Rowling tribute to ‘utterly amazing’ Angelou
JK Rowling has described the author and poet Maya Angelou as an “utterly amazing” woman following her death aged 86.
The Edinburgh-based novelist tweeted a quote from US-born Angelou, a Grammy winner for her spoken word books, who died at home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Rowling wrote: “If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be. Maya Angelou” before adding her own touching tribute.
Dr Angelou was a prolific African-American author whose numerous awards including being honoured last year by America’s National Book Awards for her service to the literary community.
Her g round-breaking autobiography I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, a coming-of-age story in a hostile society in the American South in the 1930s and 1940s that deals with racism and rape, is a classic.
San Franciso’s first black streetcar conductor [aged 16] published another book about her upbringing, Mom & Me & Mom, just last year.
“She was beyond simply being a writer of autobiography and poetry. I think she transcended the idea of writ- ing and using writing as a transcendence medium to further the individual,” Harold Augenbraum, executive director of The National Book Foundation said.
Dr Angelou was a Reynolds professor of US studies
Dr Angelou was a national treasure whose life and teachings inspired millions around the world, including countless students
at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salum. A spokesman said: “Dr. Angelou was a national treasure whose life and teachings inspired millions around the world. including countless students, faculty, and staff.”
Singer Cyndi Lauper tweeted: “She was a great light in the world.”
Mary J Bilge’s tribute included by quote by the professor that read: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone said she was “an incredible woman, writer and poet.”
Dr Angelou, who has 411,000 followers on the micro-blogging site, poignantly tweeted six days ago: “Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God.”
Writer and poet Born: April 4, 1928; Died: May 28, 2014
WHEN Maya Angelou, who has died aged 86, stepped on stage at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh, she won the hearts of her female audience with her opening words. “We. Are. Phenomenal. Women!” she cried, with a suggestive swing of her dancer’s hips. Her lipsticked smile, and even brighter eyes, encouraged – indeed commanded – her listeners to feel good about themselves, whatever their colour, age, or looks.
And we did, so long as we were in her company. A woman to whom the platform was as much home as her kitchen, Angelou was a born performer. Witty, roistering, warm and salty, she was bewitching. That performance took place in the late 1980s, but well into her eighties she was making 80 appearances a year.
Watching her, it was hard to imagine the desperate conditions in which she began life. Angelou’s CV was giddyingly varied and full, as her books relate. For many of us, she was first encountered in her bestselling memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), her haunting, harrowing, and blackly humorous account of her childhood.
In that tale, which still stands as one of the most powerful autobiographies of her generation, she depicted her rape by her mother’s boyfriend when she was seven. For five years after that, Angelou did not speak except to her older brother Bailey. It was not the rape that silenced her, but the fact that shortly after she named her abuser, he was found beaten to death behind a slaughter house, presumably by Angelou’s relatives. Terrified that if she spoke again somebody else would die, she turned mute. As she wrote, “I had to stop talking. I walked into rooms where people were laughing, their voices hitting the walls like stones, and I simply stood still — in the midst of a riot of sound. After a minute or two, silence would rush into the room from its hiding place because I had eaten up all the sounds.”
It was her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, who encouraged Angelou to turn to writing, but long before then her artistry had been apparent. Born Marguerite Ann Johnson in St Louis, Missouri, to a doorman and dietition father and a mother who was a card dealer, she and her brother were shuttled between their mother in California, and her grandmother in Arkansas when the marriage collapsed. Tellingly, it was a teacher and family friend who introduced her to books and encouraged her to speak again by urging her to recite Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. This revealed not just her excellent memory, but her appreciation of fine literature. She later said her first white love was Shakespeare.
Shortly after graduating from the California Labor School in dance and drama, the 17-year-old Angelou had her only child, Clyde (later called Guy). In the second of her seven-part autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she portrayed “a single mother’s slide down the social ladder into poverty and crime”, which, because she had fallen in love with a pimp, included a spell working as a brothel madam and prostitute. Ahorrifying glimpse of a heroin addict’s existence turned her life around, and by the 1950s she was making a name for herself as Maya Angelou, performing as a singer-dancer in San Francisco, touring Europe and Africa in a production of Porgy and Bess, and recording her first album, Miss Calypso in 1957, when she returned to the US.
A friend and associate of Malcolm X, whom she met while she was living in Akkra, Angelou was drawn into the civil rights movement. His death horrified her as, some years later, did that of Martin Luther King junior, with whom she was collaborating on arranging a protest march. Following his death, she made an extraordinary 10-part documentary series, Black, Blues, Black, about the role of African culture in America. Shortly after, she wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird sings, which in its opening pages states: “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.” With that line, her literary territory was marked out.
The book’s wildfire success gained her an international reputation, and in time she went on to write six further volumes of autobiography. The most recent, Mom& Me & Mom, appeared last year. Across her career she wrote more than 30 books, including poetry - perhaps most famously the collection And Still I Rise (1978) - and essays, plays, children’s and cookery books. Although Angelou’s work could be erratic, and was controversial in some quarters for its mockery of religion and sexual frankness, she was enormously popular, and never more so than after President Bill Clinton invited her to recite her poem On the Pulse of Morning at his 1993 inauguration.
In the opinion of Arnold Rampersad, professor emeritus of English at Stanford University: “She brought an understanding of the dilemmas and dangers and exhilarations of black womanhood more to the fore than almost any autobiographer before her time. She challenged assumptions about what was possible for a poor black girl from the South, and she emerged as a figure of courage, honesty and grace.” In doing so, she took her place alongside her compatriots Alice Walker and Toni Morrison as the country’s most eminent writers about black women’s experience, their work proving a turning point for American literature.
Angelou’s method of writing was eccentric. She would book herself into a hotel room from morning to afternoon, with a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards, Roget’s Thesaurus and the Bible. Added to this ritual, she told one audience, “I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.”
Vivacious, gentle, thoughtful and imperious, Angelou never admitted how many times she had been married for fear of appearing “frivolous”. When President Obama was elected president, she joyfully remarked, “We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism.” If that is true, then she played a great part in making it so.
She is survived by her one son, Clyde “Guy” Johnson.