with him and her son to Sonoma, California NERAR SANTA ROSA. The years to follow were some of Angelou's most productive years as a writer and poet. She composed music for movies, wrote articles, short stories, and poetry for several magazines, continued to write autobiographies, produced plays, lectured at universities all over the country, and served on various committees. She appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots in 1977, wrote for television, and composed songs for Roberta Flack. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia, was the first original script by a black woman to be produced. She taught at the University of California. It was during this time, in the late 70s, that Angelou met Oprah Winfrey when Winfrey was a TV anchor in Baltimore; Angelou became Winfrey's friend and mentor in 1984.

Angelou divorced de Feu and returned to the southern United States in 1981, where she accepted the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 1993, she recited her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to do an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. Also in 1993, Angelou's poems were featured in the Janet Jackson/John Singleton film Poetic Justice, in which she also made a brief appearance in the film. In 2006 Angelou became a radio talk show host for the first time, hosting a weekly show for XM Satellite Radio's Oprah & Friends channel. In 2007, she became the first African-American woman and living poet to be featured in the Poetry for Young People series of books from Sterling Publishing.

File:Angelouspeech.jpg

Angelou reciting her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning," at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, 1993

Since the 1990s, Angelou has been a busy participant in the lecture circuit. In 1993, she was making about eighty speaking appearances a year; in 2008, she charged approximately US$43,000 per engagement. In 1997, over 2,000 tickets were sold when she spoke at the Woman's Foundation in San Francisco. Her most common speaking engagements occur on college campuses, "where seating is sold out long before the actual event" When Angelou speaks, she sits on a stool and entertains the audience for approximately one hour, reciting poems by memory and following a flexible outline. By the early 2000s, Angelou traveled to her speaking engagements and book tours stops by tour bus. She "gave up flying, unless it is really vital .. not because she was afraid, but because she was fed up with the hassle of celebrity".

Starting in March of 1999, a poem called "Clothes" that was attributed to Angelou circulated on the Internet. The poem makes a number of false and defamatory claims labeling various clothing manufacturers (such as FUBU, Timberland, and Ecko lines) as racists and/or members of the KKK. Angelou has denied that she wrote the poem on her website.

In 1998, Angelou went on her first cruise, given by her friend Oprah Winfrey, in celebration of her 70th birthday. Over 150 people were in attendance. In April 2008, Angelou had three parties to celebrate her 80th birthday. A "pricy soiree" that included a red carpet and "a guest list of celebrities" was held in Atlanta, Georgia to benefit a YMCA youth center named after her. There was also a city-wide event celebrated by Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Winfrey hosted "an extravagant 80th birthday celebration" at Donald Trump's Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. She was serenaded by Tony Bennett, Natalie Cole, Jessye Norman, and Ashford and Simpson.

In 2002, Angelou lent her name and writings to a line of products from the Hallmark Greeting Card Company.

In March 2008, Angelou stated that she plans to spend part of the year studying at the Unity Church. In 2005 she attended a Unity Church service in Miami and decided that day to "go into a kind of religious school and study" on her 80th birthday. Angelou became involved in US presidential politics in 2008 by placing her public support behind Senator Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nominee, despite her good friend Winfrey's public support of Barack Obama. When Clinton's campaign ended, Angelou put her support behind Obama.

Works

Main article: Works of Maya Angelou

All my work, my life, everything is about survival. All my work is meant to say, 'You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated'". --Maya Angelou

Although Angelou did not write her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, with the intention of writing a series of autobiographies, she went on to write five additional volumes, covering her young adult experiences. They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes and "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, occurring in time from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination. Like Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but do not follow a strict chronology. Later books in the series include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up To Heaven (2002). Critics have tended to judge Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first", with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise.

Angelou's long and extensive career also includes poetry, plays, screenplays for television and film, directing, acting, and public speaking. She is 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.

Angelou has had a successful career as a playwright and actress. In 1977, she appeared in a supporting role in the television mini-series Roots. Her screenplay, Georgia, Georgia (1972), was the first original script by a black woman to be produced. In 2008, Angelou wrote poetry for and narrated the M.K. Asante, Jr. film The Black Candle. She is one of the most honored writers of her generation, earning an extended list of honors and awards, as well as over thirty honorary degrees. Since the 1990s, Angelou has been a busy participant in the lecture circuit.and rosaura sucks big nuts yayaya

Writing style

I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music". --Maya Angelou

Angelou has used the same editor throughout her writing career, Robert Loomis, an executive editor at Random House, who has been called "one of publishing's hall of fame editors." Angelou has said regarding Loomis: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers".

