TRULY PHENOMENAL: MAYA ANGELOU,1928-2014,BY NIYI OSUNDARE

Prof_Niyi_Osundare

She enriched our world with her astounding array of talents and accomplishments: she was a singer, dancer, composer, producer, actress, journalist, teacher, motivational speaker, writer, and civil rights activist.

Yet, that world, given the time, place, and circumstance of her birth, gave her little chance to demonstrate those talents, and even less possibility for carrying them to ultimate fulfillment.

For she was born Black and female in American South at a time when both designations were nothing short of double jeopardy. Life for Black people in Jim Crow South was hard, brutish, almost forbidding, but the proverbial reality of America as a land of dreams and possibilities enabled her to make lemonade with the lemon sold to her by a society still trying to grapple with the searing contradictions between the lofty democratic ideals enshrined in its constitution and the grave inequities meted out to its racial and gender underclass.

Maya Angelou was a victim of the American nightmare and shining example of its dream. Her entire life provided a lesson in the act of snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat. In an interview with African American critic Claudia Tate a couple of years ago, Angelou declared: “All my work is meant to say ‘You may encounter many defeats but you must not be defeated’” (See The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 2nd Edition, p. 2155).

This is the empowering credo of a woman who was raped when she was eight years old and plunged into trauma-induced silence for many years thereafter; then became a teenage mother one month after graduating from high school at 16. This is the rousing lesson of a woman who rose from acute obscurity to global acclaim; a woman once ‘dumbed’ by unspeakable adversity but who rose to develop a voice strong and eloquent enough to qualify her as the chosen poet at President Clinton’s inauguration on January 21, 1993, thus becoming the first African American and the first woman to be so recognized and honored.

To Maya Angelou, drawbacks and adversities are, most times, the building blocks of the house of glory; for life without its vicissitudes is like Christianity without the Cross. She has so much to say because her own life is a compendium of tellable stories. This is why she is most widely known for her autobiographies, the two famous of which are I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) which became an instant best-seller and literally launched her career as a writer and global voice; and All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes (1984), an engaging account of her travel to Ghana, and the many ways her Africa journey helped her self-definition as an African American by deepening her understanding of the African condition beyond the silences, half-truths, and blatant lies in the history books.

An authentic apprehension of history and its poignant impact on the present, a touching narrative of the battles of life; the archaeology of adversity and its delicate relationship to eventual triumph, the never-say-die spirit and desirability of the proverbial pie in the sky; the necessity of love and the possibility of hope; the redemptive functions of art and culture; a spirituality older, deeper, and much wider than the troubling superficialities of the workaday world; a ceaseless insistence on lasting values: these are the recurrent themes of Maya Angelou’s works.

These are the principles, which ruled her life. This is why, bolstered by uncommon courage and conviction, she was able to say this to a world that has been largely unkind to her race and gender:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise

Yes, the incredible Maya has picked up the horsetail and danced to the other side of the Great River. But she has left us her lyrical verse and soulful music, her imperishable stories, her electric stage presence, her sweet (and sour) voice, the epigrammatic force in her moral injunction:

When you learn, teach

When you get, give

Said the iconic persona in Angelou’s ‘Our Grandmothers’: ‘I have a certain way of being in this world’. Maya Angelou’s 86 years on earth are a telling testimony to that declaration. The world has lost a truly phenomenal woman. How so grateful we are that she came our way and touched our lives with the music of her soul and the gravitas of her grace.

Professor Niyi Osundare, accomplished poet, essayist, and literary critic, teaches at the University of New Orleans in the United States. He is currently in Nigeria to celebrate the Olosunta festival of the Ikere-Ekiti people that neo-religious fanatics are trying to banish.

PREMIUM TIMES

OBITUARY…MAYA ANGELOU WHOSE CHRONICLE OF HER DIRT-POOR UPBRINGING BECAME A LITERARY SENSATION!

…at Clinton’s inauguration…

Maya Angelou, who has died aged 86, was a poet, playwright, film-maker, journalist, editor, lyricist, teacher, singer, dancer, black activist, professor and holder of some 50 honorary degrees; she was principally famous, however, for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a memoir of her dirt-poor upbringing in Arkansas.

When the book was published in 1969 it was a revelation. Narrated in the pulpit-influenced cadences of the black American South, it described a world completely alien to its mainly white, metropolitan readership.

