Gather Together In My Name

The second of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, ‘Gather Together In My Name’ covers her life between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. Angelou, called Rita in the book, is the example of a single mother’s struggle in a society that is almost repulsed by the very existence of an African-American woman. The book was written three years after and immediately followed the events of her first autobiography ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’. Maya Angelou has long since been the representation and voice of African-American women in a post-war America, which was essentially a white-male-dominated society.

To give a short summary of the plot, the story revolves around Rita’s life as a young mother and the struggles she faces in locating herself and her identity in a changing world. The shadow of poverty creeps closer to her through the narration as she slides down the social ladder into a life of crime.

The thread of racism has run unbroken through all of Angelou’s works in one form or the other. This book is no different, in terms of her honest depictions of the social realities of such a time in history. There are several instances where the binary of white/black comes uncomfortably close to the surface. For example, a quote from the beginning of the book,

“A Crow gives birth to a Dove. The bird kingdom must be petrified.”

            

         This was said by one of Rita’s classmates, on seeing her infant son. This is in reference to the fact that Rita’s child had a comparatively fair complexion and did not have the distinctive large-lipped mouth marking his African-American heritage. Such a blatant display of the colonial influence is almost shocking to read, moreover because one must keep in mind that this is an autobiography, which allows us to see things as they really were. To assert this point further, the woman saying these words, is also African-American. The illusion of setting what is considered ‘normative’ in a society is one of the primary tools of the coloniser, and this is successful when the colonised begins to accept this norm. We also see how Rita herself is a nonconformist, in that she takes offense at her classmate’s implication that her child has ‘white’ features. Seeing as to how Angelou’s goal from her very first autobiography was “to tell the truth about the lives of black women”, it is apparent that she is successful in doing so.

        The most important element of the book would be its prologue, which highlights the confused state of mind of African-Americans in the post-war period. This quote aptly summarises that feeling:

“There was no need to discuss racial prejudice. Hadn’t we all, black and white, just snatched the remaining Jews from the hell of concentration camps? Race prejudice was dead. A mistake made by a young country. Something to be forgiven as an unpleasant act committed by an intoxicated friend.”

      

       One must keep in mind that African-Americans are, by this time, natives to the land of America. The American way of life does not just belong to the white population, but to them as well. Yet, we see that no member of this community is allowed to live out that American dream as long as they themselves consider their community as the marginalised and the oppressed. The injustice done against the African-American community has far reaching effects, which go much further than the violence of the American Civil War period, or the blatant attitudinal racism that followed this. Maya Angelou’s book marks the period in history, where America transformed its blatant racism to a more subtle form. The book is very much concerned with everything that Rita learnt and how she learnt it. Unsurprisingly, none of this is through the medium of education, but through her experiences from fighting back against the norms set by society.

        

       In conclusion, the second volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies illuminates the difficulties in locating the self in a society that one has been forced to adopt as one’s own, while subsequently being suppressed by the same party that forces this society upon the individual.