Another short(ish) and sweet blog to follow…my backache has been joined by swollen ankles (what a cliché!) but enough about me…
We met yesterday to talk about I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou; the first instalment in an autobiography that runs to several volumes. Angelou is a national treasure in the US, especially since she was the inaugural poet for Bill Clinton’s inauguration as president in 1992. Although she campaigned for Hillary initially this time round, I recall being aware of her emotional response to Barack Obama’s ultimate win over McCain. She said something along the lines of how amazing it was that such a thing could happen in her lifetime.
Having finally read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I can concur that I too am amazed that America would elect a black president in the same lifetime as that of the author. A series of almost disconnected memories from her childhood and adolescence, the primary story that comes across is of a disadvantaged population living in almost total segregation in the American South.
Some readers had finished the book, some not and one had read it years ago, but even so the general round of opinion was about the same. We were all touched by the story, and fascinated by aspects of it, especially her ability to render a situation almost tangible (for example you felt the exhaustion of the cotton pickers as they came into her grandmother’s store after a day’s picking, and you also felt their hope as well the following morning) and to write believably in dialect. There were elements of the story that were truly shocking: even though we knew that in the deep south the black population got a raw deal, it’s still something to read of the casual way their situation was dealt with by the whites, a dentist refusing to treat her even though she was in awful pain, saying that he’d rather treat a dog than a black person. The ignorance of the woman for whom Angelou worked when she was about 12 who decided to rename her for her own convenience, as Angelou’s given name was too long; and the arrogance of people in general who always expected black people to give up their seats for whites, and the many other innumerable slights and insults that made up normal interaction between people of both colours. No wonder Angelou doubted when she was young that white people were human at all.
The story of Angelou’s relationship with her mother and father is an interesting one. Intriguingly, she seems to hold little bitterness towards her parents, even though they effectively abandoned their responsibilities towards her and her brother, letting them be raised by a competent but not very outwardly loving grandmother; a large part of our discussion revolved around this strange fact. Maya and her brother idealised their parents, particularly their mother. Perhaps this was understandable when they were children, but there is little enough explanation offered either for why they were so lax, or how their offspring felt about it. Angelou was seriously affected by being raped by her mother’s lover when she was eight and living with her mother for a time, and when the sympathy from her mother’s family ran out she had to return to her grandmother’s store, a ball of guilt and misapprehensions, she couldn’t speak for several years to anyone other than her brother and she certainly could not bring herself to tell her grandmother what had happened.
Her interaction with her father was bizarre, in that he really did not seem to care what happened to her or her brother; even after his fiancé attempted to stab her and she ran away, living rough for about a month before returning to her mother in San Francisco, neither parent seemed to have enquired of the other as to her circumstances or how she was, even though her father knew she had run away with a stab wound. Maybe we cosset our children too much!
One reader asked the question as to whether we got from the memoir what was the core reason that Angelou managed not to be subsumed in poverty for her lifetime, how it was that she has risen from being the impoverished grandchild of a store owner in a tiny segregated town to being where she is today. The lift up isn’t obvious, and the memoir ends on a particularly bleak note; after a very unsatisfactory sexual encounter she becomes a mother at the age of sixteen. But we all agreed that she showed unusual stubbornness and inner strength from a young age, and this coupled with her intellectual strength must be what got her through.
Readers were generally positive about this book; there was a lot of humour in there which made it easier to read and got us closer to the essence of Maya Angelou herself. We would like to find out more about what happened to her and her family, particularly her brother, but having said that, no-one showed any inclination to rush out and get the next volume! This is partly due to the perennial backlog of books to be read and the little time there is to read them in…
Speaking of which, our next choice is The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. Happy reading!
