Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson) was an American poet, novelist, singer, civil rights activist, and memoirist. In her literary career, she published three books of essays, seven autobiographies based on different stages in her life, and numerous books of poetry. She is also recognized for her television shows, movies, and plays. She received more than fifty honorary degrees and dozens of awards.
Angelou is recognized for her seven autobiographies. She discusses her childhood and early adult experiences in her autobiographies. Her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was published in 1966. In this book, she focuses on her childhood and teenage life for up to 17 years. This autobiography was internationally recognized and brought approval.
She did a series of jobs as a young adult. These jobs include fry cook, performer, nightclub dancer, sex worker, coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the actor of the opera Porgy and Bess, and also did journalism in Ghana and Egypt during the decolonization in Africa.
Afterward, she became a poet. In 1982, at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, she was titled as the first Reynolds Professor of American Studies. She was also an active member of the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Malcolm X. and Martin Luther King Jr. from the 1990s, on the lecture circuit, she would make around 80 appearances annually. She also continues to appear on the lecture circuit in her eighties.
She also recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration ceremony of Bill Clinton in 1993. She is the first poem to do an inaugural recitation after Robert Frost, who recited at the inauguration ceremony of John F. Kennedy in 1961.
Angelou discussed the aspects of personal life publically with her publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She was a respected spokesperson for women and black people. Her works are regarded as a defense of black culture. Even though various attempts have been made to ban her publications in the libraries of the U.S., her books are widely included in the school curriculum and studied in universities across the world.
The most celebrated books of Angelou are labeled as autobiographical fiction. However, many critics do not consider them fiction but pure autobiographies. By changing, critiquing, and expanding the genre of autobiography, Angelou deliberately tried to challenge the ordinary and conventional structure of the autobiography.
A Short Biography of Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Johnson) was born on 4th April 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. When she was three years old, her parents got separated. Maya and her brother went to live in Stamps, Arkansas, with her grandmother. She was raped by the boyfriend of her mother when she was only eight years old. When Angelou discloses the incident, her uncle killed the culprit. She was not able to speak for the next five years after being frightened by the power of her words.
In 1940, Maya and her brother shifted to San Francisco with her mother. There, Angelou started taking dance classes, and then finally gave auditions for professional theatre. At the age of 16, she had a son, which made her hold her plans for a while. She then shifted to San Diego and started working as a waitress in a nightclub. She was tangled with prostitution, drugs, and also danced in a strip club. Over there, she was discovered by a theatre group, and her career was saved, ironically.
She auditioned for Porgy and Bess with other women. She won a role for an international tour. She traveled to 22 countries from 1954 to 1955.
She shifted to New York in 1956. In New York, she became associated with leading Harlem writers. She also involved herself in the Civil Rights Movement. With her boyfriend, she shifted to Egypt in 1961. Over there, she became an editor of Arab Observer. She left her boyfriend and headed to Ghana.
A car accident in Ghana relentlessly injured her son. Besides taking care of her son, she also started a job at a news channel, African Review. She stayed in Ghana for several years. Under the renaissance of African culture, she developed and flourished personally and so as her writings.
Angelou published the multi-volume autobiography when she went back to the U.S. The first volume was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It was followed by four more volumes in the next twenty years. Along with autobiographies, she also published numerous books of poetry. At the Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, she was appointed as a Professor of American Studies in 1981.
She recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the inauguration ceremony of Bill Clinton in 1993. She receives various honorary degrees and dozens of other awards. On 28th May 2014, she died in North Carolina at the age of 86.
Maya Angelou’s Writing Style
General Characteristic of Maya Angelou’s Style
Maya Angelou is an Afro-American writer. She is best recognized for her seven autobiographies. She was also a productive and successful poet. The poetic and prosaic style of Maya Angelo has many similarities. In poetry and prose both, she employs direct and informal voice. Her stories are welcoming for readers as she is inviting them to share her secrets with them. She also used persuasive and strong similes and metaphors. In her first novel/autobiography, she used the best metaphor in the title: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She compares herself with the caged bird.
Angelou considers herself as a playwright and a poet. In 1969, she wrote Caged Bird, which brought her recognition and approval across the world. Many readers regard her first as a poet and then an autobiographer. However, she is more recognized for her prose works. She published numerous collections of poetry and is equally acclaimed as a poet. She would also alternate her autobiographies with her poetry in her early career.