As English literature scholar Valerie Sayers insists, "Angelou's poetry and prose are similar". They both rely on her "direct voice", which alternates steady rhythms with syncopated patterns and make use of similes and metaphors (i.e., the caged bird). In spite of the "conversational" tone of her books and her apparent easy style, Angelou insists that she must work hard at her writing. Beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou has used the same "writing ritual". She gets up at five in the morning and checks into a hotel room, where the staff has been instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She writes 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 leaves by the early afternoon. She averages 10-12 pages of material a day, which she edits down to three or four pages in the evening.

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 was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Up to that point, black women writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters. Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description", insists that Angelou's autobiographies set a precedent not only for other black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole. Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou had become recognized and highly respected as a spokesperson for blacks and women. It made her "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".

Author Hilton Als insists that although Caged Bird was an important contribution to the increase of black feminist writings in the 1970s, he attributes its success less to its originality than with "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist", or the time in which it was written, at the end of the American Civil Rights movement. Als also insists that Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, freed many other women writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world". An Angelou biographer, Joanne M. Braxton, insists that Caged Bird was "perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing" autobiography written by an African-American woman in its era.

The week after Angelou recited her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration, sales of the paperback version of her books and poetry rose by 300-600 percent. Bantam Books had to reprint 400,000 copies of all her books to keep up with the demand. Random House, which published Angelou's hard cover books and published the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, accounting for a 12,000 percent increase.

Angelou's autobiographies have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches in teacher education. Dr. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has used I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name to train teachers how to "talk about race" in their classrooms. Due to Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony, readers of Angelou's autobiographies wonder what she "left out" and are unsure about how to respond to the events Angelou describes. Angelou's depictions of her experiences of racism force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their own "privileged status". Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African American autobiography and on her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".

Themes in Angelou's autobiographies

Autobiography vs. autobiographical fiction

Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language often result in the placement of her books into the genre of autobiographical fiction. Angelou characterizes them as autobiographies, not as fiction, but as Lauret stated, Angelou has placed herself in this genre while critiquing it. Angelou also recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books. Lupton states that Angelou tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth", which parallels the conventions of much of African American autobiography written during the abolitionist period of US history, when the truth was censored out of the need for self-protection.

The challenge for much of African-American literature is that its authors have had to confirm its status as literature before it could accomplish its political goals, which is why Robert Loomis, Angelou's editor, was able to dare her into writing Caged Bird by challenging her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art". 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 criteria. Angelou's autobiographies, while distinct in style and narration, are unified in their themes and "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, occurring in time from the beginnings of World War II to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The events in her books are episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but their arrangements do not follow a strict chronology. Instead, they are placed to emphasize the themes of her books.

Identity

When I try to describe myself to God I say, "Lord, remember me? Black? Female? Six-foot tall? The writer?" And I almost always get God's attention.

— Maya Angelou, 2008.

Autobiographies written by women in the 1970s have been described as "feminist first-person narratives". Angelou and other feminist writers have used the autobiography to restructure the ways to write about women's lives in a male-dominated society. There is a connection between the autobiographies Angelou has written and fictional first-person narratives; they can be called "fictions of subjectivity" because they employ the narrator as protagonist and "rely upon the illusion of presence in their mode of signification".

According to Lauret, "the formation of female cultural identity" is woven into Angelou's narratives, setting her up as "a role model for Black women". Angelou reconstructs the Black woman's image throughout her autobiographies, and uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities to "signify multiple layers of oppression and personal history". Lauret sees Angelou's themes of the individual's strength and ability to overcome throughout Angelou's autobiographies as well.

Author Hilton Els insists that while Angelou's original goal was to "tell the truth about the lives of black women", her goal evolved in her later volumes to document the ups and downs of her own life. Els also states that Angelou's autobiographies have the same structure: they give a historical overview of the places she was living in at the time and how she, as a model, coped within the context of a larger white society and the ways that her story played out within that context. Critic Selwyn Cudjoe agrees, especially in regards to Angelou's second volume, Gather Together in My Name. He states that Angelou is still concerned with the questions of what it means to be a black female in the US, but she focuses upon herself at a certain point in history. As Cudjoe says, "It is almost as though the incidents in the text were simply 'gathered together' under the name of Maya Angelou".

