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| Photo by Chester Higgins, Jr. |
I***** I asked my neighbor and friend in Somerville, Mass., the acclaimed poet Afaa Michael Weaver to write a piece about the the late Maya Angelou. Weaver, a journalist back in the day in his native Baltimore came through right on deadline. Weaver recently won the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, and won a Pushcart Prize for his work in Ibbetson Street, a Somerville-based literary journal. Weaver is a professor of English at Simmons College in Boston.
The Organic Life of Birds
Maya Angelou
1928-2014
—- by Afaa Michael
Weaver
On May
28th, Dr. Maya Angelou made her transition.
She was eighty-six years old.
Poetry was her first love as a writer.
Her
life as an artist and activist embodied some of the most significant events in
world history during the twentieth century.
She befriended James Baldwin in France, worked for Dr. Martin Luther
King, met Malcolm X, lived in Africa, had an enduring friendship with Nelson
Mandela, and more. She inspired
several generations of people.
Her fame as
a writer took hold with her first autobiography, I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,”
where
she revealed a life filled with a wellspring of energy rooted in the culture
and traditions of African Americans. It
was published in 1969, the year of her forty-first birthday, and in the
recounting of her life she revealed having been abused as a seven year old, a
child barely beyond her formative years.
After her abuse she was a “voluntary
mute”
for
seven years, a period of silence during which she said she wrote. She wrote and she listened. When she began to speak again, she had
connected to the internal power that would make her a figure on the world
stage.
Maya Angelou
broke an unwritten code for black Americans, namely that child sexual abuse was
seldom discussed, certainly not outside the black community. Much of that has to to with the necessary
coping strategies of a world built in segregation, but what makes her story and
her life especially remarkable is that her healing took place within the
tradition of her culture. She held onto
the truthfulness of a love and spirituality carved in the rough terrains of
slavery and its aftermath. It is that
energy that made her a humanistic icon for many people.
She was
also a dancer, singer, actor, an film director.
She lived with the dynamic energy of a well-rounded artist. As director of the 1998 film Down
in the Delta, she gave the gift of her organic
wisdom, her vision of African American culture through the prism of her own
experiences. In the film a black family
with roots in Mississippi find that their southern home is their healing place,
the place where they can retreat and draw the sustaining power of the community,
its love and its meaning. A silver
candelabra is the family heirloom, passed down from slavery when the patriarch
of the family was sold in exchange for it.
After the Civil War his son took it in remembrance of his father who was
sold away. The candelabra is an icon to
mark the miracle of survival much like the miracle of Angelou’s
own recovery from abuse in the context of a love she maintained for her family
and culture. In that she found a power.
I read I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in the year
immediately after it was published. I
read it alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The two books were the lenses that helped me
envision myself as a black man and a poet.
In the wake of my own recovery from having been abused as a child, I
look back at Dr. Angelou’s autobiography and
remember how deeply I was moved. The
secret of her incredible spirit and presence was in her faith in African
American culture, in her own people and emanating outward from there to the
whole world.
Maya
Angelou walked in the world without apologizing for her identity or life as a
black woman, and that is, I believe, a lesson for anyone. She walked with an openness that allowed her
to see herself in Shakespeare, and to love his art as her own. She treasured the fact of being able to be
touched in the spirit by someone so far from her, and in her life she did the
same for people born in cultural places so far from her own.
She so much
loved the poem “Sympathy,”
by
Paul Laurence Dunbar that she applied it to the title of her first
autobiography. The poem takes on the
subject of confinement and freedom, and so I close with her own lovely and
inspiring poem about how the captivity of a bird and its longing for freedom is
so much of what life is about for everyone.
Caged Bird
by Maya Angelou
A
free bird leaps
on
the back of the wind
and
floats downstream
till
the current ends
and
dips his wing
in
the orange sun rays
and
dares to claim the sky.
But
a bird that stalks
down
his narrow cage
can
seldom see through
his
bars of rage
his
wings are clipped and
his
feet are tied
so
he opens his throat to sing.
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
free bird thinks of another breeze
and
the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and
the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and
he names the sky his own
But
a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his
shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his
wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so
he opens his throat to sing.
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.
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