Throughout her writing (both in poetry and autobiographies), Angelou explores almost the same themes. These themes are painful loss, love, music, racism, struggle, and discrimination. Angelou’s poetry is mainly about relationships, love, and overcoming hardships. The metaphors she used in her poetry function as litotes or “coding.” These metaphors would only be understood by black people. However, her themes and subject matter are applied universally.
In her works, Maya Angelou employs everyday language, the Black vernacular. She employs the black form of rhetorical techniques such as surprising language. In her poetry, she uses the music and form of black people. She also occasionally uses vulgar language and conventionally unaccepted subjects. In her autobiographies and all other works in general, she does not speak for her but for the whole world. She did not confine her works to any particular gender or race.
Through her autobiographies and poems, she employs the themes of mild protest. Through humor, she injects hope into black people. She talks about suffering and hardships experienced by her race in her works.
Many critics regard her autobiographies as more significant than her poetry. Her poetic books have been the best-sellers; they are not studied much. Her popular success and preference of critics for the written form of poetry rather than spoken or performed is the reason for lack of critical acclaim.
Style of Poetry
At a very young age, Angelou started studying and writing poetry. To cope with the trauma of her life, she would engage herself with writing poetry and other literary works. After a little series of the job, she became a poet. She was a performer of calypso music in a nightclub. The songs she wrote during this period were placed in her poetry collections.
It is very hard to classify the writing style of Maya Angelou. She never employed any specific or one set of the rhyming scheme in her poetry. But in many poems, she used a specific type of dialect called Black Secular. This dialect is the most simplified form of the English language. She also employed metaphors related to black slavery in her works.
Angelou also employed a form response or call form. This form creates a sort of verbal interaction between the poet and readers. She uses this technique in her poems, such as “Sepia Fashion Show,” And Still I Rise.” She wrote her most poems in this style with the employment of metaphors that are truly understood by black people.
She used her poetry to encourage black people to protest against the government. The government has banned the teaching of Black Secular speech in school. Moreover, in her poetry, she also showed racism in her poetry that is still prevalent in America and protested against them. Maya Angelou has been considered as the poet laureate of black women. Her poems are regarded as the anthems of African Americans.
Maya Angelou herself said that in terms of patter, her poems follow the model based on blues. Her poetry has a verse that is followed by a chorus. Her poems that reflect this style are “Phenomenal women,” and “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
Being grown up as a black woman in America, and listening to blues music has significantly influenced her writing style. She also used this style because it was invented by black slaves. This music was created to express their grief and miseries and to recount their stories. Maya Angelou was doing the same with her poetry.
Angelou’s poetry cannot be placed in the category of techniques or themes. Her poetry is most of the time compared with the musical form of music, especially with the blues singers and blues form. To cope with minor sadness, suffering, or irritation, she employs laughter or ridicules that tears.
Maya Angelou’s Writing Style in Prose
In her prose work, Maya Angelou employed a unique style. Angelou was challenged by Robert Loomis, a publisher from Random House, to write an account of her own life with the merit of literature. This spurred her, and to accomplish her achievement, Angelou wrote the most celebrated autobiography/novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Her first prose work and the succeeding volumes shared the two genres of literature. They were novel/literary fiction because they employed widespread themes. They were autobiographical because they were based on her personal experience, narrated in her own perspective. Even though in her biography, Angelou talks about her personal experiences of living and growing as a black woman, she also associates her experience with all those black women who are struggling hard to overcome sexism, racism, and isolation.
Maya Angelou wrote five other biographies after I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing. In these biographies, she studies and explored sex, race, and identity with clear and persistent directedness. In her first autobiography/novel, she wrote that for the southern, if growing up is painful, then being conscious about her dislocation is like “rust on the razor that threatens the throat.”
Through her prose works, Angelou slows her readers to peer into her personal life. She describes her efforts to raise her son, Guy Johnson, in her book Singin’ and Swingin. She talks about her determination to raise him by working as a shake dancer in nightclubs, dinner cook, fry cook, and also had worked in a mechanic’s shop. She also gives details about her life as a prostitute. An intimate outlook of Angelou’s experiences is provided to the readers through her frank and conversational tone.
Angelou’s books have been placed in the genre of autobiographical fiction as she employed the style and technique of fiction writing in her work. These techniques include characterization, dialogue, and development of setting, theme, plot, and language. To change the common structure of her autobiographies, she makes intentional changes in her structure of autobiography. She changed the genre by expanding and criticizing it.
