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Edition:	Random House (Hardcover)
Author:	Maya Angelou
Published:	March 2002
Pages:	288
ISBN 10:	0375507892
New:	$10.00 (34)
Used:	$0.01 (45)
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography about the early years of writer and activist Maya Angelou. The first in a six-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how a strong character and a love of literature can help one overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 17. In the course of Caged Bird, Maya transforms from a victim of racism with an inferiority complex to a self-possessed young woman who is able to respond to racism with dignity. The book's title is taken from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Angelou was challenged by her friend, author James Baldwin, and her editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography that was also a piece of literature. Although Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques and thematic development often leads reviewers to categorize Caged Bird as autobiographical fiction, the book is best characterized as an autobiography, a genre she attempts to critique, change, and expand. The book contains topics that are common in autobiography by black American women written in the years following the civil rights movement: the celebration of black motherhood, the criticism of racism, the importance of family, and the quest for self-sufficiency, personal dignity, and self-definition.

Angelou uses her autobiography to explore topics such as identity, rape, racism, and literacy. She writes about women's lives in a male-dominated society in a new way. Maya, the younger version of Angelou and the book's central character, has been called "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America". Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text. Rape is used as a metaphor for the suffering of her race. Another metaphor, that of a bird struggling to escape its cage, is a central image throughout the book, which consists of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". Angelou's treatment of racism gives the book its thematic unity. Literacy and the power of words is the way that young Maya copes with her bewildering world; books become her refuge as she copes with her trauma.

Caged Bird was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 and remained on The New York Times paperback bestseller list for two years. It has been used in educational settings from high schools to universities. However, the book's graphic depiction of childhood rape, racism, and sexuality have caused it to be challenged or banned in many libraries and by many parent groups.

Plot summary

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to sixteen and the struggles she faces – particularly with racism – in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother ("Momma") and crippled uncle ("Uncle Willie") in Stamps, Arkansas. Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book; they travel alone and are labeled like baggage.

Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the prejudice and overt racism of her white neighbors. Momma, a smart, religious, and entrepreneurial woman, is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' black community. Still, the white children of their town hassle the family relentlessly. One of these "powhitetrash" girls reveals her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident. Early in the book, Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders. Maya experiences many other instances of racism throughout the book. She has to endure the insult of her name being shortened to "Mary" by a racist employer. A white speaker at her eighth grade graduation ceremony disparages the black audience by suggesting that they have limited job opportunities. A white dentist refuses to treat Maya's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him of a previous loan. The black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of racial victory when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis' championship fight, but generally they feel oppressed.

A turning point in the book occurs when Maya and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears in Stamps. He takes the two children with him when he leaves, but leaves them with their mother in St. Louis, Missouri. Eight-year-old Maya is sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. There is a trial, and Mr. Freeman is found guilty, but he escapes jail time and is murdered, probably by Maya's uncles. Maya feels guilty and withdraws from everyone but her brother. Even after being sent back to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps", who supplies her with books to encourage her love of reading and coaxes her out of her shell.

When Bailey is disturbed by the discovery of the corpse of a black man, Momma decides to send her grandchildren to their mother in San Francisco, California. Maya attends George Washington High School and studies dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. Before graduating, she becomes the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Maya visits her father in southern California one summer. She drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from an excursion to Mexico. She experiences homelessness for a short time, after a fight with her father's girlfriend.

In Maya's final year of high school, she becomes worried that she might be a lesbian (which she equates with being a hermaphrodite), and initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy. She becomes pregnant, which on the advice of her brother, she hides from her family until her eighth month of pregnancy in order to graduate from high school. Maya gives birth at the end of the book and begins her journey to adulthood by accepting her role as a mother to her newborn son.

Themes

Identity

As feminist scholar Maria Lauret indicates, Angelou and other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s used the autobiography to reimagine ways to write about women's lives in a male-dominated society. Lauret sees a connection between the autobiographies Angelou has written and fictional first-person narratives; they can be called "fictions of subjectivity" and "feminist first-person narratives" because they employ the narrator as protagonist and "rely upon the illusion of presence in their mode of signification".