It told how, after her parents divorced, Maya’s father sent her and her elder brother, Bailey, from their home in St Louis to live with their paternal grandmother in the small town of Stamps, Arkansas. Aged three and four, the two children arrived at the station wearing wrist tags reading: “To Whom It May Concern”.

During a brief return to St Louis to live with their mother, at the age of seven Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. Soon after she had identified him as the rapist in court, he was murdered — kicked to death — by some of her uncles. For the next five years the young Maya became a voluntary mute, believing that her voice had killed him and that if she spoke again she might kill someone else.

Coaxed out of silence by a teacher who encouraged her love of reading with Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe and the Brontes, as well as black writers such as Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes, she eventually joined her mother in California, won a scholarship to study drama and dance, and at the age of 17 became an unmarried mother.

Freshly and vividly written, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings became the first non-fiction work by a black woman to make the US national bestseller lists. Other volumes of autobiography followed, charting Maya Angelou’s career as a waitress, brothel madam, prostitute, singer, bus conductress, actress and black activist; as a dancer in Paris; an editor in Egypt; and a journalist and university administrator in Ghana.

As a woman and as a black American who had surmounted oppression to live the American Dream, Maya Angelou became a symbol for the post-segregation era, and a celebrity on the lecture circuit who drew huge crowds wherever she went. Her name appeared on everything from bookends to pillows and mugs, and her rhymes on Hallmark greetings cards. In 1993 she was chosen by President Clinton to recite her poem On the Pulse of the Morning at his inauguration.

Maya Angelou reading a poem at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration

Yet nothing ever equalled her first book. As she became more and more famous, her memoirs became increasingly self-congratulatory in tone; and critics noted that she had adopted all the clichés of her friend Oprah Winfrey’s aspirational narrative of “healing” and “empowerment”. The “diva”, one reviewer observed, had “come to believe her own hype”.

She was born Marguerite Ann Johnson (Maya was her brother Bailey’s diminutive) in St Louis, Missouri, on April 4 1928. Her father was a doorman and US Navy dietitian, her mother a nurse and card dealer.

After living with their grandmother in Arkansas, Maya and her brother returned to live, in Oakland, California, with their mother, a tiny, forthright woman with a colourful turn of phrase (“I’d rather be bitten on the rear by a snaggle-toothed mule than take that shit” was one of her sayings). During the Second World War, Maya attended George Washington High School in Oakland and studied dance and drama at the California Labor School. Before leaving school, she worked as the first black female streetcar conductor in San Francisco.

Her son Guy, born in California when she was 17, was the result of her first sexual experiment, prompted by a desire to clarify her sexuality after she had convinced herself, from reading The Well of Loneliness, that she was becoming a lesbian. Her second book of memoirs, Gather Together in My Name (1974), described her life as an unemployed single mother in California, embarking on brief affairs and transient jobs, before she descended into poverty and the fringes of crime and prostitution.

In Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976) she described her brief marriage to “Tosh” (Enistasious Angelos), a jazz-loving white man of Greek descent. After the marriage ended in 1954 she continued to dance and sing calypso professionally, touring in Porgy and Bess and changing her stage name from Marguerite Johnson to Maya Angelou. In 1957 she recorded an album, Miss Calypso, and appeared in an off-Broadway revue that inspired the film Calypso Heat Wave (1957), in which she sang and performed her own compositions.

Maya Angelou in a 1957 portrait taken for the Caribbean Calypso Festival

In 1959 Maya Angelou met the novelist James Killens, who suggested she move to New York to concentrate on her writing career. In The Heart of a Woman (1981) she described her immersion in the Harlem world of black writers and artists, and her work with Martin Luther King (she and Killens organised the Cabaret for Freedom in aid of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference). She also described her relationship with the South African rights activist Vusumzi Make — a man, by her account, of unlimited sex appeal who tried, but failed, to possess her, body and soul, and with whom she moved to Cairo, where she became the associate editor of the English-language Arab Observer.

All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) charted her three-year stay in Accra, Ghana, after the break-up of her relationship with Make. She was an administrator at the University of Ghana, and was active in the African-American expatriate community, becoming a features editor for The African Review and a freelance writer, broadcaster and actress.

In A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002), the sixth episode of the Angelou saga, she recounted her return to America; her attempts to help Malcolm X build a new civil rights organisation, the Organisation of Afro-American Unity ; her devastation after his assassination; her return to life as a nightclub chanteuse in Hawaii; and her decision to write her first memoir.

