Women From Away

Year Three Book Seven: 

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sing by Maya Angelou

June 2nd, 2016

Overall rating: 3.8/5

Amy: I rated I Know Why The Caged Bird Sing 5/5! Why has it taken so long for me to read this one! Thank you Lacey for suggesting it and to WFA for voting for it! I will try to keep my thoughts short and succinct because I could comment on most chapters individually. 

I think because this book focuses mostly on Angelou's youth, the idea of childhood oppression or a child's lack of agency really sticks out. Maya didn't get to choose to live with her Grandmother in Stamps, didn't get to choose to go back to her parents and back and forth.

"It was the same old quandary. I had always lived it. There was an army of adults, whose motives and movements I just couldn't understand and who made no effort to understand mine" (Ch. 11)

Aside from that, race and the dehumanization of black people in the South bares a lot of the same injustice that is common decades after this book was published. Chapter 18 and 23 made me cry in the telling of dirty, tired people returning from working cotton fields but cleaning themselves up to gather for an all night revival meeting to invigorate themselves to face their masters with "charity" which speaks to a level of resilience I will never understand and that such heavy topics of race and discrimination coloured and shaped Angelou's story.

"People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all." (Ch.18)

"I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standards and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed." (Ch. 18)

It was like the community was so tired and broken that these communal gathering to sing and encourage each other were vital to facing the next day and all the possibilities for violence they were expecting to encounter. 

Chapter 23 had a similar moment when the Graduation speech turned into a "remind them of their place" situation and again, sings the Negro Anthem helped centre themselves again to face daily opposition. Which is maybe what spurred Angelou to go on to become San Francisco's first Tram Driver?!?

Overall, super heavy read and the poetry of the writing made it easier to absorb compared to books like Roots or Twelve Years a Slave.