Caged Bird's Maya, who has been described as "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America", lives in a hostile world that defines beauty in terms of whiteness. As a child, she internalizes this notion; her belief in her own ugliness was "absolute". As a displaced person, her pain is worsened by an awareness of her displacement. Maya is "the forgotten child", and must come to terms with "the unimaginable reality" of being unloved and unwanted. In the course of Caged Bird, however, Maya goes from being a victim of racism with an inferiority complex to a self-aware individual who responds to racism with dignity. African American literature scholar Dolly McPherson states that Angelou, in her demonstration of the passage from childhood to young adulthood, creatively uses "the Christian myth" and presents the themes of death, regeneration, and rebirth. Scholar Liliane Arensberg calls this Angelou's "identity theme" and a major motif in Angelou's narrative. Maya's unsettled life in Caged Bird suggests her sense of self "as perpetually in the process of becoming, of dying and being reborn, in all its ramifications".

Lauret states that "the formation of female cultural identity" is woven into Angelou's narrative, setting her up as "a role model for Black women". Lauret agrees with other scholars that Angelou uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities in her books to "signify multiple layers of oppression and personal history". Angelou begins this technique in Caged Bird and continues it in her subsequent volumes, especially her demonstration of the "racist habit" of renaming African Americans, as shown in the first book when her white employer insists on calling her "Mary". Angelou describes this as the "hellish horror of being 'called out of [one's] name'". Scholar Debra Walker King calls it a racist insult and "a violent verbal assault against the child's race and her self-image". According to scholar Sidonie Ann Smith, this renaming emphasizes Maya's feelings of inadequacy and denigrates her identity, individuality, and uniqueness. Maya understands this and rebels by breaking Mrs. Cullinan's favorite dish.

Another incident that solidifies Maya's identity is her trip to Mexico with her father, when she has to drive a car for the first time. Contrasted with her experience in Stamps, Maya is finally "in control of her fate". Maya recognizes the importance of this incident, as well as the incident that immediately follows it, her short period of homelessness after arguing with her father's girlfriend. These two incidents give Maya a knowledge of self-determination and confirm her self-worth.

Kinship concerns are also woven throughout Caged Bird. McPherson believes that the concept of family in Angelou's books must be understood in the light of the children's displacement at the beginning of Caged Bird. Being sent away from their parents was a psychological rejection, something that the young children interpreted as "a rejection of self". This rejection also resulted in a quest for love, acceptance, and self-worth. Associated with the theme of kinship in Caged Bird is the theme of community. The black community of Stamps finds ways to be strong, nurturing, and cohesive in order to withstand an antagonistic environment, especially white violence against black men.

Beginning in Caged Bird, when Maya becomes a mother at the end of the book, motherhood is a "prevailing theme" in Angelou's autobiographies. Lupton believes that Angelou's plot construction and character development were influenced by this same mother/child motif found in the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Jessie Fauset. Maya's feelings for and relationship with her own mother, whom she blames for her abandonment, expresses itself in ambivalence and "repressed violent aggression" Scholar Mary Burgher believes that black women autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African American mothers as "breeder and matriarch", and presented them as having "a creative and personally fulfilling role".

Rape

Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text. Scholar Mary Vermillion compares Angelou's treatment of rape to that of Harriet Jacobs in her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs and Angelou both use rape as a metaphor for the suffering of their race; while Jacobs uses it to critique slaveholding culture, however, Angelou at first internalizes twentieth-century racist conceptions of the black female body, and then challenges them. Rape, according to Vermillion, "represents the black girl's difficulties in controlling, understanding, and respecting both her body and her words".

Arensberg notes that Maya's rape is connected to Angelou's theme of death in Caged Bird. It is performed under threat of death, and Mr. Freeman threatens to kill her brother Bailey if she tells anyone. After Maya lies during Freeman's trial, stating that the rape was the first time he touched her inappropriately, Freeman is murdered and Maya sees her words as a bearer of death. As a result, she resolves never to speak to anyone other than Bailey. Angelou connects the violation of her body and the devaluation of her words by the depiction of her self-imposed, five-year long silence. As Angelou later stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk".

Stamps, Arkansas, as seen in Caged Bird, had very little "social ambiguity"; it was a world divided between black and white, male and female. Author Hilton Als characterizes this division as "good and evil", and notes how Angelou's witness of this evil, "generally directed at black women", shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood. Vermillion goes further, maintaining that a black woman who writes about her rape risks reinforcing negative stereotypes about her race and gender.

