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Maya Angelou Sexual Abuse

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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. In this research paper I will be analyzing if the sexual abuse, molestation, and/or rape Maya …show more content…

Freeman sexually abused Maya, she is unable to control her body or words which signals the domination of her body by others. Even in the opening scene, there is a combination of Maya’s inability to control her appearance, words, and bodily functions. The inability to create a story about her body “pervades the remainder of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as Maya struggles to cope with her emerging womanhood” (Vermillion 252). Instead of letting the mute and sexually abused Maya represent the black female body in her text, she begins to reembody Maya by critiquing her admiration for white literary speech and writing. On example of this critique can be seen in Maya’s meeting with Mrs. Bertha Flowers. Angelou presents the older black woman as a direct opposite of young Maya, stressing that Mrs. Flowers rules both her words and body. “She had the grace of control to appear warm in the coldest weather, and on the Arkansas summer days it seemed she had a private breeze which swirled around, cooling her” (Angelou 77). Mrs. Flowers makes Maya proud to be black, and claims that she is more beautiful and “just as refined as whitefolks in movies and books” (Angelou 79). Although Maya begins to respect and admire the black female body, the white body still provide her standard for beauty, and Angelou pokes fun at the literary writing that whitens Maya’s view of Bertha Flowers and

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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

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291 Words | 2 Pages

Biographical Analysis of “Champion of the World” In “Champion of the World”, Maya Angelou tells a story of her childhood where the success of one man changed the future of her entire race. Maya Angelou, an African American woman, took a stand against racial segregation in form of her writing and words. She experienced many of the hardships that the people of her race were going through, and she knew it needed to stop.

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286 Words | 2 Pages

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.

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85 Words | 1 Pages

Rhetorical Analysis Essay In “Champion of the World,” an excerpt from Maya Angelou’s, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Angelou writes about the night Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, fights a white contender, challenging his heavyweight champion of the world title. In her narrative, she is able to show readers how racial discrimination oppressed the African Americans during the 1930s. Therefore, she is able to highlight the importance of that boxing match since it held so much deep meaning to her community. Angelou uses

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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.

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970 Words | 4 Pages

Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson, lived through an unstable early life. She was born in St. Louis, Arkansas, but moved away to Stamps, Arkansas at age three due to her parents’ divorce. There, Angelou lived with her brother, Bailey, and her paternal grandmother (Galenet - Self and a Song of Freedom in the Southern Tradition). As discussed in her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, seven-year old Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. The man was consequently murdered by her uncles, and Maya, feeling responsible for his death, ceased talking and remained speechless for five years.

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1235 Words | 5 Pages

Flowers established the basis for Maya’s appreciation of the poetic word, it was her mother Vivian Baxter who drove Angelou into womanhood and maturity. Angelou not only loved her mother's beauty but also loved the way her mother carried herself in society. Vivian Baxter taught Angelou values that were both feminine and strong. She guided her daughter through motherhood: a time that was crucial for Angelou when she was pregnant as an unwed mother. “My mother’s beauty literally assailed me.

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514 Words | 3 Pages

Maya Angelou was a strong African-American women who made an influential impact on the Civil Rights Movement, in bother her actions, and her literature. Her life experiences and courage helped others, and made her work influential. During Maya’s early life, she experienced many hardships that shaped her into the person many remember her as. Born on April 4, 1928, she only lived in St. Louis, MO for three years before her parents got divorced, and Maya, along with her mother and brother, moved in with her grandparents in Arkansas. At the age of eight, raped by her mother’s boyfriend, Maya learned the power that words possess.

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476 Words | 2 Pages

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.

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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,

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664 Words | 3 Pages

In “Momma, the Dentist, and Me,” Maya Angelou describes Mommas’ struggle during racial segregation in a childhood memory and in a rare but glorious case is overcome. Angelou recalls when she and Momma, her grandmother, go to the dentist for a toothache severe enough that young Angelou contemplates death to feel relief from the excruciating pain. Angelou imagines her Momma’s actions in the dentist's office after being turned down heroically. Angelou demonstrates a small victory over racism with Momma’s actions as she stands valiantly against racial injustice. In order to strengthen her narrative, Angelou employs imagery, hyperbole, and tone effectively.

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955 Words | 4 Pages

This explication is on the poem “Africa” by Maya Angelou. In the poem, the speaker shows the suffering of Africa by personification, imagery, and wordplay to result that Africa is moving forward to regain herself to give us all the world has done to Africa. The speaker is a knowledgeable person who is passionate and knows well about Africa. The poem takes the setting of Africa and in the time period around the 1400s - 1500s. The poem is an ABAB pattern with three stanzas.

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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.

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1945 Words | 8 Pages

Hailed as one of the immense voices of contemporary African American writing, Maya Angelou 's scholarly works have created basic and well known enthusiasm for part, since they portray her triumph over unimpressive social impediments, her battle, as a woman, to accomplish an identity and gain self-acknowledgment. Such themes tie Angelou 's writings closely to the concerns of the feminist literary movement. Dr Angelou has additionally been noted for her clear depictions of the strongest ladies throughout her life. Angelou’s one of the most inspiring poems Still I Rise will be one of the texts for analysis. The other three are as follows:

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1215 Words | 5 Pages

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.

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