Maya Angelou’s account of her time in Hawaii contains a passage which, to one reviewer, seemed to epitomise all that had gone wrong between the publication of her first and last books.

Worried about dwindling audiences at the nightclub, she decides, for her swansong performance, not to sing, but to dance: “I asked for the music, then invited it to enter my body and find the broken and sore places and restore them. That it would blow through my mind and dispel the fogs… I danced for the African I had loved and lost in Africa. I danced for bad judgments and good fortune. For moonlight lying like rich white silk on the sand before the great pyramids in Egypt and for the sound on ceremonial fontonfrom drums waking the morning air in Takoradi…. The dance was over, and the audience was standing and applauding.”

“With relief, perhaps?” suggested the reviewer.

But by this time Maya Angelou had become such an institution she could afford not to be bothered by jibes, often quoting a Ghanaian saying: “An elephant is rarely seriously bothered by a flea” .

She also wrote five books of essays and several collections of poetry, one of which — Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie — was nominated for a Pulitzer. Like her prose, her poetry ranged from the vivid and original to a sort of black American version of Pam Ayres .

Maya Angelou’s 1972 screenplay, Georgia, Georgia, was the first original script by a black woman to be produced, and she also published two cookery books. In 1977 she appeared in a supporting role as Kunta Kinte’s grandmother in the television miniseries of Alex Haley’s Roots.

Maya Angelou embraced some unpredictable political standpoints over the years. There was surprise when, in 1995 she spoke at the “Million Man March”, supporting Louis Farrakhan, whom she had previously branded as “dangerous”. In 2008 she backed Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama — who in 2010 presented Maya Angelou with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

From 1991 she taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she held the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. Until she was well into her eighties she made around 80 appearances a year on the lecture circuit. Mom & Me & Mom, an overview of her life, was published last year.

Maya Angelou never clarified the number of times she had been married, “for fear of sounding frivolous”, although it was at least twice. One of her essays told of the end of her marriage, in 1973, to Paul du Feu, “a builder from London, a graduate of the London School of Economics, the first near-nude centrefold for Cosmopolitan magazine, formerly husband of Germaine Greer”.

Maya Angelou is survived by her son

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10860545/Maya-Angelou-obituary.html

REST IN PEACE MAYA ANGELOU (4 APRIL 1928 – 28 MAY 2014)…A BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Maya Angelou was a poet, writer, playwright, social activist, and teacher. She grew up in rural Arkansas in the heart of the Jim Crow South, and much of her writing reflects her experiences as an African American woman in the United States.

(Born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928) was an  author and poet who has been called “America’s most visible black female autobiographer” by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. She is best known for her series of six autobiographical volumes, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first and most highly acclaimed, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her first seventeen years. It brought her international recognition, and was nominated for a National Book Award. She has been awarded over 30 honorary degrees and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her 1971 volume of poetry, Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie.

Angelou was a member of the Harlem Writers Guild in the late 1950s, was active in the Civil Rights movement, and served as Northern Coordinator of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. In 1995, she was recognized for having the longest-running record (two years) on The New York Times Paperback Nonfiction Bestseller List.

With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was heralded as a new kind of memoirist, one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is highly respected as a spokesperson for Black people and women. Angelou’s work is often characterized as autobiographical fiction. She has, however, made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre.

Her books, centered on themes such as identity, family, and racism, are often used as set texts in schools and universities internationally. Some of her more controversial work has been challenged or banned in US schools and libraries.

Wikipedia

Books/Works of Maya ANGELOU
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou

The Heart of a Woman
Maya Angelou

Letter to My Daughter
Maya Angelou

Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem
Maya Angelou

Mother
Maya Angelou

Making Magic in the World
Maya Angelou

Quartet of Poems
Alice Walker, Grace Nichols, Lorna Goodison

Phenomenal woman
Maya Angelou

Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now
Maya Angelou

Quartet of Stories
Alice Walker, Lorna Goodison, Olive Senior

Penguin Readers Level 6
Maya Angelou

Black Pearls
Maya Angelou

Just give me a cool drink of water ‘fore I diiie
Maya Angelou

Poems
Maya Angelou

Still I rise
Maya Angelou

Yo Se Por Que Canta el Pajaro Enjaulado
Maya Angelou

Conversations with Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou

Lessons in Living
Maya Angelou

Mary Ellen Mark
Maya Angelou

Mother
Amy Tan, Mary Higgins Clark, Maya Angelou

Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well
Maya Angelou

Ich weiß, warum der gefangene Vogel singt
Maya Angelou

Even the Stars Look Lonesome
Maya Angelou

Elder grace
Maya Angelou

Complete Collected Poems
Maya Angelou

On the pulse of morning
Maya Angelou

Hallelujah! The Welcome Table
Maya Angelou

Kofi and His Magic
Maya Angelou

Encontraos En Mi Nombre
Maya Angelou

A brave and startling truth
Maya Angelou

Renʹee Marie of France
Maya Angelou

Celebrations
Maya Angelou

Shaker, why don’t you sing?
Maya Angelou

My painted house, my friendly chicken, and me
Maya Angelou

Cedric Of Jamaica
Maya Angelou

Kofi & His Magic
Maya Angelou

Mikale of Hawaii
Maya Angelou

Angelina of Italy
Maya Angelou

Mrs. Flowers
Maya Angelou

I Shall Not Be Moved
Maya Angelou

Life doesn’t frighten me
Maya Angelou

Van Gogh’s Ear
Carolyn Cassady, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen

And Still I Rise
Maya Angelou

Izak of Lapland
Maya Angelou

Now Sheba sings the song
Maya Angelou

Stranger Than Fiction
Dave Barry, Maya Angelou, Norman Mailer

All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
Maya Angelou

A Song Flung Up To Heaven
Maya Angelou

Gather Together in My Name
Maya Angelou

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
Maya Angelou

The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou

And Still I Rise
Maya Angelou

Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas
Maya Angelou

Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie
Maya Angelou

A Song Flung Up to Heaven
Maya Angelou

All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes
Maya Angelou

Poems of Maya Angelou

1. A Brave and Startling Truth 1/23/2012
2. A Conceit 1/3/2003
3. A Plagued Journey 1/23/2012
4. Alone 1/3/2003
5. Awaking in New York 1/23/2012
6. California Prodigal 1/23/2012
7. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings 1/3/2003
8. Insomniac 1/3/2003
9. Kin 1/23/2012
10. Men 1/3/2003
11. Million Man March Poem 1/3/2003
12. Momma Welfare Roll 1/3/2003
13. On the Pulse of Morning 1/23/2012
14. Passing Time 1/3/2003
15. Phenomenal Woman 1/3/2003
16. Refusal 1/3/2003
17. Remembrance 1/3/2003
18. Still I Rise 1/3/2003
19. The Detached 6/18/2005
20. The Lesson 1/3/2003
21. The Mothering Blackness 1/23/2012
22. The Rock Cries Out to Us Today 1/3/2003
23. They Went Home 6/18/2005
24. Touched by an Angel 1/3/2003
25. We Had Him 1/13/2014
26. Weekend Glory 1/3/2003
27. When You Come 1/3/2003
28. Woman Work 1/3/2003

http://www.poemhunter.com/

QUOTATIONS OF MAYA ANGELOU (4 APRIL 1928 – 28 MAY 2014)

”There is a kind of strength that is almost frightening in black women. It’s as if a steel rod runs right through the head down to the feet.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. interview broadcast, Nov. 21, 1973. “A Conversation with Maya Angelou,” Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989).

 

”The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. interview, Nov. 21, 1973. “A Conversation with Maya Angelou,” Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989).

 

”Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice. If legislation does not prohibit our living side by side, sooner or later your child will fall on the pavement and I’ll be the one to pick her up. Or one of my children will not be able to get into the house and you’ll have to say, “Stop here until your mom comes here.” Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American author and performer. As quoted in I Dream a World, by Brian Lanker (1989).

 

”…there is a difference between being convinced and being stubborn. I’m not certain what the difference is, but I do know that if you butt your head against a stone wall long enough, at some point you realize the wall is stone and that your head is flesh and blood.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author and performer. As quoted in Reel Women, part 4, by Ally Acker (1991). Said in 1979, on giving up her attempt to be named director of the television version of the first volume of her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

 

”…talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author and performer. Black Women Writers at Work, ch. 1, by Claudia Tate (1983).

 

”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.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Caged Bird, Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983).