Maya's rape demonstrates how as a Black female, she is violated as she moves from childhood to adolescence. African American literature scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe calls its depiction "a burden": a demonstration of "the manner in which the Black female is violated in her tender years and ... the 'unnecessary insult' of Southern girlhood in her movement to adolescence". When asked decades later how she was able to survive such trauma, Angelou explained it by stating, "I can't remember a time when I wasn't loved by somebody." When asked by the same interviewer why she wrote about the experience, she indicated that she wanted to demonstrate the complexities of rape. She also wanted to prevent it from happening to someone else, so that anyone who had been raped might gain understanding and not blame herself for it.

Racism

Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage, described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem, as a central image throughout her series of autobiographies. Like elements within a prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism, as well as other forms of oppression like drugs, marriage, and economic inequality. This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle".

Caged Bird has been called "perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era". French writer Valérie Baisnée sees Angelou's autobiographies in the midst of literature written during and about the American Civil Rights movement. Lupton states that Caged Bird starkly "captures the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans". Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the black community of Stamps, her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society. Angelou also vividly presents racist characters "so real one can feel their presence".

Angelou's early experiences with racism were so powerful that in a 1982 interview with Bill Moyers during her first trip back to Stamps, she was unable to cross some railroad tracks into the white part of town. Critic Pierre A. Walker places Caged Bird in the African American literature tradition of political protest, and insists that the unity of Angelou's autobiographies serves to underscore one of their central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with Caged Bird, contain "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". This sequence leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest".

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

-The final stanza of Maya Angelou's poem, "Caged Bird"

Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives Caged Bird its thematic unity. The book, like most autobiographies, begins with Angelou's earliest memories, but she relates events non-chronologically. For example, the description of the "powhitetrash" girls that taunt Maya's grandmother occurs in chapter five, when Maya was about ten years old, two years after her rape, which occurs in chapter 12. Maya reacts to the "powhitetrash" incident with "rage, indignation, humiliation, [and] helplessness", but Mama teaches her how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism. Walker calls this a "strategy of subtle resistance" and McPherson calls it "the dignified course of silent endurance".

Later chapters in Caged Bird demonstrate the limitations of subtle resistance, but Angelou shows that it serves as a basis for moving to actively protesting and combating racism. Other ways of responding to racism are presented, like when Maya broke the race barrier and became the first black street-car operator; her description of eighth-grade graduation; her treatment by her white employer Mrs. Cullinan; and being refused service by a white dentist. In addition, her description of the strong and cohesive black community of Stamps demonstrates how African Americans subvert their institutions to withstand racism. Arensberg insists that Angelou demonstrates how she, as a black child, evolves out of her "racial hatred", common in the works of many contemporary black novelists and autobiographers. At first Maya wishes that she could become white, since growing up black in white America is dangerous; later she sheds this self-loathing and embraces her racial identity.

Literacy

As Lupton points out, all of Angelou's autobiographies, especially this volume and the one that follows it, Gather Together in My Name, are "very much concerned with what [Angelou] knew and how she learned it". Lupton compares Angelou's informal education with the education of other black writers of the 20th century, who did not earn official degrees and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms". Angelou is influenced by writers introduced to her by Mrs. Flowers during her self-imposed muteness, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. Angelou states, early in Caged Bird, that she "met and fell in love with William Shakespeare". As a child Angelou was also powerfully affected by slave narratives, spirituals, poetry, and other autobiographies. Critic Mary Vermillon sees a connection between Maya's rape and Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece", which Maya memorizes and recites when she regains her speech. Vermillon maintains that Maya finds comfort in the poem's identification with suffering. Maya finds novels and their characters complete and meaningful, so she uses them to make sense of her bewildering world. She is so involved in her fantasy world of books that she even uses them to cope while being raped. As Angelou writes in Caged Bird, "...I was sure that any minute my mother or Bailey or the Green Hornet would bust in the door and save me".

According to Walker, the power of words is another theme that appears repeatedly in Caged Bird. For example, Maya chooses to not speak after her rape because she is afraid of the destructive power of words. Mrs. Flowers, by introducing her to classic literature and poetry, teaches her about the positive power of words and empowers Maya to speak again. In a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Angelou advises her to "do as West Africans do ... listen to the deep talk", or the "utterances existing beneath the obvious". As McPherson says, "If there is one stable element in Angelou's youth it is [a] dependence upon books". The public library is a refuge to which Maya retreats when she experiences crisis, and it becomes a "quiet refuge" from the chaos of her life.

References

Wikipedia