Maya Angelou ( April 4 , 1928 – May 28 , 2014 ) was an American author, poet, dancer, actress, and singer. Hailed as a Renaissance woman , she is an American poet, biographer, novelist, educator, playwright, producer, actress , historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist . She is a professor of literature and American studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina . Many of her works are studied in schools and universities.
Biographical summary
She was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, but spent much of her childhood with her grandmother in rural Arkansas, where she not only experienced the brutality of racial discrimination but was also absorbed by the unwavering faith and traditional values of the African-American family, community and culture.
When she was only 8 years old, Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. The man who attacked her so savagely was beaten to death. Maya suffered such trauma from these events that she became pathologically mute.
She was still mute when her vocation for language arose. She remained mute for five years, until a teacher managed to get her to speak again, after convincing her that she would only be able to appreciate letters if she was able to speak again.
At the age of 16, she graduated from high school. That same year, her son Guy was born, and she began working as a cook and waitress. In 1940, she moved in with her mother in San Francisco .
Path
During the 1950s she performed in nightclubs and began a successful career as a singer, dancer, actress, magazine editor, civil rights activist, poet and novelist.
His most famous work is the series of autobiographical novels that begins with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), in which he describes the lives of African-Americans in witty language.
In almost all of his works he denounces racism and exalts courage, perseverance, survival and self-esteem.
Political activist
She began her political activism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, an activism that she combined with her first successes as a singer and with her entry into The Harlem Writers Guild , where she met writers such as James Baldwin , her mentor.
Despite her professional successes, Maya’s life becomes so politicized during a particularly turbulent period in the history of the United States that she decides to abandon the various facets of her artistic vocation.
Through her political activities, Maya comes into personal contact with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X , to whom she feels closer because his approach to racial struggle seems more effective to her. At the same time, her son Guy’s problems at school show how racial hatred corrupts everything and prevents understanding and collaboration between Maya and the white leadership.
After deciding to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), where she has to overcome her own racial prejudices when faced with white collaborators such as Jack Murray, Angelou meets Luther King.
Maya struggles to balance her political activism with her responsibilities as a mother, and is forced to confront the leader of a gang of young black boys, the Savages, who threaten her son Guy. However, she cannot help but empathize with these young men.
Personal life
After meeting South African Vusumzi Make, a representative of the Pan-African Congress, Maya leaves her job as coordinator at the SCLC and as co-founder of CAWAH (The Cultural Association for Women of African Heritage) and takes on the role of the perfect, submissive housewife that Make wants her to be; however, it is Make himself who finally encourages her to accept the role of the black queen in Genet’s The Blacks . After encountering serious financial difficulties due to Make, Angelou abandons her position at the SCLC and travels to Egypt with him and their son Guy, where a new life seems to begin that promises to make her forget her previous marginalization.
Despite prejudice against women, Maya manages to find a job as a journalist at The Arab Observer .
Voluntary exile
Following another failed relationship due to Make’s infidelity, and given the hostility towards her in her environment and at work, Maya decides to settle in West Africa and enroll her son Guy in the University of Ghana . She has come to the conclusion that Africa is the only place in the world where she can permanently free herself from the stigma of blackness. She therefore voluntarily leaves her homeland behind and enters the territory of the unknown. Her questioning of the margins of racial discrimination leads her to explore a new terrain, that of the dichotomy between the “centre” and the “periphery”, between which she will find unsuspected interconnections.
Newly arrived in Ghana, a country that has just gained independence under the presidency of Kwame Nkrumah, Maya and her son are pleasantly surprised to see black pilots (something unthinkable in the United States in 1962) and to witness how their race performs effectively in all kinds of leadership positions. Thus, a promising stage in their lives seems to be beginning, but a serious accident involving Guy makes Maya fear for her life and forces her to change her plans.
Maya explores various areas of Ghana and notes unexpected similarities between the hospitality she receives and the solidarity among neighbors she witnessed in the American South during her childhood. However, the cultural differences with the natives of Ghana are marked, especially in the fighting spirit of the American black minority, who have suffered the tragedy of slavery and racism. Ultimately, African Americans cannot “go back” to Africa.
Before leaving in 1965, Maya visits the Keta region, which is hard hit by slavery. After noticing details that seem strangely familiar to her, a woman “recognizes” her in the market and begins a “mourning” ceremony for the lost relatives. Maya joins in her tears, convinced that they are, indeed, related; despite everything, she draws a positive lesson from history. All these experiences mature the writer, who learns, among other things, that a permanently bellicose attitude will not lead her to achieve the kind of society she yearns for. On the other hand, the African experience leaves a deep mark on Angelou.
Return to the United States
Consequently, Maya decides to return to the United States to collaborate with Malcolm X on the Organization of Afro American Unity (OAAU), a project that will not become a reality due to the leader’s assassination.
Construction site
Angelou’s work is part of a tradition of writers of colour for whom autobiography has provided an open forum in which to expose the details of their struggle, inform the reader about the sad condition of their race and promote a protest movement that would facilitate the achievement of full equality. In this sense, without forgetting the political influence that Angelou has exercised, not only because she was a direct collaborator of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X , but because her work has been able to “incarnate” the ideological system of racial segregation down to its smallest details, reconstructing not only its external context but, more importantly, its internal, experiential context. In doing so, she has undoubtedly contributed to proclaiming new values of civilization and coexistence.
Another important contribution Angelou made to the African-American literary tradition is that she challenged the traditional stereotypes with which women of color were represented. In literature in general, women appear as symbols rather than as persons. Their figure has always been more difficult to conceptualize than that of men and particularly susceptible to association with the most diverse representations, images, myths, etc. Angelou’s introduction of greater diversity in the way of representing women of color, and in particular her representation as a capable and powerful matriarch, has thus contributed to overcoming racial and sexist prejudices. Thus, for example, the marked “mobility” that can be seen in the writer’s own life constitutes a new quality in a woman of color, traditionally restricted to a very limited space because of her race and the social functions assigned to her as a woman.
Through the genre of autobiography, Angelou has transformed a private and unique experience into a collective and universal one. Following in the footsteps of Phillis Wheatley , she is part of that group of women writers of color who have abandoned marginality to establish themselves as protagonists of their literary tradition.
Angelou’s determination to overcome both the internal exile to which the ideological system of segregation condemned her and the external exile that took her to Ghana have made her an icon of the African-American community.
Her first novel sold more than a million copies worldwide and inspired a film version.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ( 1969 ), her best-known and most critically acclaimed work, she recounts her childhood in the American South during the Depression and tells of her upbringing alongside her Puritan grandmother, her complicated relationship with her mother, and her pregnancy as an unmarried 16-year-old.
The Heart of a Woman (1981) recounts her experiences as a political activist in the 1950s and 1960s.
All God’s Children Should Have Traveling Shoes (1986) tells of her experience when, feeling disappointed by the lack of results obtained in the fight for civil rights and, after the failure of a romantic relationship that took her to Africa , she decided to go into voluntary exile in Ghana .
She is the author of the script and music for the film Georgia, Georgia.
Acknowledgements
She has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the recorded book category , a Tony Award for her work on Broadway’s Look Away, and an Emmy for the miniseries Roots .
In 1993, she read her poem ” On the Pulse of Morning “ at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton .