"Arriving on a nightmare, praying for a dream." That's a line from Maya Angelou's poem "On the Pulse of Morning," which Bill Clinton asked her to compose and recite at his first presidential inauguration in 1993. When we hear her read it in front of the nation's Capitol in PBS's must-see new documentary biopic about her life, And Still I Rise, it sounds like a mantra for this amazing woman's entire life and artistic output.
However, she of course meant it to describe a narrative in which all of us have our roles to play: that of America itself. Angelou never shied away from making the big gesture—it just wasn't in her nature. From that day forward, especially, she was such a prominent presence in our popular culture that it's easy to assume that you know this woman, know her story, know her gifts.
Sure, you probably know about I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the blockbuster 1969 bestseller in which Angelou described her childhood and coming of age. That book, for better or worse, practically reinvented the personal memoir as a dramatic genre featuring recreated dialogue and other factual embellishments; but the emotional truth of it—scarred by virtual orphanhood, sexual abuse and domestic violence, five years of traumatized mutism, and repeated sudden relocations and dislocations—comes across as brutally honest.
But maybe you don't know that in the end Angelou wrote a total of six autobiographical sequels to Caged Bird—or that the last one (Mom & Me & Mom, 2013) is arguably as illuminating and moving as the first installment was.
And maybe you don't know that Angelou wrote film scripts—even composed a music score to one—and, aside from her three Grammy-winning spoken-word albums, wrote music with the likes of Roberta Flack, Ashford & Simpson, and the rapper Common, who, in a protracted segment in And Still I Rise, describes with amusem*nt and joy how he tangled with Angelou over his use of the n-word on his 2011 album The Dreamer/The Believer, to which she contributed a spoken-word track.
And you probably don't know that Angelou accosted a profanity-spouting Tupac Shakur on the set of John Singleton's 1993 film Poetic Justice, took him aside, and reduced him to tears—in a good way—by talking with him about how sexist slang and racial slurs are an artifact of African American degradation and powerlessness. Angelou was dead certain that such words could not, as the standard argument contends, be appropriated and revalued—to her they were a poison chalice, pure and simple.
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8WO8Sb_lbc&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
What you gather by degrees as you watch And Still I Rise is how that kind of courage in the face of seemingly hopeless odds is central to Angelou's moral vision. Only a few other figures, such as the incomparable Nina Simone, come to mind as rivaling Angelou's insistence on the gravity and importance of lonely dissidence through the decades-long unraveling of Jim Crow, the assassination of figures such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (both of whom had beckoned Angelou to make common cause with them in the months before their deaths), and the longer struggle to make good on the promise of the civil rights movement.
Angelou's deep, sentimentally supercharged vision of African American history on the broadest scale fueled her moral authority; and it seems clear that she saw her own life as a recapitulation of that story, rising from scant and seemingly doomed beginnings to the highest kinds of cultural achievement. (Maybe you forgot that Angelou starred in the epochal 1977 TV miniseries Roots; maybe you never even knew that she toured the world in the mid-1950s performing in Porgy & Bess, then became a star of the Calypso craze in 1957, making an album and touring as a singer; it goes on: What did this woman not do?)
[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xax5_TskpE4&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
There's so much else to be savored in And Still I Rise: Angelou living in Cairo with a South African anti-apartheid activist; Angelou encountering the legendary founding father of African American history, W.E.B. Du Bois, while living in Accra, Ghana; Angelou meeting, and adoring, the young James Baldwin in Paris in the early 1950s; Angelou having a whirl (and not just an artistic one, we are given to understand) with B.B. King; that time she married the ex of Germaine Greer; that conversation she had with Dave Chappelle just after he walked away from his $50 million contract. It just goes on and on. At a loss for how else to describe her, John Singleton says of Angelou, "You have a woman who is like a tree trunk…like a redwood." He's talking about her majesty.
Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise airs on PBS on 21 February at 8 P.M.
