ipl-logo

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Book Review

1665 Words7 Pages

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Book Review It is not an unknown fact that the world has seen many accounts of racial prejudice and how that prejudice leads to purification. The way visible differences make men turn upon one another. It is a thought provoking idea, for if men turn on each other then what would be the fate of females, for the behaviour of women is far crueler. Set in the 1930s, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, gives a personal, yet honest look at racial prejudice in the United States of America towards the black minority. Born Marguerite Annie Johnson, Maya Angelou, the young protagonist, is sent with her older brother Bailey, to live with their grandmother in the racially segregated, southern town of Stamps, …show more content…

Louis, in which she gets molested by a man who is much older than her. Many years later, now in San Francisco, Angelou learns how to love herself and finds her own courageous and strong spirit to fight for her rights and dreams. It is a story of a girl who when weak the world laughed at and when strong the world marveled, for how could a black women be strong. Angelou challenges the boundaries placed on her and that is shown in this autobiography through her identity, the challenges she faced and the outcome of said challenges, turning her into a women that history will never forget. First, to understand a person’s achievements and reasons behind their success, one must understand where that person comes from. A major part of Angelou’s triumph is because of her upbringing, her personality and her aspirations. Angelou grew up in a small racially segregated town in Stamps, Arkansas. She lived with her devoutly Christian grandmother Momma, her uncle Willie and her older brother Bailey. Being sent away by her mother at such a young age, impacted Angelou’s mental state. She thought herself not good enough whether it be because of her personality or because of her looks. Her background in such a community in which she had to

Show More
Related
813 Words | 4 Pages

One of this week’s readings focused on Ch. 5, “Caged Birds,” in Professor Lytle Hernandez’s book City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965, and this chapter was particularly interesting because it further explained the development of immigration control in the United States. As a continuation from the last chapter, there was a huge emphasis in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Geary Act of 1892. This essentially prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States, as well as eventually requiring these people to comply with regulations. “Caged Birds” encapsulates the events afterwards, as the book heads well into the early-1900’s. The disenfranchisement of immigrants develops towards further exclusivity because “[by] 1917, Congress had banned all Asian immigration to the Unites States and also categorically prohibited all prostitutes, convicts, anarchists, epileptics, ‘lunatics,’ ‘

Read More
740 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More
450 Words | 2 Pages

Angelou, later on, became a writer, dancer, and poet. She went on to prove that no matter what skin color you may be, you can still go on to be successful. Throughout life, you should never judge a person because of how they look on the outside. You never know, that person could go on to be beyond than what you believed.

Read More
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.

Read More
842 Words | 4 Pages

Growing up in the 1930s as an African American was not a walk in the park. Angelou had to

Read More
535 Words | 3 Pages

His poem Sympathy is just one example of how he felt trapped like a caged bird in his life. Even though the Civil War was over, African Americans still did not have as many privileges and opportunities as most White people had. Most of Dunbar’s writing showed his perspective of life and the struggles that came with it. Maya Angelou was born in 1928 and suffered a hard childhood that later on affected her writing. When she was eight years old, Maya was sexually abused and raped by her mother’s boyfriend.

Read More
313 Words | 2 Pages

In I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, the section I chose to analyze was chapter 36. In this particular chapter Maya feels alone, like her world is crumbling down around her. She didn't know how to approach the fact she was pregnant and about to have a baby. When she told daddy Clidell, he assured Maya that she “nothing to worry about”Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Read More
476 Words | 2 Pages

Once again, Maya Angelou manages to touch our hearts again with her poetic skills in Chapter 19 titled The Champion of the World in her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She recalls a time in her life where the African American community gathered at her grandmother's and uncle's store to hear a boxing match via radio. The boxing match was between the former champion Joe Louis and a white boxer. Maya Angelou takes the meaning of a simple boxing match into something more complex; she demonstrates the suffrage of her people fighting against oppression during that time period.

Read More
506 Words | 3 Pages

This short story was about a girl named Maya who struggled with her early life as a child trying to fit in. In “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” the author states Mrs. Flowers had the grace of control to appear warm in the coldest weather” (Angelou 517). The quote shows that a friend like Mrs. Flowers cared for a struggling Maya. Mrs. Flowers had a warm heart and was willing to help Maya through tough

Read More
1975 Words | 8 Pages

Maya Angelou worked as a professor at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, from 1991 to 2014. As an African American women, one whose life was full of racial discrimination and gender inequality, she had plenty of experience and wisdom to share with her students. During her time working at the university, she taught a variety of humanities courses such as “World Poetry in Dramatic Performance,” “Race, Politics and Literature,” “African Culture and Impact on U.S.,” and “Race in the Southern Experience” (Wake Forest University,

Read More
492 Words | 2 Pages

The African American culture has faced many hardships in the past and today. Being so called “different” to others was already hard to face but being called ignorant names made it worse. Maya in the book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was called out of her name several times throughout the book as a sign of disrespect. Being named or labeled something other than your name out of disrespect was the ultimate challenge faced by African Americans.

Read More
437 Words | 2 Pages

How do Maya Angelou and Harper Lee express their views on racial inequality during the 1930’s through the novels ‘I know why the caged bird sings’ and ‘to kill a mocking bird’? Maya Angelou, a well-known and loved Author wrote an autobiography of her life from when she was very young up to her death in 2014. The first book in the series of 7 is ‘I know why the caged bird sings’, it encompasses her growth and development as a child physically, mentally and emotionally, showing the journey and confusion that many young African-Americans go through as they grow up. Similar to ‘I know why the caged bird sings’, Harper Lee’s book ‘to kill a mocking bird’ is also based on growing up in Southern North America during the 1930’s. It’s a very well-known

Read More
1023 Words | 5 Pages

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.

Read More
700 Words | 3 Pages

“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.

Read More
742 Words | 3 Pages

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.

Read More

More about I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Book Review

Related Topics

Open Document