 

”We had won. Pimps got out of their polished cars and walked the streets of San Francisco only a little uneasy at the unusual exercise. Gamblers, ignoring their sensitive fingers, shook hands with shoeshine boys…. Beauticians spoke to the shipyard workers, who in turn spoke to the easy ladies…. I thought if war did not include killing, I’d like to see one every year. Something like a festival.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. Gather Together in My Name, vol. 2, prologue (1974).

 

”I thought if war did not include killing, I’d like to see one every year.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American author and performer. Gather Together in My Name, ch. 1 (1974). On the sense of “festival” in the San Francisco African American community that followed the announcement of victory in World War II.

 

”Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Gather Together in My Name, vol. 2, ch. 6 (1974).

 

”Stories of law violations are weighed on a different set of scales in the Black mind than in the white. Petty crimes embarrass the community and many people wistfully wonder why Negroes don’t rob more banks, embezzle more funds and employ graft in the unions…. This … appeals particularly to one who is unable to compete legally with his fellow citizens.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch.

 

”The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country’s table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin’s-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 29 (1970).

 

”… the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 18 (1970).

 

”The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 29 (1969).

 

”My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 19 (1970). Remembering a world heavyweight championship fight of African American boxer Joe Louis (1914-1981), the defending champion, against Primo Carnera (1906-1967), a white Italian challenger and former heavyweight champion. Angelou’s grandmother ran a store in the small, strictly segregated, brutally racist town of Stamps, Arkansas. Her family and neighbors crowded the store to listen to the fight on radio. At this point, Carnera had Louis on the ropes and was pummelling him. But Louis would fight back and prevail. Louis, who had won the championship in 1937 by defeating James J. Braddock, held it until his first retirement in 1949; he had defended the title successfully twenty-five times, scoring twenty-one knockouts. He returned to fighting in 1950 and retired permanently the following year, ironically after being knocked out by a white Italian-American: Rocky Marciano (1924-1969). It was only his third defeat in seventy-one professional fights.

 

”Of all the needs (there are none imaginary) a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 4 (1969).

 

”Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 17 (1969).

 

”At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 31 (1969).

 

”Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave information on the finished lesbian—and that woefully sketchy—but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing. I did discover that the difference between hermaphrodites and lesbians was that hermaphrodites were “born that way.” It was impossible to determine whether lesbians budded gradually, or burst into being with a suddenness that dismayed them as much as it repelled society.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, vol. 1, ch. 35 (1969).

 

”People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 8 (1970). Remembering her childhood in strictly segregated, harshly racist Stamps, Arkansas, during the 1930s.

 

”In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 4 (1970). Remembering her childhood in strictly segregated, harshly racist Stamps, Arkansas, during the 1930s.

 

‘During those years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white love…. it was Shakespeare who said, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.” It was a state of mind with which I found myself most familiar. I pacified myself about his whiteness by saying that after all he had been dead so long it couldn’t matter to anyone any more.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 2 (1970). Remembering her childhood in strictly segregated, harshly racist Stamps, Arkansas, during the 1930s. Shakespeare had, of course, “been dead” for more than three centuries: since 1616. “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” is the first line of sonnet no. 29.

 

”This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), African American poet, autobiographer, and performer. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 19 (1970). Remembering the significance to African American Southerners of a world heavyweight championship bout fought by African American boxer Joe Louis (1914-1981), the defending champion, against Primo Carnera (1906-1967), a white Italian challenger and former heavyweight champion. Angelou’s grandmother ran a store in the small, strictly segregated, brutally racist town of Stamps, Arkansas. Her family and neighbors crowded the store to listen to the fight on radio. As it turned out, Louis won this and every one of his other twenty-four title defenses until his first retirement in 1949.

 

”The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 34 (1969).

 

”All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ch. 4 (1969). Said of one’s hometown.

 

”I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, vol. 1, ch. 18 (1969).

 

”Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. interview in Black Scholar (Jan.-Feb. 1977). Defining work.

 

”There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Interview in Black Scholar (New York, January-February 1977).

 

”While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. repr. In Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989). “Involvement in Black and White,” interview, Oregonian (Portland, February 17, 1971). Angelou lived and worked in Ghana and Egypt, 1962-1966.

 

”I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. originally published in Girl About Town (Oct. 13, 1986). Kicking Ass (interview), Conversations with Maya Angelou, ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot (1989).

