I know why the caged bird sings book review (Maya Angelou)
This book is the first of seven autobiographies of Maya Angelou, depicting her childhood years in the American south during the 1930s depression era. Combining the raw and honest perspective of a child and the wisdom of retrospection, Angelou eloquently explores the struggles of racial inequality, the pains of growing up, and the shackles of misogyny. Despite the drastic difference in time and environment of the story, readers can still connect with the struggles and resilient confidence gained from challenging experience. “The truth is that we can all have empathy, why we could all be stirred when the caged bird sings.”
A few defining moments of childhood trail us — part of our past that define our personal trajectory. For me, many of the author’s experiences were piercing and they aborted her from childhood — including childhood trauma, empowerment through literature, and teenage pregnancy. As John Steinbeck wrote in Of Mice and Men, “As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.”
Maya’s childhood — the shackles of misogyny and the need for belonging
Maya was transported between her grandmother’s store in Stamps, her mother’s place, and her father’s city in different stages of her childhood. Stability and the constant nurturing of a well-functioning family were absent from her childhood. Thus, her brother Bailey played a major role in her growth, being a constant companion. “Bailey was the greatest person in my world. Of all the needs that I lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty black brother was my kingdom come.”
Racism felt in the Southern Black community
With tenderness and eloquence, Maya depicts the struggles of growing up in the poverty stricken south. “If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult.” I enjoyed reading her vivid descriptions and beautiful (and heartbreaking) metaphors of her observations of cotton picking. “Each year I watched the fields across the store turn caterpillar green, then gradually frosty white. I knew exactly how long it would be before the big wagons would pull into the front yard, and load on the cotton pickers, to carry them to the remains of the slavery’s plantations.” “In cotton picking time, the late afternoons revealed the harshness of Black Southern Black life, which in the early morning had been softened by nature’s blessing of grogginess, forgetfulness, and the soft lamplight.” As a child, Maya lacked confidence to face up towards authority, power imbalance, and racial discrimination — setting a stage for her hard-won transformation that was to come. “It was awful to be a Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance to defense.”
Childhood Trauma
Maya’s childhood trauma aborted her from childhood — her perspectives were transformed overnight, and I felt like reading from a more matured voice after the incidence. After she was sent to live with her mother, she endured the trauma of molestation and rape by her mother’s boyfriend Mr. Freeman. She depicts her observation and experience with heartbreaking metaphors, of the power imbalance between a vulnerable child and the beastly aggressor whose mind is bent on its desires. “The act of rape on an eight-year-old body is a matter of the needle giving because the camel cannot. The child gives, because the body can, and the mind of the violator cannot.” For me, the episodes that followed were also distressing, as Maya felt guilt herself after the incidence. She went silent, thinking that it was partly her fault, and was unable to express herself in her tender age. Her other descriptions of the man were vivid and attentive, “Mother’s boyfriend, Mr. Freeman, was grateful. He must have been many years older than her, with the sluggish inferiority of old men married to younger women. He watched her every move, and when she left the room, his eyes allowed her reluctantly to go.”
The nurturing power of literature:
Maya finds her voice and love of language through literature through the help of Mrs. Flowers. She became her mentor who has remained “throughout my life the measure of what a human being can be.” With literature, Maya slowly finds her voice and confidence of expression, which empowered her throughout her life. “She gave me her secret world which called for a djinn who was to serve me all my life — books.” In the poverty and inequality stricken south, Mrs Flowers told her that she should “always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.” With literature, her keen observation of people and surroundings, she gradually finds her way and future aspiration. In the onset of WWI, she depicted that “San Francisco acted in wartime, like an intelligent woman under siege. She gave what she could with safety withheld and secured those things under her reach. The city became for me the ideal as a grownup — friendly but never gushing, cool but not distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness.”
Personal Reflections
The author presents her autobiography in the form of literature eloquently, describing pertubating experiences with the console of metaphors and rawness of childhood perspective. The language presentation was unique, delivered through heartbreaking honesty and vivid recollections. There is a strong emotional arc of the memoir — of a personality transformation from timid tenderness to a more resilient confidence. The author combines the wit and wisdom of adult reminiscence and the rawness of childhood memory, healing and bridging divides through storytelling.
The deepest impressions for me were the huge paradoxes presented in the book — the inequality between race and the power imbalance in face of aggression. It is a heartbreaking rite of passage for a child to go through the shackles of racism and trauma to be “grown.” “I was eight, and I was grown.” The traumatic event signals the abrupt abortion of Maya’s childhood, seeing the darkness of human desires and aggression.
We leave the story with a positive note. Maya gradually moved past her identity as a trauma survivor — she became the first black female cable car conductor in San Francisco and a teenage mother. Teenage pregnancy was another defining moment, as she was not sure whether she could handle the responsibility right. Her mother’s word of wisdom? “See, you don’t have to think about doing the right thing. If you are for the right thing, then you do it without thinking.”
