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Summary: Will the Circle (of ignorance, poverty, and alienation) Be Unbroken?
I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS is indeed autobiographical, yet it is more than that, and its importance lies not so much in its description of the author's early childhood but in the historical picture it conveys of a country split by an almost unbridgeable racial divide. This book explains more about race relations (or lack thereof) in the 20th century United States than does any textbook on sociology, psychology, or American history that I have ever come across. By portraying the development of a young Black girl as she was formed and shaped by that divide, the book gives the reader a "real world" case study of the effects of a segregated Black-White society.
Lest any reader erroneously conclude that this book deals with only the historical past, let us take a moment to correct that misapprehension. In July 2006, an analysis on PBS television focused on a high school and its surrounding neighborhood in contemporary Mississippi. Four decades after the Civil Rights movement took down legal segregation in the United States, there is no integration in this school or this community, and Whites and Blacks remain firmly separate and unequal. No "economic opportunity" is visible to Black students in this neighborhood, and, with no social or economic reward awaiting, where is the motivation to complete high school, much less college? With such a low average education level, the community is scarcely attractive to outside investors, and so the circle of ignorance, poverty, alienation, and separation continues from generation to generation. This is precisely the situation that the reader will find in Angelou's book, even though it depicts a town in Arkansas over six decades ago! The book, shamefully enough, could have been written this year. No, it is not "only history."
Because Angelou's book is best described as episodic, i.e., focusing on a succession of significant episodes in her early life, I occasionally found the chronology somewhat less clear than I might have wished. This is as close as I can come to finding anything in the book to criticize. I do, however, find something else very surprising. While I am not challenging Angelou's veracity, I must express surprise in meeting an elementary-school-age girl who escapes into the novels of Jane Eyre. Equally surprising is her next autobiographical installment, GATHER TOGETHER IN MY NAME, when the reader is presented with a teen-age girl who loves the novels of Dostoevski. To encounter any child, much less one some of whose public school teachers themselves had only eighth grade educations, reading novels of this caliber does force the reader at least to consider the possibility that the author has attributed later interests to an earlier period in her life.
Such perturbations notwithstanding, the book remains a powerful glimpse into a culture and a society that is neither seen nor understood by most of white, middle-class America. It is an uncomfortable story that should help expand White America's comprehension of the uncompromisingly repressive and destructive nature of racism and of the socially destructive results of growing up in its presence. As a White Southerner by birth who clearly remembers "White Only" signs over water fountains in the county courthouse, I recommend the book to everyone with the courage to expend his or her vision of where we all are today and how and why we got here.
Summary: Engaging, Compelling, Beautifully Written, and Yet...
Maya Angelou's I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS has achieved one of modern literature's great prizes: a fixed place in the high school literary canon from which it is, for all intents and purposes, untouchable. Hers is now the archetype for the black coming of age story, apparently supplanting such earlier classics as MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND (my high school reading) and NATIVE SON. Naturally, in keeping with the times, Ms. Angelou's book is also filled with all the psychodramas of the late 20th Century confessional novel - childhood rape, revenge murder of the rapist, grossly irresponsible parents (her mother shoots her gambling parlor business partner, her father is a drunken philanderer and petty thief), pregnancy out of wedlock, and sexual ambiguities regarding her fears of incipient lesbianism. Add to this the experience of (mostly) Southern white racism, and the result is a toxic brew from which an intelligent, well-adjusted, adult black woman could only have emerged through a miracle. As Salman Rushdie chides Ms. Angelou in his book FURY, "O, her dauntlessness in the face of poverty and cruelty! O, her joy when Fate chose her to be one of its Elect!"
Not to say that Maya Angelou's most renowned work is without merit - quite the contrary. Ms. Angelou writes with great feeling, drawing her young life as Marguerite Johnson (the book ends with the birth of her son when she is about 18 years old) through a series of entertaining vignettes filled with memorable personalities. Several episodes capture magically the place of family and church religion in black life, as well as the few but invariably hazardous intersections of black lives with white lives in 1930's, small town Arkansas. Her memoir often reads as a sort of prose poem, filled with strong images and apt metaphors. When she describes being raped as an eight-year-old by Mr. Freeman, her mother's 50-year-old boyfriend, Ms. Angelou juxtaposes the Biblical image of the impossibility of the camel passing through the eye of a needle with the horror of the physical event itself; the result is a literary gem. She is also a master of the sudden contrast, offering joy or hope and then grabbing it away (or despair followed by small triumph), sometimes in a single sentence. For example, her story of the people of Stamps, Arkansas thrilling to Joe Louis's heavyweight championship victory over Primo Carnera ends with the recognition that it would not do for a black man walking home that night to be caught alone by whites. Vicarious victory and celebration is reduced to harsh reality and dread in a single closing sentence.
