After marrying a South African freedom fighter, Angelou lived in Cairo, Egypt, for several years, where she edited an English-language newspaper. Later, she taught at the University of Ghana and edited the African Review. Angelou often shared stories about her unusual, intense, and poignant childhood, and her friends and associates encouraged her to write an autobiography.
It quickly became a best-seller and was nominated for the National Book Award. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. James Baldwin, the novelist and activist, took her to the party, which was at the home of the cartoonist- writer Jules Feiffer and his then-wife, Judy.
If you could get her to write a book In those five years, I read every book in the black school library. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say. One of the women who helped Angelou find her voice was a teacher in Stamps, Arkansas, named Bertha Flowers. She was the kind of woman you rarely got to read about in American literature in the s. But later, the moral code is turned on its head. These parts are very entertaining to read, and must have been an eye-opener to a young teenager from such a narrow background.
The book ends when Maya Angelou is To the little girl, that felt like her true identity, not what others called her. That is a hugely emotional part of the book. I gave a mental cheer when Maya managed to turn this around. I personally found this almost the most affecting part of the book. Maya was a supremely talented and hard-working child. The reader senses her feelings bubbling over - her well-earned pride in her achievements.
The accomplishment was nothing. The meticulous maps, drawn in three colors of ink, learning and spelling decasyllabic words, memorizing the whole of The Rape of Lucrece - it was for nothing.
Donleavy had exposed us. We were maids and farmers, handymen and washerwomen, and anything higher that we aspired to was farcical and presumptuous. How could she possibly recover from this one? How can one person continue to have courage, strength and fight? She is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
It will also, however, make you proud of what can be achieved. One hopes it was cathartic to write, but it is far more than the plague of misery sagas which have descended onto our bookshelves in recent years. It is nonfiction, but it is as entertaining as a novel; parts of it reading like lyrical prose. From a relatively unknown author, a world was firmly introduced to the reality of racial tensions and prejudice in the Southern United States.
The book grips you from its start. Maya Angelou has a unique ability to make any reader identify with a poor black child, to experience what they experience, from whatever point the reader is in their own life. Maya Angelou does not alienate. She does not seek to select her audience; she speaks to us all. She conveys her various feelings of confusion, pride, hatred, despair, guilt and rage, expressing so well the reasoning behind them at the time. Her use of dialect is perfectly balanced for a general reader.
It is authentic and essential, yet at no point is the reader likely to have to pause, reread and try to interpret. I personally have had far more difficulty with my experience of classic books which attempt to include a written representation of my own native, regional Yorkshire speech. This is part of her great skill as a writer - it flows. She concentrates on our common humanity.
This is a book which can, perhaps should, be read by everyone at least once in their lifetime. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic admiration. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defense.
We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths.
The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana Purchase, while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination.
All of us. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with fearful trill of the things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom View all 39 comments.
Caged Bird A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
The above poem by Maya Angelou n Caged Bird A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. The above poem by Maya Angelou not from this book, BTW encapsulates in a few lines why the voices of protest are the loudest, and the literature the most powerful when it is forcefully suppressed. Because the only thing the caged bird can do is sing, he will keep on doing it, lest he go mad.
Poetry will keep on flowing out of the decapitated head of Orpheus. I understand that this book has been banned multiple times. Not surprising, considering that the words of the poet have more power than swords or bullets, as proved time and again by history. It was the early thirties, and the North and the South of USA were poles apart as far as coloured people were concerned; in the North, they were part of the society albeit an insular one while in the South, they were the despised 'niggers'.
Maya spent most of the formative part of her childhood down south. Her grandmother 'Momma' was a singularly resourceful woman who owned a store: they managed to live in relative comfort even during the Depression era. However, this material comfort was offset by the fact that they were always the hated 'other' - the 'whitefolk' who lived apart almost a mythical race, in Maya's young mind were powerful and whimsical gods who could visit death and destruction any time on any black man or woman.
Even the 'powhitetrash', the drifters and squatters who had the fortune to be born into the Anglo-Saxon race, could insult even the propertied black people with impunity.
