I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Psp Mp5 Player Manufacturer - Digital Photo Frame 2.4-3.5 Inch

Background

Background

The book's title comes from a poem by African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The caged bird, a symbol for the chained slave, is an image Angelou uses throughout all her writings.

Before writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou had a long and varied career, holding jobs such as fry cook, dancer, actress, poet, educator, and even brothel madam. In the late 1950s, she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, where she met a number of important African-American authors, including her friend and mentor James Baldwin. After hearing civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. speak for the first time in 1960, she was inspired to join the Civil Rights movement. She organized several benefits for him, and he named her Northern Coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. She next worked for several years in Ghana, West Africa, as a journalist, actress, and educator. She was invited back to the US by Malcolm X to work for him shortly before his assassination in 1965. In 1968, King asked her to organize a march, but he too was assassinated.

The assassinations were "particularly painful" for Angelou because she had agreed to work for both Malcolm X and King a few months before their deaths. King died on her birthday, so she did not celebrate it for many years. She was deeply depressed in the months following King's assassination, so to help lift her spirits, Baldwin brought her to a dinner party at the home of cartoonist Jules Feiffer and his wife Judy in late 1968. The guests began telling stories of their childhoods and Angelou's stories impressed Judy Feiffer. The next day she called Robert Loomis at Random House, who became Angelou's editor throughout her long writing career, and "told him that he ought to get this woman to write a book". At first, Angelou refused, since she thought of herself as a poet and playwright. According to Angelou, Baldwin had a "covert hand" in getting her to write the book, and advised Loomis to use "a little reverse psychology". She reported that Loomis tricked her into it by daring her: "It just as well", he said, "because to write an autobiography as literature is just about impossible". In her words, Angelou was unable to "resist a challenge", and she began writing Caged Bird. After "closeting herself" in London, it took her two years to write it.

Although she did not intend to compose a series of autobiographies, Angelou 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 from Arkansas to Africa, from the beginnings of World War II to King's assassination. 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", and Caged Bird generally receives the highest praise.

Angelou describes her writing process as regimented. Beginning with Caged Bird, she has used the same "writing ritual" 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 1012 pages of material a day, which she edits down to three or four pages in the evening. Angelou goes through this process to "enchant" herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, to "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang". She places herself back in the time she is writing about, even during traumatic experiences like her rape in Caged Bird, to "tell the human truth" about her life. Critic Opal Moore says about Caged Bird: "... Though easily read, [it] is no 'easy read'". Angelou has stated that she plays cards to reach that place of enchantment, to access her memories more effectively. She has stated, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I in ita! It so delicious!" She does not find the process cathartic; rather, she has found relief in "telling the truth".

Title

When selecting a title, Angelou turned to Paul Laurence Dunbar, an African-American poet whose works she had admired for years. Jazz vocalist and civil rights activist Abbey Lincoln suggested the title. With Shakespeare, Angelou has credited Dunbar with forming her "writing ambition". The title of the book comes from the third stanza of his poem "Sympathy":

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.

Plot summary

See also: List of characters in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings follows Marguerite's (called "My" or "Maya" by her brother) life from the age of three to seventeen 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.

The community of Stamps, Arkansas, is the setting for most of the book.

Many of the problems Maya encounters in her childhood stem from the overt racism of her white neighbors. Although Momma is relatively wealthy because she owns the general store at the heart of Stamps' black community, the white children of their town hassle Maya's family relentlessly. One of these "powhitetrash" girls, for example, reveals her pubic hair to Momma in a humiliating incident. Early in the book, Momma hides Uncle Willie in a vegetable bin to protect him from Ku Klux Klan raiders. Maya has to endure the insult of her name being changed to Mary by a racist employer. A white speaker at her eighth grade graduation ceremony disparages the black audience by suggesting that they have limited job opportunities. A white dentist refuses to treat Maya's rotting tooth, even when Momma reminds him that she had loaned him money during the Depression. The black community of Stamps enjoys a moment of racial victory when they listen to the radio broadcast of Joe Louis's championship fight, but generally they feel the heavy weight of racist oppression.

A turning point in the book occurs when Maya and Bailey's father unexpectedly appears in Stamps. He takes the two children with him when he departs, but leaves them with their mother in St. Louis, Missouri. Eight-year-old Maya is sexually abused and raped by her mother's boyfriend, Mr. Freeman. He is found guilty during the trial, but escapes jail time and is murdered, probably by Maya's uncles. Maya feels guilty and withdraws from everyone but her brother. Even after returning 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. This coaxes Maya out of her shell.

Later, Momma decides to send her grandchildren to their mother in San Francisco, California, to protect them from the dangers of racism in Stamps. 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. While still in high school, Maya visits her father in southern California one summer, and has some experiences pivotal to her development. 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.

During Maya's final year of high school, she worries that she might be a lesbian (which she equates with being a hermaphrodite), and initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy. She becomes pregnant, and 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 mother to her newborn son.

Style and genre

Like Richard Wright's novel Native Son, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been classified as a Bildungsroman.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been called a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story. Although Caged Bird is an autobiography, critic Mary Jane Lupton compares it to George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss. According to Lupton, the two books share the following similarities: a focus on young strong-willed heroines who have solid relationships with their brothers, an examination of the role of literature in life, and an emphasis on the importance of family and community life. Angelou's book also continues the tradition of African American autobiography. Like Richard Wright's Native Son, the protagonist in Caged Bird serves as an example of how a young African American can survive. As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou was reporting not one person's story, but the collective's. Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees, and sees Angelou as representative of the convention in African American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people.

