ANGELOU, Maya

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Nationality: American. Born: Marguerita Johnson, St. Louis, Missouri, 4 April 1928. Education: Attended schools in Arkansas and California; studied music privately, dance with Martha Graham, Pearl Primus, and Ann Halprin, and drama with Frank Silvera and Gene Frankel. Family: Married Tosh Angelos (divorced); 2) married Paul de Feu in 1973 (divorced); one son. Career: Actress and singer; associate editor, Arab Observer, Cairo, 1961–62; assistant administrator, School of Music and Drama, University of Ghana Institute of African Studies, Legon and Accra, 1963–66; freelance writer for Ghanaian Times and Ghanaian Broadcasting Corporation, both Accra, 1963–65; feature editor, African Review, Accra, 1964–66; lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles, 1966; writer-in-residence or visiting professor, University of Kansas, Lawrence, 1970, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1974, Wichita State University, Kansas, 1974, and California State University, Sacramento, 1974. Since 1981 Reynolds Professor, Wake Forest University. Northern coordinator, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1959–60. Taught modern dance, Rome Opera House and Hambina Theatre, Tel Aviv. Actress appearing in various television programs. Also composer, television host and interviewer, and writer for Oprah Winfrey television series Brewster Place.Awards: Yale University fellowship, 1970; Rockefeller grant, 1975; Ladies Home Journal award, 1976; Golden Eagle award, 1977; American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate award, 1990; Essence Woman of the Year, 1992; Horatio Alger award, 1992; Woman in Film award, 1992; Grammy award for best spoken word album, 1994; Spingarn Award NAACP, 1994; Frank G. Wells award, 1995; Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Los Angeles and Martin Luther King, Jr., Legacy Association national award, 1996; W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Expert-in-Residence Program, 1997; Black Caucus of American Library Association, Cultural Keepers award, 1997; Christopher award, 1998; Lifetime Achievement award for literature, 1999. Received Emmy award, National Book award, Pulitzer prize, and Tony award nominations. Also the recipient of numerous other awards and honors, including the North Carolina Award in Literature, 1987; Langston Hughes award, City College of New York, 1991; Innaugural poet for President Bill Clinton, 1993; poet, Million Man March, Washington, D.C., 1995. Honorary degrees: Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1975; Mills College, Oakland, California, 1975; and Lawrence University, Appleton, Wisconsin, 1976. Member: American Revolution Bicentennial Council, 1975–76; board of trustees, American Film Institute, 1975; advisory board, Women's Prison Association; Harlem Writer's Guild; National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year; Director's Guild of America; Equity; American Federation Television Radio Artists (AFTRA); Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans; National Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1992; Ambassador, Unicef International, 1996; Doctors without Borders, 1996; W.E.B. Dubois Foundation, Inc.; National Society of Collegiate Scholars; Lifetime membership, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Agent: Lordly and Dame Inc., 51 Church Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02116–5493, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie. New York, Random House, 1971; London, Virago Press, 1988.

Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well. New York, Random House, 1975.

And Still I Rise (also director: produced Oakland, California, 1976). New York, Random House, 1978; London, Virago Press, 1986

Poems. New York, Bantam, 1981.

Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? New York, Random House, 1983.

Now Sheba Sings the Song. New York, Dial Press, and London, Virago Press, 1987.

I Shall Not Be Moved. New York, Bantam Books, 1991 On the Pulse of Morning. New York, Random House, 1993.

Life Doesn't Frighten Me (for children). N.p., Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1993.

The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. New York, Random House, 1994.

Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women. New York, Random House, 1995.

A Brave and Startling Truth. New York, Random House, 1995.

Recordings: Miss Calypso, Liberty, 1957, 1996; For the Love of Ivy, Sidney Portier film, 1968; The Poetry of Maya Angelou, GWP, 1969; Women in Business, University of Wisconsin, 1981; Georgia, Georgia, 1972; All Day Long, 1974; And Still I Rise, 1992; Been Found, 1996.

Plays

Cabaret for Freedom (revue), with Godfrey Cambridge (produced New York, 1960).

The Least of These (produced Los Angeles, 1966).

Gettin' up Stayed on My Mind, (produced, 1967).

Ajax, from the play by Sophocles (produced Los Angeles, 1974).

Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, book by Errol John (produced in London, 1988).

King (lyrics only, with Alistair Beaton), book by Lonne Elder III, music by Richard Blackford (produced London, 1990).

Screenplays: Georgia, Georgia, 1972; All Day Long, 1974.

Television Plays: Sisters, Sisters, with John Berry, 1982.

Television Documentaries: Black, Blues, Black, 1968; Assignment America, 1975; The Legacy, 1976; The Inheritors, 1976; Trying to Make It Home (Byline series), 1988; Maya Angelou's America: A Journey of the Heart (also host); Who Cares about Kids, Kindred Spirits, Maya Angelou: Rainbow in the Clouds, and To the Contrary (all Public Broadcasting Service productions).

Other

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York, Random House, 1970; London, Virago Press, 1984.

Gather Together in My Name. New York, Random House, 1974; London, Virago Press, 1985.

Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas. New York, Random House, 1976; London, Virago Press, 1985.

The Heart of a Woman. New York, Random House, 1981; London, Virago Press, 1986.

All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. New York, Random House, 1986; London, Virago Press, 1987.

Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship (for children). Minneapolis, Redpath Press, 1986.

Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now. New York, Random House, 1993.

My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (for children), N.p., Crown, 1994.

Kofi and His Magic, with photographs by Margaret Courtney-Clark (for children). New York, Clarkson Potter, 1996.

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Bibliography: "A Maya Angelou Bibliography" by Dee Birch Cameron, in Bulletin of Bibliography (Westwood, Massachusetts), 36, 1979.

Manuscript Collection: Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Critical Studies: Maya Angelou by Claudia Tate, in Black Women Writers at Work, New York, Continuum, 1983; "Transcendence: The Poetry of Maya Angelou" by Pricilla R. Ramsey, in A Current Bibliography on African Affairs (Amityville, New York), 17(2), 1984–85; "Maya Angelou: Self and a Song of Freedom in the Southern Tradition" by Carol E. Neubauer, in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, edited by Tonette Bond Inge, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 1990; "Singing the Black Mother: Maya Angelou and Autobiographical Continuity" by Mary Jane Lupton, in Black American Literature Forum, 24(2), summer 1990; "Breaking Out of the Cage: The Autobiographical Writings of Maya Angelou" by James Robert Saunders, in Hollins Critic (Hollins College, Virginia), 28(4), October 1991; Touch Me, Life, Not Softly: The Poetry of Maya Angelou (dissertation) by Leila Andrea Walker, Florida State University, 1994; The Poetry of Maya Angelou: A Study of the Blues Matrix As Force and Code (dissertation) by Kathy Mae Essick, Indiana University, 1994; "Racial Protest, Identity, Words, and Form in Maya Angelou's 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'" by Pierre A. Walker, in College Literature (West Chester, Pennsylvania), 22(3), October 1995; "Women's Life-Writing and the Minority Voice: Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Alice Walker" by Suzette A. Henke, in Traditions, Voices, and Dreams: The American Novel since the 1960s, edited by Melvin J. Friedman and Ben Siegel, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1995; "Searching for a Self in Maya Angelou's 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'" by Dana Chamblee-Carpenter, in Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (Cleveland, Mississippi), 1996; Contemporary American Writers of Desperate Survival: Edward Albee, Maya Angelou, Pat Conroy and Leslie Marmon Silko (dissertation) by Charlene Knadle, St. John's University, New York, 1998; "Hurston's and Angelou's Visual Art: The Distancing Vision and the Beckoning Gaze" by Marion M. Tangum and Marjorie Smelstor, Southern Literary Journal (Chapel Hill, North Carolina), 31(1), fall 1998; Maya Angelou by Miles Shapiro, Philadelphia, Chelsea House Publishers, 2000.

Theatrical Activities: Director: Plays —And Still I Rise, Oakland, California, 1976; Moon on a Rainbow Shawl by Errol John, London, 1988; Film —All Day Long, 1974. Actress: Plays —in Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, tour, 1954–55; Calypso Heatwave, New York, 1957; The Blacks by Jean Genet, New York, 1960; Cabaret for Freedom, New York, 1960; Mother Courage by Berthold Brecht, Accra, Ghana, 1964; Medea, Hollywood, 1966; Look Away, New York, 1973; Film— Roots, 1977; How to Make an American Quilt, 1995; Down in the Delta, 1998.