When she was eight years old, Maya's father took her brother and herself to their mother, Vivian Baxter, in St. Here the incident which was to become the turning point of her life happened. The eight-year old girl was raped by her mother's current boyfriend, Mr. Freeman: he managed to wiggle out of jail only to be murdered, presumably by Maya's maternal uncles who were also the town toughs. As a result of this, she became a virtual mute for almost five years. Sent back to Stamps, Maya continued her zombie-like existence until she was brought back into the world of the living by Bertha Flowers, a teacher and family friend - she did this by the expedient of introducing the girl to books.
Maya found refuge in the world of imagination, and slowly came back to normal. She again went to live with her mother in California when she was During this sojourn, she visited her father in Southern California where another traumatic even in her life took place. After a frightening journey across the border into Mexico along with her father when she was forced to drive a car back to the US in the night with him passed out in the back — even though she was not a qualified driver!
She quit home and lived for a month in a junkyard, with similar social drop-outs, before returning to her mother. A month of living in the rough had emboldened the shy and withdrawn girl. Maya decided to get a job as a streetcar conductor, even though the occupation was closed to blacks, and succeeded: the activist and rebel were just emerging.
The book is eminently readable. Still, is this a great book? I would not say so. Good, yes: genuinely great, no. The causal tone, for me, took away most of the poignancy.
Even the extremely distressing rape incident — though described in gory detail — fails to really make an impact. However, it might come across to people that her mother never cared much I have found this view expressed on one or two of the one-star reviews for this book on this site. Being a black woman, she feels disadvantaged thrice, as she says: The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
So maybe, the best defence is to attack. Throw the hypocrisy of society back in its face. Accept me for what I am, whether you like what you see or not! View all 20 comments. This autobiography of her early years from age four through sixteen makes for a tough story at times, but an amazing telling of it. At four years old, she and her brother Bailey are sent to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their paternal grandmother, a staunchly religious and savvy store owner and their disabled Uncle Willy.
They help at the store , go to school and live through times of ugly racism. The children return to live with their grandmother, but Maya is so scarred by the attack that she stops speaking for several years. Yet, amid the bad times in this depiction of the Jim Crow south, there are times of happiness and revelation of what life has to offer. It is back in Stamps that she develops a love of reading and she calls Shakespeare her first white love.
She shares the joy of making her first friend and her unconditional love for her brother Bailey. A few years later, they move back with their mother and it is here in California that we see the impact of the past on her and also see her come of age at sixteen, on her journey to becoming the renown activist, writer, poet. Angelou does nothing short of bare her heart and soul in this deeply personal and affecting narrative.
View all 57 comments. People really do take their lives for granted. It is of course a suffering. From birth to death. We should be shedding tears for the complete ignorance we carry ourselves for the reality the world offers which we fail to see, yet is it worth it?
All those tears. It would be considered in a certain fact that reading this bo " My tears were not for Bailey or Mother or even myself but for the helplessness of mortals who live on the sufferance of life" How apt are these words and how true they ring? It would be considered in a certain fact that reading this book during the current turbulent days is certainly fitting in a certain manner but some might think one is trying to be part of something they are not.
Truth be told being a brown girl as we've been constantly labeled in a brown country surrounded by the ocean and other brown countries, I personally have not faced racism. In fact I have been brought up in my own cocoon. I am part of the majority that inhabit our tiny island, thus I have not received any judgement from any. The first time I felt out of my box was around 2 years ago. I was in Italy happily travelling by train from Milan to Switzerland when a certain Italian boy was curiously looking at me.
I thought I was mistaken and ignored it. Later it came to my attention that he went as far as pointing at me and telling something to his mother. Me with zero knowledge of that language just smiled at him. I did not suspect anything until my aunt came to me and turned me away from them and took me away from there and told to just ignore them.
Although she did not explicitly mention what was conversed between mother and child, I knew it was nothing good. This was my first time I ever felt as if I was an alien in another planet.
It was the first time I felt as I was not accepted. Although this was for a very brief moment I felt a certain level of sadness, not anger but sadness. Not even knowing what they were saying I felt that I was accused of a crime I cannot even help. Now that I read this book, I cannot even fathom what colored people, let them be black, brown or yellow feel at a regular basis. Now that I have called myself brown and given the term yellow and black to others, what do I really try to achieve? Am I not putting the same labels that they have forced upon us?
