| I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | |
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| Author | Maya Angelou |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Publication date | 1969 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
| Pages | 288 pp (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | ISBN 9-7803-7550789-2 |
| Followed by | Gather Together in My Name |
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography about the early years of writer and activist Maya Angelou; it is the first in a six-volume series. 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. Angelou was challenged by her friend, author James Baldwin, and her editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography that was also a piece of literature.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings begins when three-year-old Maya and her older brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya becomes a mother at the age of 17. Angelou uses the younger version of herself to illustrate themes such as identity, rape, racism, and literacy, and Maya has been called "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America".[1] In the course of Caged Bird, Maya goes from being a victim of racism and having an inferiority complex, to someone who knows who she is and who is able to respond to racism with dignity. Angelou's depiction of rape is controversial, and although brief compared to the rest of the book, it overwhelms the text.
The book's title is taken from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. Angelou uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage as a central image throughout the book, which consists of "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression".[2] Angelou also shows the power of words and how literature helped her survive.
Caged Bird was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970 and remained on The New York Times paperback bestseller list for two years. It has been used in educational settings from high schools to universities. However, the book's graphic depiction of childhood rape, racism, and sexuality have resulted in it being challenged or banned in many libraries and by many parent groups.
Contents |
Prior to writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou could already be called "a Renaissance woman",[4] holding jobs ranging from entertainer to educator. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met her friend and mentor James Baldwin and other important African American authors. She heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, and was inspired to join the Civil Rights movement. After organizing a few benefits for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he named her the organization's Northern Coordinator in 1960. She spent several years in Africa and was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965.[5] In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated.[6]
Both assassinations were "particularly painful"[5] for Angelou because she had agreed to work for both men shortly before their deaths. King died on her birthday (April 4), leaving her so devastated that she refused to celebrate her birthday for many years.[4] She was "deeply depressed"[7] about King, so to help lift her spirits, 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; Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day she called Robert Loomis, an editor at Random House, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book".[7] At first, Angelou refused to write her autobiography, since she considered herself a poet and playwright.[2] She reported that Loomis "tricked" her into it by "daring" her: "It’s just as well, because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible".[7] In her words, Angelou was unable to "resist a challenge",[2] and she began to write Caged Bird.
Although she did not intend to compose a series of autobiographies,[5] she later wrote five additional volumes, covering a variety of her young adult experiences. They are distinct in style and narration, but unified in their themes and "stretch over time and place",[8] from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination.[8] Like those of Caged Bird, the events in these books are episodic and crafted as a series of short stories, yet do not follow a strict chronology. 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). Critics have often judged Angelou's subsequent autobiographies "in light of the first",[5] with Caged Bird receiving the highest praise.
The title of the book comes from the third stanza of the poem "Sympathy", by Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African American poet who influenced Angelou; along with Shakespeare, she has credited Dunbar with forming her "writing ambition":[9]
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings –
I know why the caged bird sings.[10]
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to sixteen and the struggles she faces – particularly with racism – in the Southern United States. Abandoned by their parents, Maya and her older brother Bailey are sent to live with their paternal grandmother ("Momma") 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.[11]
Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the prejudice and overt racism of her white neighbors. Momma, a smart, religious, and entrepreneurial woman, is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' black community. Still, the white children of their town hassle their family relentlessly. One of these "powhitetrash" girls reveals her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident. Early in the book (chapter three), Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders. Maya experiences many other instances of racism throughout the book. She has to endure the insult of her name being shortened to "Mary" by a racist employer. 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. The black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of victory for their race, when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis' championship fight, but they feel oppressed by racism.
A turning point in the book occurs when Maya and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears in Stamps, where his big city ways impress the small town. He takes them with him when he leaves after three weeks, but brings them to their mother in St. Louis. Eight-year-old Maya is sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. There is a trial, and Mr. Freeman is found guilty, but he escapes jail time and is murdered, probably by her uncles. This burdens Maya with guilt and causes her to withdraw from everyone but her brother. Even after being sent back to Stamps, Maya remains reclusive and nearly mute until she meets Mrs. Bertha Flowers, "the aristocrat of Black Stamps",[12] 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. Before graduating, she becomes the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Maya visits her father in southern California one summer. She drives a car for the first time when she must transport her intoxicated father home from an excursion to Mexico. She experiences homelessness for a short time, after a fight with her father's girlfriend.
In Maya's final year of high school, she becomes worried that she might be a lesbian (which she equates with being a hermaphrodite), and initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy. She becomes pregnant, which on the advice of her brother, she hides from her family until her eighth month of pregnancy in order to graduate from high school. 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.
Critic Mary Jane Lupton labels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as a Bildungsroman, or "coming-of-age" story. Although Caged Bird is an autobiography, Lupton compares it to George Eliot's novel, The Mill on the Floss. [13] As Lupton states, "Both are about the coming-of-age of strong young willed women; both focus on the heroine's strong relationship to her brother; both examine the effects of literature on character; both center strongly around family and community life".[13]
Angelou's use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and the development of theme often lead reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction. Angelou characterizes her works as autobiographies,[14] a genre she also attempts to critique, change, and expand.[15][5] Angelou acknowledges that she has followed the slave narrative tradition of "speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning 'we'".[5] As with most autobiographies, Angelou uses the first-person narrative voice, in spite of also including fiction-like aspects, told from the perspective of a child that is "artfully recreated by an adult narrator".[16] She uses two distinct voices, the adult writer and the child who is the focus of the book, whom Angelou calls "the Maya character".[1] Angelou reports that maintaining this distinction is "damned difficult", but "very necessary".[17] Scholar Liliane Arensberg suggests that Angelou "retaliates for the tongue-tied child's helpless pain" by using her adult self's irony and wit.[18]
Scholar Joanne M. Braxton sees Caged Bird as "representative of autobiographies written by black women in the post-civil rights era".[19] Angleou's autobiography 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.[20] Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books; she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth".[21] This approach parallels the conventions of many African American autobiographies written during the abolitionist period in the US, when truth was often censored for purposes of self-protection.[22] 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.[23] Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices.[24] For example, while Angelou was composing her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, she was concerned about how her readers would react to her disclosure that she had been a prostitute. Her husband, Paul Du Feu, talked her into publishing the book by encouraging her to "tell the truth as a writer" and to "be honest about it".[25]
Robert Loomis has been Angelou's editor throughout her writing career.[26] In 1999 Angelou said: "We have a relationship that's kind of famous among publishers".[27] Because authors of African American literature have had to confirm its status as literature, he was able to dare Angelou into writing Caged Bird. Specifically, he challenged her to write an autobiography that could be considered "high art".[2] 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".[28] As critic Pierre A. Walker notes, 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 structure of her work echoes this unity; each book resembles a series of short stories, but they do not follow a strict chronology. Instead, they are arranged to emphasize specific themes. Walker believes that Angelou succeeded, despite the episodic quality of the narrative.[2] In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discussed her writing process, and "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction"[29] and memoirs. When asked if she changed the truth to improve her story, she stated, "Sometimes I make a diameter from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in only one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about".[29]
Critic Opal Moore says about Caged Bird: "... Though easily read, [it] is no 'easy read'".[30] In spite of the "conversational" tone of her books[24] and her uncomplicated style, Angelou describes a thorough writing process.[5] Beginning with Caged Bird, she has used the same "writing ritual"[31] for many years. She gets up at five in the morning and checks into a hotel room, where the staff has been instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She writes on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and leaves by the early afternoon. She averages 10-12 pages of material a day, which she edits down to three or four pages in the evening.[32] Angelou goes through this process to "enchant"[33] herself, and as she has said, to "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang."[33] She places herself back in the time she is writing about, even traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, in order to "tell the human truth"[33] about her life. Angelou has stated that she plays cards in order to get that place of enchantment, calling it a way to "occupy my little mind',[33] in order to access her memories more effectively. She has stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I’m in it—ha! It’s so delicious!"[33] She does not find the process cathartic; rather, she has found relief in "telling the truth".[33]
