Maya Angelou's Biography

Smith analyzes Maya Angelou's biography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and sees it as an example of black life in America, comparing the work to the autobiography of Richard Wright and the works of other black writers. She finds that Angelou in this book expresses a good deal of self-consciousness because of her looks as a child, and another element she sees in the reflections of the young girl is a sense of personal displacement counterpointed with the feeling of displacement within the larger black community itself. The black community of the book is that of Stamps, Arkansas.

Smith highlights certain stories from the book and certain moments in the life of Angelou, especially those stories that reflect on the subject of displacement--the fact that Angelou and her brother were sent away from home because their parents were divorcing, the other journeys the child undertakes, a trip she takes with her father to Mexico, and through it all the fact that the child was learning about herself. This particular black child sees the world as a series of barriers to be broken through in order to prove herself as a human being, as a woman, as a black woman, and so on. What the girl has to escape in particular is her own self-image, and Smith finds that by the end of the book the author has shown how she has freed herself from the natural a

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inds that this structure crumbles with Gather Together in My Name where childhood experiences are replaced by episodes considered by critics to be disjointed and bizarre. The narrator does change in this second volume, as does the structure. The alter volumes follow this second work more closely than the first. Lupton says that Angelou creates from each ending a new beginning and moves from one stage of life to another. The five volumes each explore in a different way the significance of motherhood. Angelou reports on her relationship with her mother and with mother-substitutes at different stages in her life, and the mother-child configuration forms the basic pattern against with other relationships are measured in the five volumes. Each of the works is considered in turn, and the way this theme is repeated is explored in each. MacKethan, Lucinda H. "Mother Wit: Humor in Afro-American Women's Autobiography." Studies in American Humor, 4, 1 and 2 (Spring and Summer, 1985), 51-61. The expression "Mother Wit" is a black expression that refers to common sense, to the kind of good sense not necessarily learned in books or in school, and with a connotation of collective wisdom acquired by the experience of living and from g
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Approximate Word count = 1487
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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