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In a BBC broadcast—sometime after the 1987 publication of Now Sheba Sings the Song—Maya Angelou sang two impromptu, unaccompanied versions of the song "When the Saints Come Marching In." First she sang with a bright, cheerful surface, the "way whites do," and then she sang with a deep contralto, "from the soul," drawing upon the music that flows deep within us all.

William Shakespeare was Angelou's "first white love," but her poems must be heard against a background of black rhythms. She has an uncanny ability to capture the sound of a voice on a page, as in Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie. Vocal, oral, and written aspects blend in her poetry.

It is ironic that her own triumphs have drawn attention from the uniqueness of her poetry. She was named by Martin Luther King, Jr., to be the Northern coordinator for his Southern Christian Leadership Conference and by President Jimmy Carter to be a member of the Commission for the International Women's Year. She has adapted Sophocles' Ajax for the stage, television, and film; she appeared in a production of Jean Genet's The Blacks; and she had a highly successful career as a dancer. Her books have sold in the millions, but her poetry has received little serious critical attention.

In one sense of the word, however, her poetry is not "serious." Rather it is, as she herself puts it in the title poem of her volume And Still I Rise, "sassy." This term, however, has a powerful meaning. "Sassy" implies (we should assume from her own words) that "the impudent child was detested by God, and a shame to its parents and could bring destruction to its house …" This use of litotes is congenial with a peculiar sort of "coding," as with kenning. Thus, "God's candle bright" is more of a token for the sun than a metaphor. So, too, the title of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is not a sentimental metaphor but a litotes for humiliation. In her poetry understatement is a style for presenting a shared experience in its inconsistency and its energy, and the coding can reinforce the anger implied by the "humor," as in "Sepia Fashion Show":

   Their hair, pomaded, faces jaded
   bones protruding, hip-wise,
   The models strutted, backed and butted,
   Then stuck their mouths out, lip-wise.
 
 
   They'd nasty manners, held like banners,
   while they looked down their nose-wise,
   I'd see 'em in hell, before they'd sell
   me one thing they're wearing, clothes-wise.
 
 
   The Black Bourgeois, who all say "yah"
   When yeah is what they're meaning
   Should look around, both up and down
   before they set out preening.
 
 
   "Indeed" they swear, "that's what I'll wear
   When I go country-clubbing,"
   I'd remind them please, look at those knees
   you got a Miss Ann's scrubbing.

The last line strikes the ear as comic, and we share this sense of it, but then we react as we remember that black women literally had to show their knees to prove how hard they had cleaned. The change—the hearing and then the reaction—is central to Angelou's poetry. We read the understated "nothing happens" in "Letter to an Aspiring Junkie" and then realize that it is a smashing litotes for "violence is everywhere":

   Let me hip you to the streets,
   Jim,
   Ain't nothing happening.
   Maybe some tomorrows gone up in smoke,
   raggedy preachers, telling a joke
   to lonely, son-less old ladies' maids.
 
 
   Nothing happening,
   Nothing shakin', Jim.
   A slough of young cats riding that
   cold, white horse,
   a grey old monkey on their back, of course
   does rodeo tricks.
 
 
   No haps, man.
   No haps.
   A worn-out pimp, with a space-age conk,
   setting up some fool for a game of tonk,
   or poker or
   get 'em dead and alive.
 
 
   The streets?
   Climb into the streets man, like you climb
   into the ass end of a lion.

   Then it's fine.
   It's a bug-a-loo and a shing-a-ling,
   African dreams on a buck-and-a-wing and a prayer.
   That's the streets man,
   Nothing happening.

The experience is particular; the word "conk" refers to a hairdo—rather like Little Richard's, for example. But the energy comes from the astonishing rhythms and perhaps more accurately from the changes of rhythm.

Angelou has composed poetry from the particulars and the rhythms she knows, and the changes of rhythm themselves become a rhythm, the upsets and restarts in an unsteady state of soul that every life has experienced in some place or other. When we read Angelou's poetry, we share the sense of it. But then we have a reaction from the energy and have to reassess it, so that ultimately, when we hear her poetry, we listen to ourselves.

—William Sylvester