The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of male prejudice, white illogical hate and Black lack of power.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings[34]
As feminist scholar Maria Lauret indicates, 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".[35]
Caged Bird's Maya, who has been described as "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America",[1] lives in a hostile world that defines beauty in terms of being white. As a child, she internalizes this notion; her belief in her own ugliness was "absolute".[36] As a displaced person, her pain is worsened by an awareness of her displacement.[36] Maya is "the forgotten child", and must come to terms with "the unimaginable reality" of being unloved and unwanted.[37] In the course of Caged Bird, however, Maya goes from being a victim of racism with an inferiority complex to a self-aware individual who responds to racism with dignity.[2] African American literature scholar Dolly McPherson states that Angelou, in her demonstration of the passage from childhood to young adulthood, creatively uses "the Christian myth" and presents the themes of death, regeneration, and rebirth.[37] Scholar Liliane Arensberg calls this Angelou's "identity theme" and a major motif in Angelou's narrative. Maya's unsettled life in Caged Bird suggests her sense of self "as perpetually in the process of becoming, of dying and being reborn, in all its ramifications".[38]
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". Angelou begins this technique in Caged Bird and continues it in her subsequent volumes, especially her demonstration of the "racist habit"[39] of renaming African Americans, as shown in the first book when her white employer insists on calling her "Mary". Angelou describes this as the "hellish horror of being 'called out of [one's] name'".[40] Scholar Debra Walker King calls it a racist insult and "a violent verbal assault against the child's race and her self-image".[41] According to scholar Sidonie Ann Smith, this renaming emphasizes Maya's feelings of inadequacy and denigrates her identity, individuality, and uniqueness. Maya understands this in the book, and rebels by breaking Mrs. Cullinan's favorite dish.[42]
Another incident that solidifies Maya's identity is her trip to Mexico with her father, when she has to drive a car for the first time, to return to California. Contrasted with her experience in Stamps, Maya is finally "in control of her fate".[43] Maya recognizes the importance of this incident, as well as the incident that immediately follows it, her short period of homelessness after arguing with her father's girlfriend. These two incidents give Maya a knowledge of self-determination and confirm her self-worth.[44]
"Kinship concerns" are also woven throughout Caged Bird.[45] McPherson believes that the concept of family in Angelou's books must be understood in the light of the children's displacement at the beginning of Caged Bird.[46] Being sent away from their parents was a psychological rejection, something that the young children interpreted as "a rejection of self". This rejection also resulted in a quest for love, acceptance, and self-worth.[47] Associated with the theme of kinship in Caged Bird is the theme of community. The black community of Stamps finds ways to be strong, nurturing, and cohesive in order to withstand an antagonistic environment, especially white violence against black men.[48]
Beginning in Caged Bird, when Maya becomes a mother at the end of the book, motherhood is a "prevailing theme"[5] in Angelou's autobiographies.[5] Lupton believes that Angelou's plot construction and character development were influenced by this same mother/child motif found in the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Jessie Fauset.[49] Maya's feelings for and relationship with her own mother, whom she blames for her abandonment, expresses itself in ambivalence and "repressed violent aggression"[50] Scholar Mary Burgher believes that black women autobiographers like Angelou have debunked the stereotypes of African American mothers as "breeder and matriarch", and presented them as having "a creative and personally fulfilling role".[51]
It should be clear, however, that this portrayal of rape is hardly titillating or "pornographic." It raises issues of trust, truth and lie, love, the naturalness of a child's craving for human contact, language and understanding, and the confusion engendered by the power disparities that necessarily exist between children and adults.
