Maya Angelou Struggles

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Maya Angelou is well known for her numerous autobiographies and poems. In many of her works, Maya Angelou tells us about the struggles and challenges she went through in her childhood and how she overcame those struggles and challenges. While reading Maya Angelou’s, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” I observed that Maya and I share many of the same childhood experiences and challenges, but we have some major differences as well. While Maya and I share the same experience such as being sent to our grandmothers at a young age by our fathers and having to adjust to the way of life in a new environment, I believe that we reacted in different ways. Maya became very isolated and never really spoke to anyone when she stayed with her grandmother, but I was very social and talkative when I stayed with my grandmother.
In Maya Angelou’s “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings”, Maya uncovers the challenges and struggles she faced during her stay with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, and I noticed that we shared the experience of moving from the city to a rural area. In the autobiography, Maya’s father sent her and her …show more content…

Maya moved to the south and had to do a lot of work while she was living with her grandmother. In fact, her grandmother made her do some of the labor work, to help with the Store. For example, Maya had to work in the store, serving food and other things to cotton pickers (7). Similarly, when I moved to the village to live with my grandmother, I had to adjust to the village environment. While living with my grandmother, I had to learn how to farm and fetch water from a river that was very far from our village. Compared to me, Maya had it easier, because all of her necessities were around her. Whereas, I had to walk long distances to get the things that I