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.
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.
Maya Angelou is a well-known author whose writings are used in ELA classrooms around the United States. Many fans of literature hold her writings in high regard. The article “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” by Francine Prose is about Prose’s belief that American educators should not teach Angelou’s work to American students. Prose published the piece in 1999 in response to Angelou’s rising success and her writings being used to teach ELA. Prose believed that Maya Angelou’s work being used to teach literature was not necessary, as To Kill a Mockingbird was more than sufficient.
John Krakauer is an American author who is known for his many bestselling nonfiction books. Krakauer is the narrator of his book Into Thin Air, which tells the story of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster that he was a part of. He chose to write this book to give a full, in-depth story of what happened that day. Not only did he want to share the story with the rest of the world, but he also used it as a way to shed light on the events in his life. Krakauer thought writing this book would help him get the traumatic event out of his mind and remove it from his life.
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.
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.
Names are a powerful thing, they always have been and always will be. Names can cause many types of emotions, anger, hate, happiness, confusion, and a number of other ones. In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings there are a lot of names and nicknames that people have. These nicknames, though sometimes inappropriate and infuriating, are an important part of this novel. Marguerite Johnson, a.k.a Maya, is the main character in this novel and during the story she is given a few nicknames.
The book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings teaches people about situations that have happened in our society and are still happening currently. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings talks about the topics of racism, teen pregnancy, and rape. This book also talks about how these unsettling and traumatizing situations affect a person. After Maya was raped she refused to speak showing us something that can happen to people after going through something as horrible as being raped. Situations like these aren't exactly talked about as often and when they are most of the time people are always looking down on the people that it has happened to not the person who did it.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a memoir written by Maya Angelou where she recounts the many details of her life, and how people treated her as a child. It is a very touching story where Maya grows and changes along the way. She had many different hardships she encountered that left her broken down and hurt, but she still managed to overcome them time and time again, which changed her identity along the way. Maya’s identity has changed because of events like her sexual assault experience, which changed her into a more scared and timid little girl, her time with Mrs. Flowers, which made her realize the true power her words held, and her experiences with extracurricular activities at school, which changed her into a more independent and free
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.
“ 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.
What is the difference from wrong or right? Is there a defined right choice or are there multiple right choices? From the beginning the novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou the speaker grows from a child into a young adult, but what is life without problems? Maya is a negro child growing up around the period of World War Two, where racism is a constant and being discriminated against is a part of everyday life. A common theme that is found in this novel is the theme of maturity.
“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.
The world is no stranger to oppression. Madness driven from an inferiority complex based on racial stigma. Prohibition of freedom being yet another way to inflate this expanding social divide between the oppressors and the oppressed, between white and black. Within the poem I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, this concept of social division due to the desire of freedom and the desire to restrict the freedom of others is explored through the implementation of a variety of literary devices: symbolism, metaphors, sudden tone shifts, and a constant underlying allegory. Driven by her own experiences being raised during a time period where segregation and racism were acceptable behavior amongst the masses, Angelou illustrates this problematic normalization of discrimination through the juxtaposition of a free bird to a caged bird to convey the theme of oppression and the hope of freedom brought on by such.
