Remembering Maya Angelou
28/05/15 05:27
I probably wouldn’t have remembered it on my own, but from time to time I read those “today in history” postings on the Internet. There was a time when I was a huge fan of that kind of thing. I purchased record albums (remember record players?) with radio stories from the birth days of our children, and I’ve looked up the front pages of major newspapers from my own birthday and the birthdays of other family members. It is kind of interesting to me to put the times of our lives into perspective. Sometimes we experience life as a series of events. First this happens, then that happens, and on and on. Other times, however, we gain enough perspective to understand that our events fit into a context and the often what we think is a “stand alone” moment is really part of a bigger process.
Anyway, I read “Today in History, May 28.” It is mostly birthdays. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is 71. Senator Marco Rubio is 44. The singer, Gladys Knight, is 71. There are some other events reported. A year ago today, President Barak Obama addressed the graduates at West Point.
And it has been a year since Maya Angelou died at the age of 86.
I’ve been thinking about Maya Angelou for more than a month because I have been reading her poems each day. I obtained a copy of “The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. The poems in the book were originally published in at least five volumes. There is something powerful, however, about reading them all at once. Of course I can’t really read poetry that way. I would be overwhelmed trying to read them all at once. I read one or two poems a day at the most. And I read the poems out loud so that I can catch the rhythm and power of the words in ways that are not evident when reading silently.
There is little that I could write about Maya Angelou that someone else hasn’t already written. She certainly was a prolific writer, with nearly 30 books. She wrote poetry and essays and children’s books and picture books and children’s books. She wrote seven volumes of her own autobiography.
I’m pretty sure I don’t have seven autobiographies in my. I’m not sure that even one autobiography would be worth much for more than a dozen or so people to read. But there was something about the incredible experiences of a woman who assembled an incredible life from humble and oppressed beginnings that has resulted in an incredible kaleidoscope of powerful expressions of the essence of being human. She had much to say and she said it so well that her stories become the stories of our people.
And there are many ways in which my story is different. I grew up with great privilege. She did not. I am not a woman. I am not African American. I didn’t experience the life of a street kid in a major urban area. Some might say that she and I are so far apart and so different that we couldn’t possibly share the same story.
Reading her poems often is an experience of looking into another world. Some of them hit me like a slap in the face. They are more angry than I might have expected, but they are also more humorous than I would have guessed.
One thing about Maya Angelou, you can’t ignore her. You can’t forget her. She may have died a year ago today, but she isn’t going away.
So I have been reading her poems.
I don’t think I’m surprised at anger or even a touch of bitterness. She has earned the right to speak the truth of some pretty harsh and ugly situations. And we learned as we journeyed through the American Civil Rights Movement that silence was not the path to justice. What is most surprising for me is how intimately connected are deep love and deep pain. She has the tears of sorrow and the tears of deep grief mixing with the tears of laughter in the turn of a half dozen phrases. Describing the poems as an emotional roller coaster doesn’t begin to do justice to the ups and downs of the book. There are too many times when you don’t know if you are heading up or down for it to seem as simple as a set of cars on a track.
Perhaps most exciting about the poetry is that it is accessible. Despite the obvious pain and discrimination she experienced as a child and as an adult, she understood not only that she was a child of God, but that it was her duty and privilege to recognize that everyone else was also a child of God. “Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.”
Perhaps it is the power of a great writer to tell not only her own story, but the story of all people.
In 1982, Bill Moyers conducted a series of interviews with Maya Angelou about returning to her childhood home. She was raised by her grandmother and her uncle in a home behind the family store. She said, “the truth is you never can leave home. You take it with you everywhere you go. It’s under your skin. It moves the tongue or slows it, colors the thinking, impedes upon the logic.”
Having just returned from the country of my childhood beginnings, I am deeply aware of how different my story is from hers. Yet she has found a way to tell that story in such a way that it sounds familiar - and if not familiar at least so deeply human that I can understand it and experience it complete with the emotions that such experiences produce.
“Always in the black spiritual there is that promise that things are going to be better, by and by, now. Not at any recognizable date, but by and by, things were going to be better.”
