I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
The book's title is taken from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings begins when three-year-old Angelou and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother and ends when Angelou becomes a mother at age sixteen.
The author uses her coming-of-age story to illustrate the ways in which racism and trauma can be overcome by a strong character and a love of literature. Its graphic depiction of childhood rape, racism, and sexuality have resulted in the book being banned by many libraries and parent groups.
It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 and remained on The New York Times paperback bestseller list for two years.
Written at the end of American Civil Rights movement, the book was inspired by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Angelou was "tricked" into writing it by her friend James Baldwin and her editor, Robert Loomis, who gave her the challenge of writing autobiography as literature. Although classified as an autobiography and written in first-person narrative, the book has many fictional aspects, causing some critics to classify it as an autobiographical novel.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first in a six-volume autobiographical series, covering Angelou's childhood and young adult experiences.
Later books in the series include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981), All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), and A Song Flung Up To Heaven (2002).
Background and title
Book cover illustration of paperback version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Cartoonist Jules Feiffer (pictured) was instrumental in the publication of Angelou's autobiography.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was inspired by the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.; he named her the Northern Coordinator for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the late 1950s. She was "deeply depressed", so to help lift her spirits, Angelou's friend James Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy. The guests began telling stories of their childhoods, and the following day Judy Feiffer called Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". At first, Angelou refused to write her autobiography, since she considered herself a poet and playwright. She reported that he "tricked" her into it by "daring" her: "It’s just as well, because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible". In her words, Angelou was unable to "resist a challenge", and she began to write Caged Bird.
Angelou went on to write five additional volumes in her series of autobiographies, covering her young adult experiences.
They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes and "stretch over time and place", from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, occurring in time from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination. Like Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted like a series of short stories, but do not follow a strict chronology. Abandoned by their parents, she and her older brother, Bailey, are sent to live with their paternal grandmother ("Momma"), a smart, religious, and entrepreneural woman, and crippled uncle ("Uncle Willie") in Stamps, Arkansas.
Maya and Bailey are haunted by their parents' abandonment throughout the book. They travel alone and are labeled like baggage.
Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the prejudices and blatant racism of her white neighbors.
Early in the book (chapter three), Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders. A white speaker at her eighth grade graduation ceremony disparages the black audience by implying their limited job opportunities.
A white dentist refuses to treat Maya's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him of a previous loan. He takes them with him when he leaves after three weeks, but brings them to their mother in St.
Even after being sent back to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps", who supplies her with books to encourage her love of reading, and coaxes her out of her shell.
Finally, when Bailey is disturbed by the discovery of the corpse of a black man, Momma decides to send her grandchildren to their mother in San Francisco, California.
Maya attends George Washington High School and studies dance and drama on a scholarship at the California Labor School. She drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from an excursion to Mexico.
She becomes worried that she might be a lesbian (which she equates with being a hermaphrodite), and initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy. Maya gives birth at the end of the book and begins her journey to adulthood by accepting her role as a mother to her newborn son.
Themes
Identity
As feminist scholar Maria Lauret states, Angelou and other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s have used the autobiography to restructure the ways to write about women's lives in a male-dominated society.
Lauret sees a connection between the autobiographies Angelou has written and fictional first-person narratives; they can be called "fictions of subjectivity" and "feminist first-person narratives" because they employ the narrator as protagonist and "rely upon the illusion of presence in their mode of signification". In the course of Caged Bird, Maya goes from being a victim of racism and having an inferiority complex and identity crisis, to someone who knows who she is and feels pride, and is able to respond to racism with dignity.
Lauret states that "the formation of female cultural identity" is woven into Angelou's narrative, setting her up as "a role model for Black women". Lauret agrees with other scholars that Angelou uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities in her books to "signify multiple layers of oppression and personal history".
This rejection also resulted in a loss of self for Maya and Bailey, as well as in a quest for love, acceptance, and self-worth.
Beginning in Caged Bird, when Maya becomes a mother at the end of the book, motherhood is a "prevailing theme" in all of Angelou's autobiographies. Lupton believes that Angelou's plot construction and character development were influenced by this mother/child motif found in the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Jessie Fauset. Scholar Mary Burgher believes that black women autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African American mothers of "breeder and matriarch" and have presented them as having "a creative and personally fulfilling role".
Racism
Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem as a "central image" throughout her series of autobiographies. Like elements within the prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's imprisonment from the racism inherent in Stamps, Arkansas, and her continuing experiences of other forms of imprisonment, like racial discrimination, drugs, marriage, and the economic system. This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle".
French writer Valérie Baisnée puts Angelou's autobiographies in the midst of literature written during and about the American Civil Rights movement. Critic Mary Jane Lupton states that Caged Bird "captures the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans". Walker characterizes Angelou's book as political; he emphasizes that the unity of her autobiographies serves to underscore one of Angelou's central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it. Walker also states that Angelou's biographies, beginning with Caged Bird, consists of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression". This sequence leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest" throughout all six of her autobiographies.
Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives Caged Bird its internal thematic unity.
Maya reacts to the "powhitetrash" incident with "rage, indignation, humiliation, helplessness", but Mama teaches her how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism. Flowers introduced her to during her period of muteness following her rape, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare (Angelou states, early in Caged Bird, that she "met and fell in love with William Shakespeare"), and by genres like slave narratives, spirituals, poetry, and other autobiographies. Critic Mary Vermillon makes a connection between Angelou's rape and Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece", which Angelou memorizes when she regains her speech, maintaining that Angelou finds comfort in the poem's identification with suffering.
According to Walker, the power of words is another theme that appears repeatedly in Caged Bird.
Braxton sees the book as "representative of autobiographies written by black women in the post-civil rights era". Caged Bird presents themes that are common in autobiography by black American women: the celebration of black motherhood, the criticism of racism, the importance of family, and the quest for self-sufficiency, personal dignity, and self-definition. Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books; she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth", which parallels the conventions of much of African American autobiography written during the abolitionist period of US history, when the truth was censored out of the need for self-protection. At the same time, however, Angelou introduces a unique point of view in American autobiography by revealing her life story through a narrator who is a black female, at some points a child and other points a mother.
The challenge for much of African-American literature is that its authors have had to confirm its status as literature, which is why Robert Loomis was able to dare Angelou into writing Caged Bird by challenging her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art". According to Angelou, her friend James Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, and advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology". As Walker insists, when Angelou wrote the book at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature was thematic unity, and one of her goals was to create a book that satisfied that criteria. The events in her books are crafted like a series of short stories, but their arrangements do not follow a strict chronology.
Walker believes that Angelou succeeded, in spite of the otherwise episodic quality of the narrative.