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
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.
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.
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.
She shows us that despite the injustices that may occur, there will always be victory for those who truly deserve it. Maya Angelou's perspective as a young African American girl is described in Chapter 19 of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, titled Champion of the World. Her community is gathered to support Joe Louis, the former champion, in a boxing match that determines if he'll continue being champion or not. As the story progresses in her grandmother's and uncle’s store, the tone transforms from hopeful to defeated, to triumphant.
Raeva Sikka Ms. Drosdick Honors English, period 9 February 9th, 2018 When Maya i s eight years old, she is raped by her mother’s boyfriend which causes her to stop speaking for five years. Later on, she finds the courage and strength to write her story, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. The book, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, a true story by Maya Angelou shows an apparent theme of racism and segregation. The main character, a young girl, Maya is constantly watching how white people are being treating better and much more fairly than the black people.
Roughly ten years after it was published, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was included in American high school curricula and libraries in the early 1980’s for its “insight into the personal development of a young African-American girl, its appeal to adolescent readers, its multicultural characters, and its historical significance”. That very same decade, the book was challenged in several states for “promoting premarital sex, lesbianism, cohabitation, and pornography” and for “[preaching] hatred and bitterness against whites” (Henry, 2002). Thirty years and scores of inclusions in the American Library Association’s top banned books lists later, Caged Bird still remains one of the most banned books in America, challenged by
People throughout their lives are constantly discovering who they are and who they want to grow into. The same statement accurately describes Maya Johnson, a strong woman who wrote about her life in her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As a little girl, her mother’s ex-boyfriend raped and she had to rediscover herself whilst navigating through the grim veil of trauma - a process that burdened her for many years. Throughout her life, she encountered many different people, some good, others bad, but they each helped her eventually discover her identity. ‘Identity’ is how people define themselves as a human being, and, therefore, nobody else can dictate it.
Maya Angelou is known as one of the most inspirational and most powerful women the world has ever seen. She was an author, poet, and civil rights activist. Her most iconic novel, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, is a memoir about her life and about her being a child residing in the South. She lived during a time of violent racism and segregation, while also struggling to make it through the Great Depression. Many aspects draw you in and hook you to this novel, but the most important aspect would be its powerful theme.
“ I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou , a person who survived the Great Depression and a multitude of wars but lived in a time when her race and sex was put down and were not treated as equals because their skin was darker than white people. In the poem the caged bird sings because that 's all that the bird can do . The bird cannot fly or walk around freely because it is trapped so it does the only thing that it can do , sing. And the free bird can fly and explore the world freely and has more opportunities than the caged bird.
Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, illustrates the pain and rejection of being a young black girl in the segregated world of 1930s Arkansas. As a result of racial segregation, African Americans quickly fell victim to poverty and hardship. Particularly in Stamps, where Maya lives during her childhood, the black community attempts to make do with their paltry jobs, accompanied by the pressures of the white society. Faced with threats of general torment, lynching, and even death, the lives of the black residents remain in an almost unbearable state. Although living in unbelievably challenging circumstances, the black citizens are able to continue in life with the hope that their faith gives them.
It is no surprise that “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” has a large amount of cultural history. Maya goes in to explain the racial segregation that was present during her childhood, claiming that she never believed “that whites were really real (Angelou).” This meant that any one person going through that time period may have believed the same, or possibly never even seen a white person before. Her story then states that San Francisco claims to have no racial divide, which they told the truth, but the racism between people still existed. When she did get a little older and moved to a non-segregated city, any experiences with a white person has been negative.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by: Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was written in 1969 by the renowned poet, Maya Angelou. Although a poet, Maya Angelou wrote this novel not as a poem, but as an autobiography. In the autobiography, there are many ways that the two children, Maya and Bailey, feel emotional exile in their lives.
“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.
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.
