Maya Angelou: Author of famed ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’
● 1928-2014
MAYA Angelou, who has died at the age of 86, was a poet, playwright, filmmaker, journalist, editor, lyricist, teacher, singer, dancer, activist, professor and holder of about 50 honorary degrees. She was principally famous, however, for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a memoir of her dirt-poor upbringing in Arkansas.
When the book was published in 1969, it was a revelation. Narrated in the pulpit-influenced cadences of the black American South, it described a world completely alien to its mainly white, metropolitan readership.
It told how, after her parents divorced, Angelou’s father sent her and her elder brother, Bailey, from their home in St Louis to live with their paternal grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. Aged three and four, the two children arrived at the station wearing wrist tags reading “To Whom It May Concern”.
During a brief return to St Louis to live with their mother, at the age of seven Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Soon after she identified him as the rapist in court, he was murdered — kicked to death — by some of her uncles. For the next five years the young Angelou became a voluntary mute, believing her voice had killed him and that, if she spoke again, she might kill someone else.
Coaxed out of silence by a teacher who encouraged her love of reading with Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe and the Bröntes, as well as black writers such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, she eventually joined her mother in California, won a scholarship to study drama and dance, and at the age of 17 became an unmarried mother.
Freshly and vividly written, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings became the first nonfiction work by a black woman to make US bestseller lists. Other volumes of autobiography followed, charting Angelou’s career as a waitress, brothel madam, prostitute, singer, bus conductress, actress and activist; as a dancer in Paris, an editor in Egypt and a journalist and university administrator in Ghana.
She described her relationship with SA activist Vusumzi Make, who she said tried, but failed, to possess her
As a woman and as a black American who had surmounted oppression, Angelou became a symbol for the post-segregation era and a celebrity on the lecture circuit. Her name appeared on everything from book ends to pillows and mugs, and her rhymes on Hallmark greetings cards.
In 1993, she was chosen by president Bill Clinton to recite her poem On the Pulse of the Morning at his inauguration.
Yet nothing ever equalled her first book. As she became more and more famous, her memoirs became increasingly self-congratulatory in tone. Critics noted that she had adopted all the clichés of her friend Oprah Winfrey’s aspirational narrative of “healing” and “empowerment”. The “diva”, one reviewer observed, had “come to believe her own hype”.
She was born Marguerite Ann Johnson (Maya was her brother Bailey’s diminutive) in St Louis, Missouri, on April 4 1928. Her father was a doorman and US Navy dietitian; her mother was a nurse and card dealer.
After living with their grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou and her brother returned to live in Oakland, California, with their mother, a tiny, forthright woman with a colourful turn of phrase (“I’d rather be bitten on the rear by a snaggle-toothed mule than take that shit” was one of her sayings). Before leaving school, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.
Angelou’s son, Guy, born in California when she was 17, was the result of her first sexual experiment, prompted by a desire to clarify her sexuality after she had convinced herself, from reading The Well of Loneliness, that she was becoming a lesbian.
Her second book of memoirs, Gather Together in My Name (1974), described her life as an unemployed single mother who embarked on brief affairs and transient jobs before descending into poverty and the fringes of crime and prostitution.
She had a brief marriage to “Tosh” (Enistasious Angelos), a jazz-loving man of Greek descent. After the marriage ended in 1954, she continued to dance and sing calypso professionally, touring in Porgy and Bess and changing her stage name from Marguerite Johnson to Maya Angelou.
In 1959, Angelou met the novelist James Killens, who suggested she move to New York to concentrate on her writing.
In The Heart of a Woman (1981), she described her immersion in the Harlem world of black writers and artists and her work with Martin Luther King.
She also described her relationship with the South African rights activist Vusumzi Make — a man, by her account, of unlimited sex appeal who tried, but failed, to possess her body and soul and with whom she moved to Cairo, where she became the associate editor of the Englishlanguage Arab Observer.
All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes (1986) charted her three-year stay in Accra, Ghana, after the break-up of her relationship with Make. She was an administrator at the University of Ghana and active in the African-American expatriate community.
Angelou embraced some unpredictable political stand- points over the years. In 2008, she backed Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama — who, in 2010, presented Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Mom & Me & Mom, an overview of her life, was published last year.
Angelou never clarified the number of times she had been married, “for fear of sounding frivolous”, although it was at least twice.
She is survived by her son. — © The Daily Telegraph, London