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Maya Angelou's works were highly influenced by the instability of her childhood, her experiences as a mother, and the challenges of being an African American woman growing up in 0th century America. Angelou's major themes throughout her writing were inspired by the dream of overcoming the struggles that were ever-present in her life. Her struggles only made her into a stronger, independent woman who cares for people.
Maya Angelou was born April 4, 18, in St. Louis, Missouri, as Marguerite Johnson. When Angelou was about three years old her parents, Bailey Johnson, a naval dietician, and Vivian Johnson, sent Maya and her brother to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. While Angelou was growing up in Stamps, she realized what it was like to be a little black girl in a world dominated by white people. Maya was conditioned to believe that white girls led better and easier lives than African American girls did. Regardless of the society and attitude surrounding Angelou's lifestyle, her grandmother instilled pride and confidence in Maya, which would help her and guide her for years to come.
After five years of being apart from their mother, Maya and her brother were sent back to St. Louis to live with her. The happiness surrounding the reunion with her mother quickly disappeared when Maya was raped by her mother's boyfriend at the age of eight. Following this traumatic incident, Maya did not speak for nearly five years. Maya's mother was unable to deal with the depressive state her daughter was in, so she sent Maya back to Stamps to live with her grandmother. Slowly, Angelou began to gain her pride and confidence back with the continuous help of her grandmother's close friend, Mrs. Flowers.
In 140, she was once again sent back to live with her mother, now living in San Francisco. Life with her mother proved to be too hard for Maya, so she ran away to live with her father and his girlfriend in his trailer. When Angelou realized life with her father was no better, she turned to living in a yard of old, beat up cars that served as houses for other homeless children. Maya did not go back to live with her mother for one month. Angelou's rough childhood caused her to believe she had to grow up quickly and she forced herself into maturity. Angelou became pregnant at the age of 16 and gave birth to her son, Guy.
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After the birth of her son, Maya lived an adventurous life filled with failed marriages, drug use, prostitution, and a journey to find a "home", a place to belong. Most importantly, however, was her incredible journey as a mother. Maya struggled to develop a relationship with her son throughout his life, because she was not around for parts of it. It was not until the early 160s that Maya began to write her awe-inspiring poetry and books. In her life Maya has been a waitress, actress, writer, dancer, activist, journalist, and teacher.
The difficulties Maya faced in her childhood forced her to put on a strong front. She became very independent because she was unable to rely on anyone in particular throughout most of her life, other than herself. The difficult life of Maya Angelou and her work are completely intertwined.
Maya's rough and eventful life made fine inspiration for her writing. Maya wrote a multivolume autobiographical narrative consisting of five books. These works are I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin Merry Like Christmas, The Heart of a Woman, and All God's Children Need Travelin' Shoes. Her autobiographical works went in order as to the events which occurred in her life.
The first volume and perhaps the most obviously autobiographical, is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The name of this book was inspired by a poem written by Sir Lawrence Dunbar called "Sympathy." This volume covers Maya Angelou's childhood. The story follows a young girl, also named Maya, through her childhood up until the birth of her son, also named Guy.
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya deals with the difficulty of being a little black girl in a time when the world was dominated by white people. She expresses her realization of this white supremacy when she says "I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody's dream of what was right in the world"(Angelou 4). Along with dealing with this realization, she and her brother, Bailey, were sent away to a strange place by their parents, holding on to their identification tag, which said "To whom it may concern- that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson"(Angelou 6). Just as Angelou and her brother Bailey were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, so was Maya and her brother, also Bailey. After living in Stamps, Maya and her brother were sent to San Francisco to live with their mother. The book continues to reiterate Angelou's life until the birth of a son. Just as Angelou's childhood ended with the birth of her son, Guy, the volume ends with Maya's son.
The next volume of Angelou's autobiography is Gather Together in My Name. This volume covers the struggles of being a teenage mother and of being forced to grow up instantly. At the opening of Gather Together in My Name Maya is 17 and is the mother of a two month-old fatherless son. Maya introduces herself in the book by saying, "I was seventeen, very old, embarrassingly young, with a son of two months, and I still lived with my mother and stepfather"(Angelou ). In this line Maya expresses her embarrassment and discomfort of being a teenage mother.
Gather Together in My Name also explores Angelou's days of prostitution and heroin addiction. Angelou briefly worked as a prostitute for a pimp disguised as a love-struck gambler, and it was in that period of her life in which she became addicted to heroine. The most alarming mother-son incident in Gather Together… was when Maya left her son with a sitter while she went to work as a prostitute. When she returned for her son a few days later he had been kidnapped. Her son was finally returned to his mother, untouched, and it was then that she realized that her son was her responsibility and not just a "beautiful appendage of [herself]"(Angelou 16). From this point on, separation with her son became a recurring theme in her writing.
Gather Together In My Name closed with Guy and Maya returning to the safety of Maya's mother's house. Maya had experienced the horror of heroin addiction and she said, " I had no idea what I was going to make of my life, but I had given a promise and found my innocence. I swore I'd never lose it again"(Angelou 181). Maya was determined not to disappoint herself or her son ever again by lowering her standards of life.
The third volume in Angelou's autobiography is Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin Merry Like Christmas. This book is one of two transitional volumes on Maya's journey to self-acceptance. It covers about five years of Angelou's life from the ages of about to 7.