Opal Moore[52]
Angelou's description of being raped as an eight-year-old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text.[53] Scholar Mary Vermillion compares Angelou's treatment of rape to that of Harriet Jacobs in her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs and Angelou both use rape as a metaphor for the suffering of their race; while Jacobs uses it to critique slaveholding culture, however, Angelou at first internalizes twentieth-century racist conceptions of the black female body, and then challenges them.[54] Rape, according to Vermillion, "represents the black girl's difficulties in controlling, understanding, and respecting both her body and her words".[55]
Arensberg notes that Maya's rape is connected to Angelou's theme of death in Caged Bird. It is performed under threat of death, and Mr. Freeman threatens to kill her brother Bailey if she tells anyone. After Maya lies during Freeman's trail, he is murdered, and Maya sees her words as a bearer of death. As a result, she resolves never to speak to anyone other than Bailey. Angelou connects the violation of her body and the devaluation of her words by the depiction of her self-imposed, five-year long silence.[56] As Angelou later stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk".[57]
Stamps, Arkansas, as seen in Caged Bird, had very little "social ambiguity";[24] it was a world divided between black and white, male and female. Author Hilton Als characterizes this division as "good and evil",[24] and notes how Angelou's witness of this evil, "generally directed at black women",[24] shaped Angelou's young life and informed her views into adulthood.[24] Vermillion goes further, maintaining that a black woman who writes about her rape risks reinforcing negative stereotypes about her race and gender.[58]
Maya's rape demonstrates how as a Black female, she is violated as she moves from childhood to adolescence.[5] African American literature scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe calls its depiction "a burden": a demonstration of "the manner in which the Black female is violated in her tender years and ... the 'unnecessary insult' of Southern girlhood in her movement to adolescence".[5] When asked decades later how she was able to survive such trauma, Angelou explained it by stating, "I can't remember a time when I wasn't loved by somebody."[59] When asked by the same interviewer why she wrote about the experience, she indicated that she wanted to demonstrate the complexities of rape. She also wanted to prevent it from happening to someone else, so that anyone who had been raped might gain understanding and not blame herself for it.[60]
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
-The final stanza of Maya Angelou's poem, "Caged Bird"[61]
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.[62][63] Like elements within a prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism, as well as other forms of oppression like drugs, marriage, and economic inequality.[64] This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle".[63]
Caged Bird has been called "perhaps the most aesthetically satisfying autobiography written in the years immediately following the Civil Rights era".[65] French writer Valérie Baisnée sees Angelou's autobiographies in the midst of literature written during and about the American Civil Rights movement.[66] Lupton states that Caged Bird starkly "captures the vulgarity of white Southern attitudes toward African Americans". Angelou demonstrates, through her involvement with the black community of Stamps, her developing understanding of the rules for surviving in a racist society. Angelou also vividly presents racist characters "so real one can feel their presence".[67]
Angelou's early experiences with racism are so powerful that in a 1982 interview with Bill Moyers during her first trip back to Stamps, she is unable to cross some railroad tracks into the white part of town.[68] Critic Pierre A. Walker places Caged Bird in the African American literature tradition of political protest, and insists that the unity of Angelou's autobiographies serves to underscore one of their central themes: the injustice of racism and how to fight it.[2] Angelou's autobiographies, beginning with Caged Bird, contain "a sequence of lessons about resisting racist oppression".[2] This sequence leads Angelou, as the protagonist, from "helpless rage and indignation to forms of subtle resistance, and finally to outright and active protest".[2]
Walker insists that Angelou's treatment of racism is what gives Caged Bird its thematic unity. The book, like most autobiographies, begins with Angelou's earliest memories, but she relates events non-chronologically. For example, the description of the "powhitetrash" girls that taunt Maya's grandmother occurs in chapter five, when Maya was about ten years old, two years after her rape, which occurs in chapter 12. Maya reacts to the "powhitetrash" incident with "rage, indignation, humiliation, [and] helplessness",[2] but Mama teaches her how they can maintain their personal dignity and pride while dealing with racism. Walker calls this a "strategy of subtle resistance",[2] and McPherson calls it "the dignified course of silent endurance".[69]