At times looking at the situation in the world a certain fear runs through my blood. Would we be next? Will there be a day that all colored people would be washed out of the world? Reasons are truly unfathomable for me. So many questions run through my mind when I see the blatant disgust people have towards each other.
Why are we dirty? Black, brown, yellow, why are we so different from them? At the end aren't we all the same? Strip us down to the bones, won't we all be the same? Aren't we all made of the same tiny atoms?
It is not that I am trying to bring up an argument by raising these questions, neither am I accusing anyone but in the end there is a certain kind of sadness that courses through my blood. No one deserves this. Why is it that even almost a century after these happening in the book that we have not changed at all? I will admit that I am speaking about things in general rather than book here but I do not think there is much to say about this.
Maya Angelou has proven herself worthy of the praise. I am only sad that I did not pick this book up earlier. I do not know if it was the captivating words or lilting prose in the book but I truly felt as if I was in the embrace of a motherly bosom and listening to a fairy-tale while I was reading this. It truly captivated me and sent me to another realm. The story started with a simple yet small girl and ended with that small girl becoming woman when she was not a woman at all.
At times I felt anger towards my own ignorance of the world and at time I felt anger at the world in general but I can easily discern that this book really was an eye opener and it truly did change my world. In the end I was not left with that anger but a bitter sadness in my heart. Will it ever end? How long, oh God? View all 10 comments. May I wrote this review a year and a half ago. It is written from the perspective of a parent who cares about what her teenage children read in school.
I hope it may be useful to other parents, teens, and anyone else who cares about content and wants to make informed decisions about what they read. I received mostly negative reactions to my review, but also a few positive comments which encouraged me.
After a year of dealing with it all, I wanted to be done and move on, so I closed the com May I wrote this review a year and a half ago. After a year of dealing with it all, I wanted to be done and move on, so I closed the comment section. If you wish to read through the comments, you'll see a few posts I wrote in reply.
My final comments are in the last two posts. This is my personal reaction to the book, and I support your right to make your own choices about what you read, too. I read this book because my teenage son was going to be required to read it in his English class at school. I did not want to read the book because I was aware of its content. But I felt it necessary in order to be able to talk to the teacher about my objections.
So I did not like this book. My degree in Comparative Literature enables me to recognize some literary value in Caged Bird, as well as historical and social value.
I believe Maya Angelou is a talented writer. I admire some of her poetry. But her series of autobiographical books includes too much explicit and disturbing sexual content for me. And I certainly did not want my 15 year old son to have to read it! He did not want to read it and my husband and I completely supported his choice. The most graphic and disturbing sexual material in Caged Bird involves the rape of the author as an eight year old girl. This horrible experience deeply affects her life.
But I believe our teenage children can understand that terrible things like this happen, without needing to be dragged through the muck of the sordid details. Angelou writes vividly. My son does not want those images in his head, and I fully support him. I can see this book being taught at the college level, but I strongly feel that it is not appropriate for high school required reading. In my son's advanced English class, this book was one of six main texts.
In the regular English class, there are only two main texts, and this is one of them. How sad, when there are so many other great literary works to choose from which are clean.
My son's teacher was nice and professional about it. Another English teacher was not so nice. She acted surprised that I would characterize the book as "R-rated. Our my husband's and my response was "That's why we choose not to watch those TV shows!
Just because our society's standards of decency continue to plummet, is no reason to embrace them! It is an American Lit class, so I suggested a couple of other texts as options if the purpose was to address the African American experience. But this book is obviously one of that teacher's favorites, so she defended it.
The teachers did say that our son could choose to read a different book. However, because the class structure was centered on discussion, we and our son chose to have him read an 'edited version' of Caged Bird instead.
I just told him which chapters to skip. And I'm glad that our son happened to have the more sympathetic teacher. So I'm done with my rant now. While Caged Bird had always sold well, after the inauguration, sales shot up percent —landing the book back on the bestseller list 24 years after it was published. Angelou co-wrote the screenplay with Leonora Thuna.
You can watch the movie here. Despite being widely taught in schools, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is often removed from reading lists for sexual content, language, and drug use.
Angelou has been called the most banned author in the U. I feel sorry for the young person who never gets to read.
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