Perhaps it is the sheer size of the US, but the racial segregation which was ever-present - at least in the Southern States - was never a feature of English life, or life in Great Britain. But the discrimination was never institutionalised. Unlike South Africa and the Southern States of America, there were no separate schools, townships or public toilets.
The UK was not a racist society as such, although some individual members of it certainly were. What comes across in this book, especially to a non-American, is that the racial segregation was condoned.
It was the norm at all points. It seems so entrenched that it is startling that any progress could be made from such a point. For this appalling account of ignorance and prejudice is surprisingly recent.
Maya Angelou was born in , and was therefore slightly younger than my own mother. And she was describing events which were closer in time to when she was writing them, than we now are ahead in time.
It ends in , before the end of World War II. This is the first part of her autobiography, which finally ran to seven volumes, the final volume being published in I knew of Maya Angelou's works of course, but somehow had never got around to reading them. Perhaps part of me suspected it would be a harrowing read, but I had not anticipated its wry humour.
Maya Angelou died last year, in Sometimes it happens because for a short time they achieve more prominence generally. When the reaction is so positive, the experience is tinged with slight regret, nonsensical though it is. For so many long-dead classic authors that opportunity is not open to us from the start. It would have been nice to appreciate them more during their lifetime. Will I carry on reading the continuing parts? The five stars are not awarded solely to the person.
They are awarded to the work, as they should be. It is an extraordinary first book, especially considering that the author is someone who feels the voice is essential for meaning, someone who was always recognised as a passionate performance poet. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life She was nearly singing. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit.
That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations I wanted to look at the pages. Were they the same that I had read? But be warned. It is an unnecessary insult. The work also puts much of her poetry in context; the anger and prominent themes in her poetry become all of a piece with the unfolding account of her life. And in this, the staggered telling of her tale is also very effective.
She alternated a book of poetry with a book of autobiography, and these memoirs are far more expressive and revealing than one static book of past autobiography could be.
The gradual telling of her tale feels more in the present, than it does reflection. The recent history of slavery is virtually palpable. The conditions at times seemed little better than the past. Each day the workers started with optimism, but they were trapped in a life from which realistically they could never escape; never being paid enough for their work to get out of debt.
Whatever was given by Black people to other Blacks was most probably needed as desperately by the donor as by the receiver. A fact which made the giving or receiving a rich exchange. These others, the strong pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife, weren't considered folks. They were white-folks. He was my first white love A doctor, a dentist - people who should have been literally indebted to her grandmother because of the financial help she had afforded them in the past - showed truly shocking insulting behaviour when appealed to for help.
The white people almost exclusively treated the black people worse than they would treat their animals. It is difficult to convey without telling the story how each tiny instance was compounded. The book seems to escalate until the reader feels that something has to give. The author reflects that it was perhaps one instance of profound prejudice, which severely affected her brother emotionally, which led to their being sent away from Arkansas.
Their lives from this point take a sudden turn, living with this impulsive beautiful butterfly of a woman with her film-star looks. A crime is committed when Maya is just eight years old. This is brutal; an appalling account to read, both a physically and psychologically raw and graphic description.
The child is the victim, but as so often happens, the victim is convinced that she is somehow guilty. Circumstances force her to tell a small lie, and for this too, she cannot forgive herself. The children return to Momma. The next few years are chronicled in the book with much movement between the adults in the family. They have to cope with extremes in moral codes.
From the earliest chapters the reader has been stunned by the extremist Christian doctrine of their grandmother.
Another small incident which haunts the reader, is Bailey Junior being beaten for yearning so much for his mum, that he watched a similar-looking film star, and was late home.
There are countless such examples. These are very hard to accept, because these two things were perpetrated by the good people - the ones with a sense of duty and responsibility. The ignorant prejudice in the wider community, outside the town of Stamps, was oddly easier to read about than this, which felt like a betrayal by the adults whom the children trusted.
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. What do you think of this poetry? Please add your comment below. Cover Photo: Maya Angelou. Source: WHHY. A free Bird dares to claim the sky, showing how important liberty can be in also achieving the most difficult goals. Whatever stance we take on organisation design and the meaning we give to Work, the idea of enabling freedom also in the workplace is a must to be able to unleash human potential. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.
Learn how your comment data is processed. This entry is part 7 of 9 in the series Poetry and Management. Poetry and Management. Like this: Like Loading In the aftermath of these events, Maya endures the guilt and shame of having been sexually abused.
She also believes that she bears responsibility for Mr. Believing that she has become a mouthpiece for the devil, Maya stops speaking to everyone except Bailey. Bertha Flowers, a kind, educated woman who tells Maya to read works of literature out loud, giving her books of poetry that help her to regain her voice. During these years in Stamps, Maya becomes aware of both the fragility and the strength of her community. She attends a church revival during which a priest preaches implicitly against white hypocrisy through his sermon on charity.
The spiritual strength gained during the sermon soon dissipates as the revival crowd walks home past the honky-tonk party. Maya also observes the entire community listening to the Joe Louis heavyweight championship boxing match, desperately longing for him to defend his title against his white opponent. Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Further Study Go further in your study of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with background information, movie adaptations, and links to the best resources around the web.
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