Maya Angelou Identity Essay

648 Words3 Pages

Angelou uses chronological order to display the challenges which Maya had gone through in finding her identity, and how she overcomes the challenges she faces through storytelling. Big Bailey, the father of Bailey Jr. and Maya, leaves Bailey Jr., and Maya to Vivian for some days which makes Maya feels uncomfortable as her parents had abandoned them when they were younger. They were did not grow up with them, and therefore it made them socially uncomfortable. Maya and Bailey Jr. both grew up in a rural area so they took time to adapt in an urban area. Maya shield herself to the world, and “[Maya] had decided that St. Louis was a foreign country” (Angelou 69). Maya loses her cultural identity which was the identity which she has gained from Stamps. …show more content…

Louis; she considers it as a foreign country. However she feels home and safe when she was at Stamps. Angelou uses chronological order to unfold to the audience of how it is like to reconnect to her family members after leaving them for a long period of time. This scene happens in the beginning of the book to show the struggles of finding her cultural identity. Considering that Maya was very young at the time, she did not know what rape was. Mr. Freeman had took an advantage of that, and raped her. Unfortunately Maya had actually enjoyed it, thinking that she was being loved. When Mr. Freeman took an advantage of her from the second time, she realized something was wrong, and did not feel the love, but pain. She describes the pain as “[a] breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart. The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel can't. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot” (77). Maya did not know what was happening as being an eight-year-old. Mr. Freeman had stripped her identity by stripping her self worth and dignity which made her struggle to find her identity which was being taken