Angelou: a lifetime of courage
Writer and activist agrees social problems persist
You’ve lived life well when world leaders seek your nod.
To this, Maya Angelou half sings, “I’m grateful to be a person that they take endorsements from, because it means people trust me. And so really the first thing is I’m grateful to be trusted.”
Still, appearing in a video supporting President Barack Obama’s re-election — and even reading a poem she wrote at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inauguration ceremony — are far from the greatest achievements of Angelou, the artist activist and renaissance rebel who speaks at the Winspear Centre on Thursday night.
Angelou overcame a yearslong childhood silence after being raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She transcended to iconic American writer, poet, actor and even filmmaker, helping both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. grow their movements before each was assassinated. The losses devastated her. “One of the things that very few people realize about Malcolm and about Martin Luther King is that both men had tremendous senses of humour,” Angelou, 84, remembers over the phone from her North Carolina home. “And when relaxed, they would tell a joke, something on themselves, that would not make them seem as smart, as clever, as courageous, as far-seeing. And I loved that. Malcolm and I became really great friends, brother and sister friends.”
The writer tells the story of a woman approaching her at a New York party, saying she was meeting Maya Angelou, asking if Angelou knew her. “I said, ‘I’m as close to her as I am to you now.’ And she asked me what did I mean and I said, ‘I’m Maya Angelou!’ and we looked at each other and we just started laughing.” This was Malcolm X’s wife Betty Shabazz, and the two had a lifelong friendship, Angelou in hospital comforting Shabazz days before she succumbed to burns following a fire lit by her grandson. But Angelou remembers with love: “She said that Malcolm would come home and talk about how bright this woman Maya Angelou was. She told him, ‘If you mention her name in here one more time I’m putting you out of the house!’ She wasn’t at all afraid that we would be more intimate — he just admired me that much,” she laughs.
Persevering after the two murders, Angelou began writing an epic personal account of the 20th century, and her autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is fresh, still shocking and hilarious 42 years after its publication, the metaphors within tangy and delicious, full of funny references to peeing her pants. At the time, Angelou joined a wave of African-American writers revealing the barbarism of systemic racism that hypocritically claimed to be more civilized. But Angelou’s recollections are so tangibly personal they still have Oprah Winfrey laying praise at her feet, and inspire in and out of classrooms, where the book is occasionally banned to this day.
In Bird, the St. Louis-born memoirist describes living when and where people actively schemed for her destruction. “It’s probably like walking on a bridge over an ocean of sharks and alligators. One is always a little afraid. Fear becomes a part of the atmosphere. The only time you’re really at home is when the door is closed and you’re among your own people, speaking a language I call the sweet language … where you speak more slowly and drop the g’s off the end of words. And more often than not, use ‘honey’ and ‘baby’ to pronounce what your intentions are.”
Angelou’s inspirational quotes pollinate the Internet, but she addresses language’s shifting delivery, and the panic surrounding it. “Well, you know, it is said of Napoleon that he would rather face six well-armed military adversaries than six disgruntled journalists. I’ve tried to find that again; I read that 25 or 30 years ago, and I can’t find it anywhere. I know I didn’t make it up. I’m clever but I wouldn’t have thought of putting words in Napoleon’s mouth.
“We’ve not always been readers,” stresses the Tony-, Grammy- and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient.
“The majority of the time until 100 years ago, people were illiterate or semi-illiterate. I think we’ll find artists on the Internet, we’ll find people born into this world of technology and I think the human beings will be as creative and come up with something absolutely new. As new as widespread reading would have been in the 17th century. I’m not worried at all. As long as human beings realize that language is simply a tool. It’s a way in which one human being says to the other, ‘I’m cold. I’m hungry. I’m lonely. I like you.’ ”
One of many great moments in her books recounts the feeling of community elation as Joe Louis wins the heavyweight championship, which she measures against Obama winning in 2008.
“There were some of the same feelings,” she says. “But the people who voted for President Obama were not only just black people — because they couldn’t have brought in the sheriff; they’re not that big a population.”
Also, they “had not really been raised with such fear (as in the past). It was not in the soup they ate and the coffee they drank.”
She agrees problems persist, especially in an environment where politicians like Mitt Romney openly state they don’t care about the poor. “Usually that goes with pride before a fall. There will be some comeuppance to be paid for this. This is the climate in which revolutions are formed. And so we must be careful and wary and cautious and wise. My encouragement to people who move too fast and move without thinking is stop. Just stop. If you don’t know what to do, do nothing. Don’t try to work it out, just calm your heart. Calm yourself. And before you know it, an idea will come. In the silence you might even hear the voice of God.
“We shouldn’t expect just because we’re born, we’re born with courage. I don’t think so.
“If you wanted to build a house, you wouldn’t just start out and get yourself some wood and some nails and a hammer. You’d do a plan, do some small thing. Make a birdhouse. Make a hut. Little by little you’d learn.
“I think you develop courage the same way. So that’s one way to start — just do courageous things.
“Get up and give an older person a seat, no matter what anyone says. If someone knocks a person, belittles a person in his absence, stand up for him. Say ‘I don’t know him to be that mean,’ ‘I don’t know her to be that way.’ Little by little not only do you develop courage but you develop a liking for yourself.”
Angelou admits she’s still afraid sometimes. Of what, exactly, she laughs, teasing “I can’t tell you!”
By this, she means won’t, of course, and promptly doesn’t.