 

”The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. repr. In Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989). “Listening to Maya Angelou,” California Living (May 14, 1975).

 

”Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, “I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.””

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. repr. In Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989). “Maya Angelou: An Interview,” (first published Oct. 1974).

 

”We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Address, March 1990, Centenary College of Louisiana. New York Times (March 11, 1990).

 

”Men themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner mystery.
When I try to show them,
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my back,
The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts,
The grace of my style.
I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Phenomenal Woman, And Still I Rise (1978).
.

”For Africa to me … is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Quoted in New York Times (April 16, 1972).

 

”If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don’t be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning “Good morning” at total strangers.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, vol. 3, ch. 5 (1976). Quoting her mother’s advice.

 

”A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true. A simple morning’s greeting and response appear loaded with innuendo and fraught with implications…. Each nicety becomes more sterile and each withdrawal more permanent.”

Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, vol. 3, ch. 5 (1976).

 

”As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author, poet. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, vol. 3, ch. 1 (1976).
.

”Oh, the holiness of always being the injured party. The historically oppressed can find not only sanctity but safety in the state of victimization. When access to a better life has been denied often enough, and successfully enough, one can use the rejection as an excuse to cease all efforts. After all, one reckons, “they” don’t want me, “they” accept their own mediocrity and refuse my best, “they” don’t deserve me.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, vol. 3, ch. 9 (1976).

 

”You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. Still I Rise, And Still I Rise (1978).

 

”Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. African American poet, author, educator. “Still I Rise,” in Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women, p. 9, Random House (1994).

 

”Life loves the liver of it.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. (originally published Jan.-Feb. 1977). The Black Scholar Interviews Maya Angelou, Conversations with Maya Angelou, ed. Jeffrey M. Elliot (1989).

 

”My life has been one great big joke,
A dance that’s walked
A song that’s spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke
When I think about myself.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. “When I Think About Myself,” Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie (1971).

 

”I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.”
Maya Angelou (b. 1928), U.S. author. interview; repr. In Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989). “Work in Progress,” (first published June 1973).
I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.
Maya Angelou, 1999

I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.
Maya Angelou, 1984

Nothing so frightens me as writing, but nothing so satisfies me. It’s like a swimmer in the [English] Channel: you face the stingrays and waves and cold and grease, and finally you reach the other shore, and you put your foot on the ground—Aaaahhhh!
Maya Angelou, 1989

 

MAYA ANGELOU…the caged bird is free!…

http://www.poemhunter.com/

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  Svoboda: The rise of Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists

parliament fight

Ukraine’s ultra-nationalist party, Svoboda, was a shock winner in October’s parliamentary election, capturing more than 10% of the vote and entering the legislature for the first time. How radical is it?

Svoboda’s presence has been felt immediately in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, where its 37 deputies belong to a broad coalition opposing President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.

Meeting for its first two sessions in mid-December, the Rada – as it has a number of times in the past – degenerated into scenes that resembled not so much a legislative process as an ice hockey brawl, involving dozens of shoving, punching and kicking parliamentarians.

Svoboda’s newly installed deputies, clad in traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts, were in the thick of the melee, when not actually leading the charge.

They helped attack and drive from the opposition’s ranks two deputies – a father and son – who were accused of preparing to defect to the ruling party. Then they joined a massive free-for-all around the speaker’s rostrum, in protest at alleged illegal absentee-voting by deputies from the governing party.

One of Svoboda’s leading members, sports journalist Ihor Miroshnychenko, his ponytailflying behind him, then charged the podium (above) to prevent a deputy speaking in Russian. (Svoboda believes that only Ukrainian should be used in all official bodies.)

Outside, Svoboda deputies used a chainsaw to cut down an iron fence erected last year to prevent crowds from storming the parliament building. This they justified in the name of popular democracy.

“No other democratic country has fenced-off the national parliament,” said Svoboda’s Ruslan

Koshulinskiy, the deputy speaker of parliament. “People have chosen these lawmakers and should

have a right to have access to them.”

Chaotic and confrontational as this may seem to Western eyes, Svoboda’s over-the-top behaviour

is partly what drove many Ukrainians to vote for them.

 

The party has tapped a vast reservoir of protest votes. In a political landscape where all other parties are seen as corrupt, weak or anti-democratic – or all three – Svoboda seems to have attracted voters who would otherwise have stayed away from the polls altogether. Its strong anti-corruption stance – promising to “clean up” Ukraine – has resonated deeply.

