Renaissance woman Maya Angelou finds courage at the heart of all things
Storied speaker, writer and activist holds court with rapt audience in Vancouver
Maya Angelou
Oct. 29 | The Centre In Vancouver for Performing Arts
At 84, Maya Angelou has finally found her calling.
The renaissance woman is a threetime Grammy winner, actress, activist, playwright, producer, translator, singer and dancer, but she’s most often described as a writer, having penned autobiographies, essays, cookbooks, children’s lit and volumes of poetry — one of which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
The St. Louis, M. I.- born Angelou is also a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and has received over 30 honorary degrees but her most recent lecture hall was the Centre for Performing Arts on Monday night in Vancouver.
“Some people have jobs, other people have careers. Some of us have callings. I’m happy to say people listen to me,” she said by phone ahead of Monday’s event.
“I used to think I was a writer who could teach until I began to teach formally. And I realized I’m not a writer who can teach. I’m a teacher who can write. I’m a teacher. That’s my calling.”
Angelou appeared onstage in Vancouver in a clingy red dress and red shoes, sitting for the duration of her one- hour talk perched on the arm of a chair, the stage dressed to look like your grandmother’s living room. It was an ideal setting for the folksy wisdom Angelou doled out to a rapt, largely female audience.
By turns singing, reciting poetry and telling stories in her sonorous voice, Angelou told variously of being
When they have enough courage, people dare to be the rainbow in somebody’s cloud.
MAYA ANGELOU WRITER
chastised for smoking in a health- food restaurant, standing up to 20th Century Fox executives, being raped by her mother’s boyfriend as a child and silencing herself for five years; she also spoke of re- learning to speak with the guidance of her grandmother, of being 17, black and pregnant, and of longing to be included in the first United Nations conference in San Francisco where she was living in 1945 — all with the same characteristic frankness.
Despite covering a span of decades and topics, Angelou has said she really talks about just one thing — putting some “starch in your spine.”
“It has been said that a serious, great speaker has five different topics but one theme. If I was going to speak about diminishing land for elephants in Uganda, I would find some way to get courage in there,” she told The Sun from her home in WinstonSalem, N. C. “That’s what I’m always speaking about. I may never mention the word, but I will be talking about courageous human beings, and how all of us has courage.”
At the theatre, Angelou did mention the word, always in the context of empathy and civility being brave acts.
“When they have enough courage, people dare to be the rainbow in somebody’s cloud,” she told the audience.
She encouraged listeners to seek out librarians, who “have the magic,” to discover diverse cultures and people through poetry, referencing the American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose poem Sympathy was the inspiration for the title of Angelou’s bestloved book and childhood memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Angelou, who was awarded the 2011 Presidential Medal of Freedom, has also used her poetry for political effect. She was commissioned to write and read On the Pulse of Morning for Bill Clinton’s 1993 presidential inauguration and endorsed Hillary Clinton’s run for the Democratic Party nomination, and then stumped for Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. She’s following next week’s election closely.
“I don’t think anyone can stay above the fray. ( Politics) has its impact on all of us. We may not join in the fray; that is, become as rude and brass as some of the people in the fray. But it’s in the air we breathe,” she said.
“I wish all the candidates would just take the high road, and talk about what good they will do, not just talk about how bad the other fella is.”
For that to come true, the candidates might need to check some of Angelou’s teachings out of the library.