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Caged Bird Metaphors

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In the memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou forms a connection with her reader through relatable stories with intimate details of her discomfort to convey her message of the hardships she faced as being an outcast in a community that is full of outcasts from society. Angelou at a young age wants to her peers to accept her, but instead, when she pees her pants in church, she ends up yet again an outsider as “giggles hung in the air” from the other Sunday school children (5). She uses descriptive words and phrases to trigger the reader to remember times in their life when they had gone through an uncomfortable and embarrassing situation. Not fitting into the community Angelou believes that she should be white, but instead, something
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Maya Angelou’s excerpt from “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” will imaginatively take a reader away from their deskbound position to envisioning the stage of a play ornamented with fashioned rabbits, buttercups, and daisies, hearing children as they actively perfect their performance, and stimulate the readers’ appetite with the expressive words she uses to describe sweet whiffs of cinnamon and chocolate from the food samples being prepared. From Angelou’s portrayal of the play an individual will be capable of picturing white rabbits crafted from construction paper and cotton balls modelling puffy tails, together with, yellow and pink card board cut outs resembling buttercups and daisies decking a stage. The person who reads this excerpt

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Rhetorical Analysis: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings In her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelo commemorates and admires strong independent black women and strives to become a well-educated woman herself. Through the use of visual imagery, Angelou describes Mrs. Flowers as a refined black woman to convey to the audience a feeling of pride and recognition for all sophisticated black women and a sense of empathy for Maya. Maya compares Mrs. Flowers to the “women in English novels” who had the luxury to sit “in front of roaring fireplaces” and drink “tea incessantly from silver trays” (93). The visual description of the “fireplace” and “tea” demonstrates to the reader the value that white women have in this society.

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Maya Angelou published her novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the late 1960s to shed light on her personal experiences as a girl growing up in the segregated South. She writes unfiltered depictions of rape and sexual abuse, along with topics such as racism and teenage pregnancy. Her novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings became censored in America in 2002 due to these topics. Regardless of this novel being censored, it holds significant value in the lessons it teaches.

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Maya Angelou wrote I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings to present how negroes were treated and the hardships they were put through during the time this book was written. Angelou uses rhetorical devices throughout the book to display her thoughts and give us a better understanding of what she was going through. One of the rhetorical devices that she uses is imagery. She uses detailed descriptions of what she was put through as an African American female to give us a more intimate view of how she was oppressed. Another one of Angelou’s rhetorical strategies is symbolism.

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III. a. Maya Angelou was an avid writer, speaker, activist and teacher. As a result of the many hardships that she suffered while growing up as a poor black woman in the south she has used her own experiences as the subject matter of her written work. In doing this she effectively shows how she was able to overcome her personal obstacles. Her autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) tells the story of her life and how she overcame and moved forward triumphantly in spite of her circumstances.

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802 Words | 4 Pages

Maya Angelou recalls the first seventeen years of her life, discussing her unsettling childhood in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya and Bailey were sent from California to the segregated South to live with their grandmother, Momma. At the age of eight, Maya went to stay with her mother in St. Louis, where she was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. Maya confronts these traumatic events of her childhood and explores the evolution of her own strong identity. Her individual and cultural feelings of displacement, caused by these incidents of sexual abuse, are mediated through her love for literature.

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Caged Bird Slavery left several African Americans traumatized. It showed how people were before and after. Paul Laurence Dunbar and Maya Angelou’s poems both express the way people who are oppressed by inequality, discrimination, and unjust laws through the central idea of the caged bird.

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“I WOULD BE A CONDUCTORETTE ND SLING A FULL MONEY CHANGER FROM MY BELT”Maya was told she was not going to be successful because of her skin tone. Maya was discriminated against and judged her whole life but something inside her would not let her stop striving for success. The historical setting of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, encouraged Maya to be a strong and persistent person because of events that occurred in her life. There had been many female streetcar conductors; however, there had not been any African American female streetcar conductors.

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Jackson Gage 1 June 2023 Period 1 Option #1 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Essay Imagine living every day knowing that you could be slaughtered for something as simple as the color of your skin. What may seem like a horror story was an everyday reality for Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Some have argued that growing up in Stamps was difficult for Maya due to her trauma.

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Family can be regarded as a strength or a weakness; it can build one up or tear one down. Marguerite Johnson faces a great deal of family related predicaments throughout the autobiographical narrative I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. Specifically, her relationship and experiences with her grandmother, father, and mother play a large role in her personal development. Marguerite’s complicated family experiences cause short-term grief but ultimately strengthen her character. Momma is an influential character in Marguerite’s life.

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Maya Angelou’s memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, parallels the experiences and emotions Shakespeare describes in Sonnet 29, as both narrators feel like lonely, outsiders who wish they could change their position in society. Maya experiences a “painful” development as the “Southern Black girl” so different from the Whites in her community; and, at her young age, she is “aware of her displacement” in society, “an unnecessary insult” that hurts her deeply (Angelou 6). Maya, unhappy with her situation, wishes she was white and imagines herself as a beautiful child with light hair and skin; unfortunately, her self-esteem is incredibly low, and the huge barrier race creates in Stamps makes her feel even more isolated. Similar to Maya, the

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Novel Project Mini Review A hard era for most, the 1930’s through the 1950’s are chronicled in the perspective of black author Maya Angelou in the autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published by Random House in 1969. The story, as told by Angelou describes how she and her older brother, Bailey were abandoned by their divorced parents in California. From then on, they were to live with their grandmother Annie Henderson in Stamps, Arkansas, whom they referred to as Momma and was a very respected woman in the black community. She set examples for young Maya and Bailey but was not able to completely protect Maya from the dangers that she was about to face including abandonment, sexual abuse,

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694 Words | 3 Pages

At the beginning of I know why the caged bird sings, the main character Marguerite Ann Johnson; struggles with insecurities as a young black girl. She felt displaced

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“Caged Bird” written by Maya Angelou in 1968 announces to the world her frustration of racial inequality and the longing for freedom. She seeks to create sentiment in the reader toward the caged bird plight, and draw compassion for the imprisoned creature. (Davis) Angelou was born as “Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St Louis, Missouri”. “Caged Bird” was first published in the collection Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? 1983.

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In the poems “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou, both portray captive birds that sing. However in “Sympathy”, the bird pleads with god for freedom, whereas in “Caged Bird” the captive bird calls for help from a free bird. In “Sympathy” the bird knows what freedom feels like since there was a time where the bird was once free, but now is trapped. In the first stanza the use of imagery revealed how freedom felt before the bird was caged.

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