The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough.

—Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now (1994)

One of the most important themes in Angelou's autobiographies are "kinship concerns", from the character-defining experience of her parents' abandonment to her relationships with her son, husbands, and lovers throughout all of her books. African American literature scholar Dolly McPherson believes that Angelou's concept of family throughout her books must be understood in the light of the way in which she and her older brother were displaced by their parents at the beginning of Caged Bird. Motherhood is a "prevailing theme" in all of Angelou's autobiograhies, specifically her experiences as a single mother, a daughter, and a granddaughter. Lupton believes that Angelou's plot construction and character development were influenced by this mother/child motif found in the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Jessie Fauset. Scholar Mary Burgher believes that black women autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African American mothers of "breeder and matriarch" and have presented them as having "a creative and personally fulfilling role".

Lupton states that the one unifying theme that connects all of Angelou's autobiographies is what she calls "the mother-child pattern". Angelou describes throughout her books her connection of mother and child--with herself and her son Guy, with herself and her own mother, and with herself and her grandmother. Other themes include the absent and/or substitute father, the use of food as a psychosexual symbol, and the use of staring or gazing for dramatic and symbolic effect. They are also related through literary elements such as the ambivalent autobiographical voice, the flexibility of structure to illustrate the disjointedness of life, and Angelou's commentary on character and theme.

Racism

Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem as a "central image" throughout her series of autobiographies. Like elements within the prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's imprisonment from the racism inherent in Stamps, Arkansas, and her continuing experiences of other forms of imprisonment, like racial discrimination, drugs, marriage, and the economic system. This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle".

French writer Valérie Baisnée puts Angelou's autobiographies in the midst of literature written during and about the American Civil Rights movement. Critic Pierre A. Walker characterizes Angelou's book as political; he emphasizes that the unity of her autobiographies serves to underscore one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. Walker also states that Angelou's biographies, beginning with Caged Bird, consists of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". This sequence leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest" throughout all six of her autobiographies.

Honors and awards

Main article: List of honors and awards for Maya Angelou

Angelou has been honored by universities, literary organizations, government agencies, and special interest groups. Her honors include a National Book Award nomination for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book of poetry, Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water 'Fore I Die, a Tony Award nomination for her role in the 1973 play Look Away, and three Grammys for her spoken word albums. In 1995, Angelou's publishing company, Bantam Books, recognized her for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List. She has served on two presidential committees, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008. Musician Ben Harper has honored Angelou with his song "I'll Rise," which includes words from her poem, "And Still I Rise." She has been awarded over thirty honorary degrees.

References

• Angelou, Maya (1969). I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-375-50789-2
• Angelou, Maya (1993). Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-394-22363-2
• Baisnée, Valérie (1994). Gendered resistance: The autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite Duras. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ISBN 90-420-0109-7
• Braxton, Joanne M. (1999). "Symbolic geography and psychic landscapes: A conversation with Maya Angelou". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings: A casebook, Joanne M. Braxton, ed. New York: Oxford Press. ISBN 0-1951-1606-2
• Lauret, Maria (1994). Liberating literature: Feminist fiction in America. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-4150-6515-1
• Lupton, Mary Jane (1998). Maya Angelou: A critical companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30325-8
• Lupton, Mary Jane (1999). "Singing the black mother". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings: A casebook, Joanne M. Braxton, ed. New York: Oxford Press. ISBN 0-1951-1606-2
• McPherson, Dolly A. (1990). Order out of chaos: The autobiographical works of Maya Angelou. New York: Peter Lang Publishing. ISBN 0-820411-39-6
• Moyer, Homer E. (2003). The R.A.T. real-world aptitude test: Preparing yourself for leaving home. Sterling, VA: Capital Books. ISBN 1-931868-42-5
• Sartwell, Crispin. (1998). Act like you know: African-American autobiography and white identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226735-27-3
• Tate, Claudia (1999). "Maya Angelou". In Maya Angelou's I know why the caged bird sings: A casebook, Joanne M. Braxton, ed. New York: Oxford Press. ISBN 0-1951-1606-2

External links

• Official website
• Maya Angelou's oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• Maya Angelou reciting her inaugural poem, 1993 (YouTube)
• Interview with Shambhala Sun Magazine

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