Angelou made a deliberate attempt while writing Caged Bird to challenge the usual structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development often lead reviewers to categorize her books as autobiographical fiction. Lupton insists that all of Angelou's autobiographies conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. In a 1983 interview with African American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies.

When speaking of her use of autobiography, 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'". Throughout the story she uses the first-person narrative voice customary with autobiographies, but also includes fiction-like elements, told from the perspective of a child that is "artfully recreated by an adult narrator". She uses two distinct voices, the adult writer and the child who is the focus of the book, whom Angelou calls "the Maya character". Angelou reports that maintaining the distinction between herself and "the Maya character" is "damned difficult", but "very necessary". Scholar Liliane Arensberg suggests that Angelou "retaliates for the tongue-tied child's helpless pain" by using her adult's irony and wit.

Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books she tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth". Her 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. Author Lyman B. Hagen places Angelou in the long tradition of African American autobiography, but insists that she has created a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form. In a 1998 interview with journalist George Plimpton, Angelou discussed her writing process, and "the sometimes slippery notion of truth in nonfiction" 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." Although Angelou has never admitted to changing the facts in her stories, she has used these facts to make an impact with the reader. As Hagen states, "One can assume that 'the essence of the data' is present in Angelou's work". Hagen also states that Angelou "fictionalizes, to enhance interest". Angelou's editor, Robert Loomis, agrees, stating that she could rewrite any of her books by changing the order of her facts to make a different impact on the reader.

Scholar Joanne M. Braxton sees Caged Bird as a representative example of the autobiographies written by African American women in the years following the civil rights movement. The book presents themes that are common in autobiography by black American women: a celebration of black motherhood; a criticism of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self-definition. 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. Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou one of the "pioneers of self-exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices. 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".

Themes

As critic Pierre A. Walker notes, when Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings at the end of the 1960s, one of the necessary and accepted features of literature was thematic unity, and one of Angelou's goals was to create a book that satisfied this criterion. The structure of the text, which resembles a series of short stories, is not chronological but rather thematic. Walker believes that Angelou succeeded in emphasizing identity, racism, rape, and literacy, despite the narrative's episodic quality. As Hagen states, she structures the book into three parts: arrival, sojourn, and departure, both geographically and psychologically.

Identity

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

In the course of Caged Bird, Maya, who has been described as "a symbolic character for every black girl growing up in America", goes from being a victim of racism with an inferiority complex to a self-aware individual who responds to racism with dignity and a strong sense of her own identity. Feminist scholar Maria Lauret states that the "formation of female cultural identity" is woven into the book's narrative, setting Maya up as "a role model for Black women". 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. Scholar Liliane Arensberg calls this presentation 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".

As Lauret indicates, Angelou and other female writers in the late 1960s and early 1970s used the autobiography to reimagine ways of writing about women's lives and identities in a male-dominated society. Up until this time, black women were not depicted realistically in African American fiction and autobiography, so Angelou was one of the first black autobiographers to present, as Cudjoe put it, "a powerful, authentic and authentic signification of [African American] womanhood in her quest for understanding and love rather than for bitterness and despair". Lauret sees a connection between Angelou's autobiographies, which Lauret calls "fictions of subjectivity" and "feminist first-person narratives", and fictional first-person narratives (such as The Women's Room by Marilyn French and The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing) written during the same period. Both genres employ the narrator as protagonist and "rely upon the illusion of presence in their mode of signification".

As a displaced girl, Maya's pain is worsened by an awareness of her displacement. She is "the forgotten child", and must come to terms with "the unimaginable reality" of being unloved and unwanted; she lives in a hostile world that defines beauty in terms of whiteness and that rejects her simply because she is a black girl. Maya internalizes the rejection she has experienced her belief in her own ugliness was "absolute". McPherson believes that the concept of family, or what Lupton called "kinship concerns", in Angelou's books must be understood in the light of the children's displacement at the beginning of Caged Bird. Being sent away from their parents was a psychological rejection, and resulted in a quest for love, acceptance, and self-worth for both Maya and Bailey.

Angelou (shown here in 1993, reciting her poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Bill Clinton's inauguration) demonstrates an evolution of female identity throughout her autobiographical works.

Lauret agrees with other scholars that Angelou uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities throughout her books to illustrate how oppression and personal history are interrelated. For example, in Caged Bird, Angelou demonstrates the "racist habit" of renaming African Americans, as shown when her white employer insists on calling her "Mary". Angelou describes the employer's renaming as the "hellish horror of being 'called out of [one's] name'". Scholar Debra Walker King calls it a racist insult and an assault against Maya's race and self-image. According to scholar Sidonie Ann Smith, the renaming emphasizes Maya's feelings of inadequacy and denigrates her identity, individuality, and uniqueness. Maya understands that she is being insulted and rebels by breaking Mrs. Cullinan's favorite dish.

An incident in the book that solidifies Maya's identity is her trip to Mexico with her father, when she has to drive a car for the first time. Contrasted with her experience in Stamps, Maya is finally "in control of her fate". This experience is central to Maya's growth, as is the incident that immediately follows it, her short period of homelessness after arguing with her father's girlfriend. These two inci

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