A Phenomenal Woman: Marguerite Annie Johnson Angelou

Marguerite Annie Johnson Angelou otherwise known as Maya Angelou was a phenomenal woman that was born into a devastating decade and had suffered numerous tragedies. Not only has society formed her as a lady, but she also shaped our society and influenced several lives as well. I believe her legend will never die and what motivated her kept her alive throughout these disastrous events and some of her gratifying experiences. How she was affected by society, and what she did about it. In the period, she was raised in it created her into the extraordinary girl she was in life. Maya Angelou was a civil rights activist, author/poet, and an award-winning writer celebrated for her acclaimed 1969 memoir, 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings', and her various poetry and essay collections. Maya Angelou was an American author, actress, scriptwriter, dancer, author and civil rights activist best celebrated for her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which created literary history as the initial bestseller by an African American woman. Angelou received many honors throughout her career, together with 2 NAACP Image Awards within the outstanding written material category, in 2005 and 2009. Maya Angelou's family issues, and racial prejudices, haven’t failed her successful career path and resulted in her becoming a top poet & activist between the years 1928 - 2014.

Living with her mother, at the age of eight, Angelou was raped and sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend who went by the name of Freeman. After that, she had told her brother which resulted in the rest of the family finding out afterward. Freeman was later on found yet jailed for a day. Four days after he was released, he was murdered by one of Angelou's uncles. For almost five years Angelou became mute, believing, as she stated, 'I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again because my voice would kill anyone.' According to Marcia Ann Gillespie and her colleagues, who wrote a biography about Angelou, it was during this period of silence when Angelou developed her extraordinary memory, her love for books and literature, and her ability to listen and observe the world around her. Starting with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same 'writing ritual' She went through this process to 'enchant' herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, 'relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang'. She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences such as her rape in Caged Bird, to 'tell the human truth' She was found by her nurse. Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had canceled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders.

Angelou reflected racism not only by writing but singing as well with a particular song called Riot:60’s came out in 1998 on the album called Black Pearls: The Poetry of Maya Angelou on the label Rhino. The Riot that happened in Detroit, Newark, and New York impacted many innocents lives to the point where when the flame and fires lit up the city and people had no other choice but to stay home and hide from the monstrosity. In the 1960’s Detroit had a riot that occurred in the 1960s. This riot went on for five days which resulted in several deaths in the black community. Angelou’s poem became one of the most useful literature works to track the trace of racism in America which happened from the sixteenth until the nineteenth century. The poem also reflected the sentimental feeling as she is an African- American describing the ignorance of white people toward her race. In her poem, Angelou portrayed racism and its negative impact on Black African-Americans as slavery, discrimination, segregation, hegemony, and prejudice and stereotype.

Slavery became the most painful part of Angelou in her poem about racism. She repeatedly mentions the condition of slavery in her poem with a different tone of emotion such as anger, sadness, guilt, even hopelessness because slavery seems too difficult to stop while at the same time it sacrificed many lives of black African-Americans as she described in the first verse of My Guilt poem. She went on to mention that my guilt “slavery’s chains” describe the memory of the slavery era. Of all the messages in the poem, one stood out to me which was no matter how far you’ve come, regardless you must recognize the privilege you have been blessed with and how you survived and grateful you should feel that you can tell your story. Another message is how you have been freed but are very humble and not forced to get to where you are today. Focusing on remorse, this is what the writer feels as people have died during periods of slavery, civil rights movements, and the adversity of discrimination and racism. They have fought ‘hard’ and ‘loved well’ to create a future for people to gain independence, have opportunities, and a chance for a future. A bittersweet feeling rooted in remembrance, reverence, and remorse. These three attributes are intertwined because the writer remembers the heroes that have passed. She highlights how expensive her freedom is. It is so expensive that it costs slavery, death, and lynching.