A literary scholar Mary Jane Lupton says that the autobiographies of Angelou are conformed to the standard structure of the genre. For instance, they are chronological, written by one author, and also contain the elements of themes, technique, and character. Maya Angelou herself recognizes the aspect of functionality in her work. Likewise, Lupton argues that in her autobiographies, Angelou intentionally deviated from the conventional idea of “autobiography as truth.” Moreover, the autobiographies of Angelou are similar to the conventional autobiographies of the abolitionist period by African-Americans in the history of the U.S.
During that period, as maintained by Lupton and Crispin Starwell, an Africa-American scholar, out of the need for self-protection, the truth was censored. Similarly, Lyman B. Hagen also places Angelou in the autobiographical tradition of African-America. However, she also asserts that a unique interpretation of the form of autobiography was created by Angelou.
The African-American authors had to confirm their status as literature before they could achieve any political goal through their works. This was the major challenge for the African-American history of literature. That is why; Robert Loomis dared Angelou to write an autobiography on the merit of literature. Narrating her story in the first person singular pronoun “I” for first-person plural “we,” Angelou realized that she was following the tradition of the slave narrative.
A literary scholar John McWhorter regards the biographies of Angelou as “tracts.” She defends African-American culture and fights against negative stereotypes. Angelou structured her books to support her defense of black culture. Her structuring of books makes it appear to be written for children than adults.
In her autobiographies, Maya Angelou portrays herself as a sort of stand-in figure for the “black American in Troubled Times.” Though McWhorter regards her prose work as old-fashioned, he also asserts that her works have helped to pave the road for other contemporary black writers. These black writers are now enjoying the luxury of representing themselves, not their race.
The writing of Angelou has been compared to the writings of Frederick Douglass by Lyn Z. Bloom. She states that both writers achieve the same purpose of describing the black culture and to explaining and interpreting it to the white and wider audience.
According to McWhorter, the language and people that Angelou used in her autobiographies are unrealistic. This results in the parting between her audience and her. She says that she has never read an autobiography in which she could struggle to understand how people talk. Moreover, she would also find it difficult to recognize who is talking. The speech of Angelou, her son, and her mother do not speak the way one expects them; their speech is clear for the readers.
For example, Guy reflects a young black male, whereas her mother, Vivian, is portrayed as a perfect motherly figure. The rigid language Angelou used in her dialogues, as well as in the text, is trying to show that blacks can also speak and use Standard English fully.
The apologetic nature of Angelou’s writing makes her style unique. Organic unity was the basic feature of the time of literature that she was to achieve and satisfy the criterion. She crafted the events in her book like short stories and made it episodic. However, the arrangements of events were not strictly chronological. These events and episodes were placed to highlight the main themes of her book. These themes include family, travel, identity, and racism.
Beside I Know Why Caged Bird Sings, she also wrote numerous other novels. In this novel, she narrates her account of life from age one to seventeen. Her second autobiography/novel Gather Together in My Name was published in 1974 is the narration of her account of experiences as a mother with her son. The third and fourth book, Singin’ and Swingin’ and Getting Merry Like Christmas, were published in 1976 and account for four of her experiences as a dancer. In this book, she also narrates her traveling experience with Porgy and Bess.
Her book, The Heart of the Woman, published in 1981, is about the 1950s and 1960s life of Angelou. In this book, she narrates her relationship with her son and her time in California. In another novel, All God’s Children Needs Travelling Shoes, published in 1986, accounts for her life as a social activist in The Civil Rights Movement. Through her book, Angelou puts forward her emotional life with her readers and celebrates it. She published her last novel A Song Flung Up to Heaven, in 2002. This novel accounts of Maya’s experiences when Marther Luther King was assassinated.
The themes that are found in her plays and poetry are also found in her autobiographical novels. These themes were oppression, racial discrimination, a celebration of black beauty, and self-acceptance. Maya Angelou was the first Afro-American writer who discussed her life and experiences in her autobiographies. The majority of the African writers of her time did not want to talk about their nugatory lives in their works.
However, Maya Angelou not only succeeded in depicting her life, but she also exhibits her life with pleasure and pride. Her first two novels/autobiography were also critically praised. All of her novels/autobiographies are accounting for different stages of her life. Her first two novels/autobiographies reflect the themes of struggle for identity, the realization of black grandeur, steady realization, and recognition of black motherhood and womanhood. All her themes carry a particular style of writing, which affects the memory of readers. The greatness of Angelou is highly reflected in her autobiographies.