The main drama in Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin Merry Like Christmas is between Maya, the mother, and Maya, the actress. When Maya decides to leave her son with her mother to pursue her acting career, with the company of "Porgy and Bess," she chooses her career over her son, which caused a rift between the two later on. Angelou realizes that she is putting Guy in the same position she was put in as a child, when her mother left her to live with her grandmother.
The past revisited. My mother had left me with my grandmother for years and I knew the pain of parting. My mother, like me, had had her motivations, her needs. I did not relish visiting the same anguish on my son and she, years later, told me how painful our separation was to her. But I had to work and I had to be good. (Angelou 1)
The subject of parental abandonment was familiar to Maya Angelou. She too was sent to live with her mother and was abandoned by her mother. Singin' and Swingin' and Getting' Merry Like Christmas deals with a more serious emotional side of Angelou instead of just an autobiographical volume.
The fourth volume is The Heart of a Woman. This volume reveals Maya's experiences as a performer, activist, and journalist in the late 150s to early 160s. It treats Angelou's marriage, involvement with the civil rights movement, and once again her relationship with her son. It also touches on her own writing.
The main theme in The Heart of a Woman however was Maya's relationship with her son, Guy, and the similarities it had with her relationship with her mother. There was a point in the book, when Guy went to New York to live with his mother again, where it showed Guy's resistance to Angelou's attempts to make a family again. Maya discussed the tension between the two when she wrote, "'The air between us [Maya and Guy] was burdened with his aloof scorn. I understood him too well'"(Bloom 6). It hurt Maya to see what her son as he was because she understood what he was feeling.
In The Heart of a Woman, Maya travels a lot and she strengthens her public identity, becoming a coordinator in the civil rights movement and a professionally recognized dancer and actress. She also for the first time in her narratives, begins to talk about herself as a writer. "If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution"(Bloom 186).
The Heart of a Woman ends with the separation of Maya and Guy once again. Guy, a student at the University of Ghana, is moving into a dormitory. " 'I closed the door and held my breath. Waiting for the wave of emotion to surge over me, knock me down, take my breath away' "(Bloom 186). Maya feared for her child to be on his own because she was scared when she had to grow up and go off in to the world.
The fifth and final volume of Angelou's narratives is All God's Children Need Travlin' Shoes. This volume picks up right where The Heart of a Woman left off. This book takes place primarily in Ghana and deals with her early attempts in the 160s to return to her ancestral home of Africa. Angelou dedicated the book to Julian Mayfield and Malcom X, who were also both passionately and earnestly in search of their symbolic home.
All God's Children Need Travelin' Shoes continues with the common theme of searching for a home, a place to belong. Maya wrote about her idea of home "We [Maya and Guy] had been each other's home and center for seventeen years. He could die if he wanted to and go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be left without a home"(Bloom 05).
As a whole, All God's Children Need Travelin' Shoes recounts the events that brought Angelou to the realization and eventually the acceptance that there is and unreachable distance between Africans and ancestral Africans. Those events were similar to Angelou's own experiences in Ghana, trying to get in touch with her own heritage.
All God's Children Need Travelin' Shoes ended with Maya leaving Ghana. Maya not only leaves Ghana, but in doing so leaves Guy there to live his own life. Like the four previous narratives this on ended with a mother-son configuration.
In the end, Maya Angelou's works were highly influenced by the instability of her childhood, her experiences as a mother, and the challenges of being an African American woman growing up in 1th century America. Maya's life and work are so fully intertwined that throughout her five volume narratives she chronologically followed events, which occurred in her life, in the order in which they occurred. Most of the characters in the books also shared the same names as their real life counterparts.
Maya Angelou speaks numerous languages fluently, including French, Spanish, Italian, and West African Fanti. She has also traveled abroad to Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She worked as a journalist and has been honored by the academic world, receiving the Yale University Fellowship Award, being names a Rockefeller Foundation Scholar in Italy, and has 1 honorary degrees at different colleges across the country. Maya is also a renowned professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Among some of her other accomplishments are, being named Woman of the Year in Communications, by the Ladies' Home Journal and nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award.
Maya Angelou's incredible journey though life has inspired so many people through her writing. Her poetry and personal narratives are representatives of herself as an inspiration to all people, especially black women looking to survive sexism, racism, and/or bad childhoods. It has also made her a strong loving individual who accepts all people. In an interview Angelou said, "I am human and nothing human can be alien to me"(Schafer).
Works Cited
Angelou, Maya. All God's Children Need Travelin' Shoes. New York Vintage Books, 11.
Angelou, Maya. Gather Together In My Name. New York Bantam Books, 175.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York Bantam Books, 170.
"Angelou, Maya." Microsoft Encarta. Online Encyclopedia 00. Available http//encarta.msn.com. 11 February 00.
Angelou, Maya. Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin Merry Like Christmas. New York Bantam Books, 177.
Angelou, Maya. The Heart of a Woman. New York Bantam Books, 18.
Bloom, Harold editor. Modern Critical Views Maya Angelou. Philadelphia Chelsea House Publishers, 1.
Schafer, Nancy Imelda. "Empirezine." Online. Spyder's Poetry Empire. Available http//www.empirezine.com/spotlight/maya/maya1.htm. 10 February 00.
Williams, Nancy E. editor. Readings on Maya Angelou. California Greenhaven Press, 17.
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