Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.
-Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou (Marguerite Annie Johnson) was born on April 4th 1928. She was of the African-American origin. Angelou was reputed to be a multi-talented and multi-faceted dancer, actress, author, writer and singer. In the entirety of her life, she has printed a complete of seven autobiographies, many works of poetry, 3 books of varied essays, and, and was attributable with a formidable listing of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over a period of fifty years. The first of her many autobiographies is titled I Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). It tells us about her tumultuous life up to the age of seventeen. It was her pioneering work that brought her international recognition and acclaim. The details of Angelou's intriguing yet rocky life delineate in her seven autobiographies and in various interviews, speeches, and articles cared-for be inconsistent. Angelou died on the morning of May 28th 2014, consistent with a family statement.
This accredited work of Angelou, is an appropriate and most appropriate example of the Nationalist feeling of belonging, and literature. The way in which this book is written, isn’t in a way that would fuel jingoistic movements, but instead of that that would make her establish an identity with her nation as well as assist the others in doing so, too. The first in an exceptionally long seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates and depicts the conversely persistent strength of character and a love of literature that will facilitate her to overcome racism and trauma. The book begins with a three-year-old Maya and her older brother being sent to Stamps, Arkansas. They are sent to live and grow up with their grandmother and ends once Maya unexpectedly becomes a mother at the young age of sixteen. Throughout the course of her autobiography as a Caged Bird, Maya with the help of literature and its nationalist representation, transforms from being a victim of racism with a personality overridden with inferiority complex into a self-assured, dignified young lady sufficiently capable of responding to injustice and prejudice. Many critics and reviewers often tend to categorize Caged Bird as a form of autobiographical fiction simply because Angelou uses the various tools of thematic advance unique to fiction. Angelou utilizes her autobiographical work to navigate and explore subjects such as identity, literacy rape, and racism. What she also concentrates on is the life of a woman in a male-dominated society. Due to the autobiographical nature of the book, she is deemed as a, “symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America”. She has written this work of art, solely due to the fact that the usage and presence f literature in her life, helps her cope with her bewildering and violent world, and it tends to work in the process of healing her through the trauma.
Feminist scholar Maria Lauret notices that the idea of "formation of female cultural identity" is woven into the progressing book's narrative, invariable setting her up as "a role model for Black women". As a displaced girl, Angelou’s pain is made worse by an awareness of her displacement. She is "the forgotten child".
Throughout the narrative, however acceptable it is deemed to be there is a sense of displacement and inequality. The only reason she seems to have an idea on who she is, is dude the binding nature of a piece of literature. She presents an overall hybridity of unhappiness. She talks about the hierarchy that is evolved from the notion of white/black, and the juxtaposition of the manifestation of these binaries in herself. This colonial dialectic, presents the sufferings mutually endured, by her and her nation.
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