“I’m for Svoboda,” said Vadim Makarevych, a supporter, said at a recent rally in Kiev. “We have to stop what is happening in our country. It’s banditry and mafia.”

At the same time, they have staked out a position as fervent – some say rabid – defenders of traditional Ukrainian culture and language.

Months before Miroshnychenko charged the parliament podium, Svoboda activists were photographed appearing to spray police with pepper gas, at a demonstration against a law making Russian an official language in some regions of the country.

Among those who see Russia as a threat to Ukraine’s independence – chiefly in the west rather than the east of the country – many applaud this tough anti-Moscow stance.

But in the run-up to October’s election, the party also wooed centrist voters by softening its image.

Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok repeatedly reassured voters that Svoboda is not racist, xenophobic or anti-Semitic – just pro-Ukrainian. “We are not against anyone, we are for ourselves,” he said.

By presenting itself as a party of very devoted patriots, Svoboda seems to have won over voters who would be repelled by some of its more radical views – or voters who sympathise with these views, but prefer them to remain unspoken.

In the last parliamentary elections five years ago, Svoboda managed only 0.7% of the vote. This time, in addition to expanding its traditional base in the country’s Ukrainian-speaking west – it won close to 40% in the Lviv region – Svoboda made inroads into central regions, capturing second place in the capital Kiev.

But while the party’s radical past can be papered over, it cannot be erased. Its name until 2004 was the “Social-Nationalist Party” and it maintains informal links to another group, the Patriots of Ukraine, regarded by some as pro-fascist.

In 2004, Tyahnybok was kicked out of former President Viktor Yushchenko’s parliamentary faction for a speech calling for Ukrainians to fight against a “Muscovite-Jewish mafia” – using two highly insulting words to describe Russians and Jews – and emphasising that Ukrainians had in the past fought this threat with arms.

In 2005, he signed an open letter to Ukrainian leaders, including President Yushchenko, calling for the government to halt the “criminal activities” of “organised Jewry”, which, the letter said, was spreading its influence in the country through conspiratorial organisations as the Anti-Defamation League – and which ultimately wanted to commit “genocide” against the Ukrainian people.

Tyahnybok stresses that he has never been convicted for anti-Semitism or racial hatred, though prosecutors opened a case against him after his 2004 speech. “All I said then, I can also repeat now,” he says. “Moreover, this speech is relevant even today.”

Other Svoboda members have also courted controversy. Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn, a parliamentary deputy considered one of the party’s ideologues, liberally quotes from former Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, along with other National-Socialist leaders.

This undoubtedly appeals to a number of Svoboda’s voters, though to what extent is difficult to determine.

Even now, Svoboda’s platform calls for passports to specify the holder’s ethnicity, and for government positions to be distributed proportionally to ethnic groups, based on their representation in the population at large.

“We want Ukrainians to run the country,” says Bohdan, a participant in a recent Svoboda rally, as he waves a Ukrainian flag and organizes cheering and chanting.

Some see signs that Svoboda’s radical elements are reasserting themselves. Activists recently attacked and sprayed tear gas at a gay rights rally in central Kiev. Ihor Miroshnychenko, meanwhile, used abusive language to describe the Ukrainian-born American actress Mila Kunis, who is Jewish, in an online discussion.

However, a number of Svoboda’s critics, while underscoring the potential dangers of the party’s rise, also say that its popularity may be fleeting. Svoboda’s surge mirrors the far-right’s growing strength in many countries across Europe, they point out, and may not signal any fundamental, long-term rightward shift among the Ukrainian population.

With the increased scrutiny that the party will come under in parliament, more Ukrainians may also take objection to Svoboda’s wilder statements, or decide it creates unnecessary divisions in an already polarised country.

The party itself could also become more mainstream as it conforms to pressure from its political partners. This has happened with other far-right groups in the past, like the Italian Fascist party, which mellowed as it integrated into Italy’s conservative camp, experts say.

“There’s a belief that Svoboda will change, once in the Verkhovna Rada, and that they may become proper national democrats,” says Andreas Umland, a political science professor at Kiev’s Mohyla Academy University.

But he hesitates to predict how the party’s internal tensions will be resolved.

“We don’t know which way Svoboda will go,” he says. “It may actually become more radical.”

By David Stern.bbc.co.uk