Despite the undeniable beauty of her prose and her captivating style of storytelling, Maya Angelou's memoir seems somehow less than it purports to be. She hardly seems to be the "caged bird" of her title. Intelligent and well-read almost beyond believability (how many eleven-year-olds are reading JANE EYRE for the second time and tossing around references to Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Poe, Kipling, Thackeray, Samuel Butler, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jonathan Swift?), Marguerite issues from a family that is better off than most of her community. She never works the cotton fields like the many poor black workers who visit her grandmother's store every morning. Her parents can ship Marguerite and her brother Bailey from California to her grandmother in Arkansas, then to St. Louis, back to Arkansas, then off to San Francisco without undue strain. Her grandmother had even accumulated enough money to make an interest-free loan to the local white dentist during the Depression. The Johnson children have time and opportunity to go to school and, after their chores, engage in prodigious amounts of reading. They hardly live in the lap of luxury, but they seldom seem to want for food, clothing, and shelter. As many of her difficulties growing up seem to have come from disgracefully irresponsible parenting (excluding her paternal grandmother) as from white racism.
Marguerite and her brother live much of their early lives in a small town Arkansas community where the KKK's presence is inferred but never experienced, although there is no doubt that racism and its deleterious effects were abundant. Still, to paraphrase Will Rogers, young Marguerite Johnson "never met a white person she didn't fear or hate," despite the fact that the major horror visited upon her young life was inflicted by a black man. When she arrives in San Francisco and watches the Japanese Nisei spirited away to American "holding camps," she rationalizes away her lack of sympathy (and her own form of racism) with the argument that blacks had already been living the concentration camp life of slavery for over two centuries. The white dentist who indignantly refuses to pull Marguerite's painfully aching teeth ("I'd rather stick my hand in a dog's mouth") is given no quarter either - as cowardly and shameful as he was, the adult Ms. Angelou doesn't even allow for the possibility that, in that place and time, the dentist was protecting his own business from the wholesale loss of his white clientele. Hardly an acceptable excuse, yet understandable nevertheless. Even with the hindsight and perspective of an adult memoirist, she evinces no regret or dismay over the brutal murder (apparently kicked to death) of Mr. Freeman, a black man, by her three uncles.
Memoirs are a curious form of fictionalized non-fiction, certainly so when written 40 years after the fact. Conversations and whole scenes are fashioned from cloudy images and selectively blurred memories, recast in the light and values of a newer age to fit both the objectives and the present self-image of the memoirist. Suggestions of poverty, racial violence, and rampant white racism abound in this book, implying that Marguerite Johnson's transformation into Maya Angelou was something of a miracle, a personal triumph of an indomitable spirit. Perhaps so. Yet reading I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, I couldn't help but wonder what Ms. Angelou wasn't telling us.
Summary: I know why the caged bird sings as well....
The caged bird probably sings because it never had the displeasure of reading this trash.
Maya Angelou is quite a revered writer, and in my opinion, a very capable poet. However, this book just seems incomplete. It's like an artist's sketch before he paints a true masterpiece, except the masterpiece never showed up. It's a shame, because this book had potential. I expected it to be more about how she grew to become a writer, and in part it was, but here comes my main gripe about the book.
The stories she tells are intensely boring. She has entire chapters devoted to the following:
Pissing herself in church
Her crippled uncle trying to stand up
Momma beating her for saying "by the way"
They have absolutely no point to her growth. I did not see how they were important factors in molding her into the person she is. They didn't link, they didn't have any points of relevance, and above all, they were just intensely boring.
It's just astounding how she managed to make her own life seem boring. I felt nothing for her throughout the entire book. Her style of writing was distanced as far as possible from the reader. I would've been more moved by bullet points on her life. Save your money, time, and sanity; Read wikipedia.
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