Later chapters in Caged Bird demonstrate the limitations of subtle resistance, but Angelou shows that it serves as a basis for moving to actively protesting and combating racism. Other ways of responding to racism are presented, like when Maya broke the race barrier and became the first black street-car operator, her description of her eighth-grade graduation, her treatment by her white employer Mrs. Cullinan, and the dentist scene, wherein the dentist refuses to treat young Maya because she is black.[2] In addition, her description of the strong and cohesive black community of Stamps demonstrates how African Americans subvert their institutions to withstand racism.[70] Arensberg insists that Angelou demonstrates how she, as a black child, evolves out of her "racial hatred",[71] common in the works of many contemporary black novelists and autobiographers. At first Maya wishes that she could become white, since growing up black in white America is dangerous; later she sheds this self-loathing and embraces her racial identity.[71]
As Lupton points out, all of Angelou's autobiographies, especially this volume and the one that follows it, Gather Together in My Name, are "very much concerned with what [Angelou] knew and how she learned it". Lupton compares Angelou's informal education with the education of other black writers of the 20th century, who did not earn official degrees and depended upon the "direct instruction of African American cultural forms".[72] Angelou is influenced by writers introduced to her by Mrs. Flowers during her self-imposed muteness, including Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. Angelou states, early in Caged Bird, that she "met and fell in love with William Shakespeare".[73] Later, she defends Shakespeare's influence on her life and career by emphasizing Shakespeare's identification with marginalized people when she claims, "Shakespeare was a black woman".[74] As a child Angelou is also powerfully affected by the genres of slave narratives, spirituals, poetry, and other autobiographies.[75] Critic Mary Vermillon sees a connection between Maya's rape and Shakespeare's "The Rape of Lucrece", which Maya memorizes and recites when she regains her speech. Vermillon maintains that Maya finds comfort in the poem's identification with suffering.[76] Maya finds novels and their characters complete and meaningful, so she uses them to make sense of her bewildering world. She is so involved in her fantasy world of books that she even uses them to cope while being raped.[77] As Angelou writes in Caged Bird, "...I was sure that any minute my mother or Bailey or the Green Hornet would bust in the door and save me".[78]
According to Walker, the power of words is another theme that appears repeatedly in Caged Bird. For example, Maya chooses to not speak after her rape because she is afraid of the destructive power of words. Mrs. Flowers, by introducing her to classic literature and poetry, teaches her about the positive power of words and empowers Maya to speak again.[2] In a 1993 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Angelou advises her to "do as West Africans do ... listen to the deep talk", or the "utterances existing beneath the obvious".[79] As McPherson says, "If there is one stable element in Angelou's youth it is [a] dependence upon books". The public library is a refuge to which Maya retreats when she experiences crisis,[80] and it becomes a "quiet refuge" from the chaos of her life.[77]
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the most highly acclaimed of Angelou's autobiographies. The other volumes are regularly judged and compared to her first.[5] With its publication, Angelou became known, according to the New York Times Book Review, as an author who "writes like a song, and like the truth. The wisdom, rue and humor of her storytelling are borne on a lilting rhythm completely her own."[5] Angelou's friend and mentor, James Baldwin, maintained that her book "liberates the reader into life" and called it "a Biblical study of life in the midst of death".[81]
By the end of 1969, critics had placed Angelou in the tradition of other black autobiographers. Poet James Bertolino asserts that Caged Bird "is one of the essential books produced by our culture". "We should all read it," he says, "especially our children".[82] It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1970;[83] in 1995, Angelou's publishing company, Bantam Books, recognized her for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list.[84] Critic Robert A. Gross called Caged Bird "more than a tour de force of language".[85] Edmund Fuller insisted that Angelou's "artistry and intellectual range" were apparent in how she told her story.[85] Caged Bird catapulted Angelou to international fame and critical acclaim, and "heralded the success of other now prominent [black women] writers".[86]
Angelou recited her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's 1993 inauguration; in the following week, sales of the paperback version of Caged Bird and her other works rose by 300-600 percent. Bantam Books reprinted 400,000 copies of her books to meet demand. Random House, which published Angelou's hardcover books and published the poem later that year, reported that they sold more of her books in January 1993 than they did in all of 1992, marking a 12,000 percent increase.[87]