Despite the differences that are real, we are all connected by our human experience - by the fact that we all “come from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.”
It isn’t her death that we will remember. It is her life. Still, today seems like a good day to pause and experience our gratitude that such a powerful voice was given expression in our generation.
Anyway, I read “Today in History, May 28.” It is mostly birthdays. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is 71. Senator Marco Rubio is 44. The singer, Gladys Knight, is 71. There are some other events reported. A year ago today, President Barak Obama addressed the graduates at West Point.
And it has been a year since Maya Angelou died at the age of 86.
I’ve been thinking about Maya Angelou for more than a month because I have been reading her poems each day. I obtained a copy of “The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou. The poems in the book were originally published in at least five volumes. There is something powerful, however, about reading them all at once. Of course I can’t really read poetry that way. I would be overwhelmed trying to read them all at once. I read one or two poems a day at the most. And I read the poems out loud so that I can catch the rhythm and power of the words in ways that are not evident when reading silently.
There is little that I could write about Maya Angelou that someone else hasn’t already written. She certainly was a prolific writer, with nearly 30 books. She wrote poetry and essays and children’s books and picture books and children’s books. She wrote seven volumes of her own autobiography.
I’m pretty sure I don’t have seven autobiographies in my. I’m not sure that even one autobiography would be worth much for more than a dozen or so people to read. But there was something about the incredible experiences of a woman who assembled an incredible life from humble and oppressed beginnings that has resulted in an incredible kaleidoscope of powerful expressions of the essence of being human. She had much to say and she said it so well that her stories become the stories of our people.
And there are many ways in which my story is different. I grew up with great privilege. She did not. I am not a woman. I am not African American. I didn’t experience the life of a street kid in a major urban area. Some might say that she and I are so far apart and so different that we couldn’t possibly share the same story.
Reading her poems often is an experience of looking into another world. Some of them hit me like a slap in the face. They are more angry than I might have expected, but they are also more humorous than I would have guessed.
One thing about Maya Angelou, you can’t ignore her. You can’t forget her. She may have died a year ago today, but she isn’t going away.
So I have been reading her poems.
I don’t think I’m surprised at anger or even a touch of bitterness. She has earned the right to speak the truth of some pretty harsh and ugly situations. And we learned as we journeyed through the American Civil Rights Movement that silence was not the path to justice. What is most surprising for me is how intimately connected are deep love and deep pain. She has the tears of sorrow and the tears of deep grief mixing with the tears of laughter in the turn of a half dozen phrases. Describing the poems as an emotional roller coaster doesn’t begin to do justice to the ups and downs of the book. There are too many times when you don’t know if you are heading up or down for it to seem as simple as a set of cars on a track.
Perhaps most exciting about the poetry is that it is accessible. Despite the obvious pain and discrimination she experienced as a child and as an adult, she understood not only that she was a child of God, but that it was her duty and privilege to recognize that everyone else was also a child of God. “Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.”
Perhaps it is the power of a great writer to tell not only her own story, but the story of all people.
In 1982, Bill Moyers conducted a series of interviews with Maya Angelou about returning to her childhood home. She was raised by her grandmother and her uncle in a home behind the family store. She said, “the truth is you never can leave home. You take it with you everywhere you go. It’s under your skin. It moves the tongue or slows it, colors the thinking, impedes upon the logic.”
Having just returned from the country of my childhood beginnings, I am deeply aware of how different my story is from hers. Yet she has found a way to tell that story in such a way that it sounds familiar - and if not familiar at least so deeply human that I can understand it and experience it complete with the emotions that such experiences produce.
“Always in the black spiritual there is that promise that things are going to be better, by and by, now. Not at any recognizable date, but by and by, things were going to be better.”
Despite the differences that are real, we are all connected by our human experience - by the fact that we all “come from the Creator trailing wisps of glory.”
It isn’t her death that we will remember. It is her life. Still, today seems like a good day to pause and experience our gratitude that such a powerful voice was given expression in our generation.