In one of the few negative reviews of Caged Bird, author Francine Prose considers its inclusion in the high school curriculum as partly responsible for the "dumbing down" of American society. Prose calls the book "manipulative melodrama", and considers Angelou's writing style an inferior example of "poetic" prose in memoir. She accuses Angelou of combining a dozen metaphors in one paragraph and for "obscuring ideas that could be expressed so much more simply and felicitously".[88]
When Caged Bird was published in 1969, Angelou was hailed as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. Up to that point, black women writers were marginalized to the point that they were unable to present themselves as central characters. Writer Julian Mayfield, who calls Caged Bird "a work of art that eludes description",[24] insists that Angelou's autobiography set a precedent not only for other black women writers, but for the genre of autobiography as a whole.[24] Through the writing of her autobiography, Angelou had become recognized as a respected spokesperson for blacks and women.[5] Caged Bird made her "without a doubt, ... America's most visible black woman autobiographer".[65] Poet Hilton Als insists that although Caged Bird was an important contribution to the increase of black feminist writings in the 1970s, he attributes its success less to its originality than with "its resonance in the prevailing Zeitgeist",[24] of the time in which it was written, at the end of the American Civil Rights movement. Angelou's writings, more interested in self-revelation than in politics or feminism, freed many other women writers to "open themselves up without shame to the eyes of the world".[24] Angelou's influence was exhibited in 2007, when she became the first African American woman and living poet to be featured in the Poetry for Young People series of books from Sterling Publishing.[89]
Angelou's autobiographies, especially the first volume, have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches to teacher education. Dr. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has used Caged Bird and Gather Together in My Name to train teachers how to "talk about racism" in their classrooms. Due to Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony, readers of Angelou's autobiographies wonder what she "left out" and are unsure about how to respond to the events Angelou describes. These techniques force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their own "privileged status". Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African American autobiography and her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography".[90]
Educator Daniel Challener, in his 1997 book, Stories of Resilience in Childhood, analyzed the events in Caged Bird to illustrate resiliency in children. Challener insists that Angelou's book provides a "useful framework" for exploring the obstacles many children like Maya face and how a community helps these children succeed as Angelou did.[91] Psychologist Chris Boyatzis has reported using Caged Bird to supplement scientific theory and research in the instruction of child development topics such as the development of self-concept and self-esteem, ego resilience, industry versus inferiority, effects of abuse, parenting styles, sibling and friendship relations, gender issues, cognitive development, puberty, and identity formation in adolescence. He finds the book a "highly effective" tool for providing real-life examples of these psychological concepts.[92]
Caged Bird elicits criticism for its honest depiction of rape, its exploration of the ugly spectre of racism in America, its recounting of the circumstances of Angelou's own out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy, and its humorous poking at the foibles of the institutional church.
Opal Moore[93]
Caged Bird has been criticized by many parents, causing its removal from school curricula and library shelves. According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, "Parents, schools and related organizations have argued that the book encourages deviant behavior because of its references to lesbianism, premarital cohabitation, pornography and violence".[94] Some have also been critical of its "sexually explicit scenes, foul language, and irreverent religious depictions".[95] The book is challenging for young readers and the educators who bring it into the classroom, so educators have stressed the importance of preparing teachers to introduce the book effectively.[30]
Caged Bird appears third on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.[96] It is fifth on the ALA's list of the ten most challenged books of the 21st century (2000–2005).[97] It is one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms.[98]
A made for TV movie version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was filmed in Vicksburg, Mississippi and aired on April 28, 1979. Angelou and Leonora Thuna wrote the screenplay; the movie was directed by Fielder Cook. Constance Good played young Maya. Also appearing were actors Esther Rolle, Roger E. Mosley, Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee, and Madge Sinclair.[99] Two scenes in the movie differed from events described in the book. Angelou added a scene between Maya and Uncle Willie after the Joe Louis fight; in it, he expresses his feelings of redemption after Louis defeats a white opponent.[100] Angelou also presents her eighth grade graduation differently in the film. In the book, Henry Reed delivers the valedictory speech and leads the black audience in the Negro national anthem. In the movie, Angelou conducts these activities.[101]