Maya Angelou

 “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.”

Today I am celebrating one of – if not the most – famous black author of all time, Maya Aneglou This is a VERY brief history – to get her full story you should read her series of SEVEN autobiographies.

Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson; 1928 – 2014) was an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. The several volumes of autobiography explore the themes of economic, racial, and sexual oppression.

Evidence suggests that Angelou was partially descended from the Mende people of West Africa. A 2008 documentary found that Angelou's maternal great-grandmother Mary Lee, who had been emancipated after the Civil War, became pregnant by her white former owner, John Savin, who was proved to be the baby’s father and of having blackmailed and committed perjury, but was nonetheless found not guilty. Lee was sent to the Clinton County poorhouse in Missouri with her daughter, Marguerite Baxter, who became Angelou's grandmother. Angelou described Lee as "that poor little Black girl, physically and mentally bruised".

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”

Angelou’s accounts of her own life are often inconsistent or purposefully vague - for example, she was married at least twice, but never clarified exactly how many marriages she’d had "for fear of sounding frivolous". However, owing to the huge body of autobiographies and oral material she left us, we can piece together a somewhat coherent narrative of her life.

“I wrote about my experiences because I thought too many people tell young folks, 'I never did anything wrong. Who, Moi? – never I. I have no skeletons in my closet. In fact, I have no closet.' They lie like that and then young people find themselves in situations and they think, 'Damn I must be a pretty bad guy. My mom or dad never did anything wrong.' They can't forgive themselves and go on with their lives.”

Born in St Louis, Angelou spent much of her childhood staying with her paternal grandmother in Arkansas. However, she was returned to her mother’s care and at the tragic age of just 7 she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend. She told her brother, and the man was consequently murdered when the truth came out. Angelou blamed herself for his death, and the trauma caused her to become completely mute for several years. This period of her life became the focus of her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which gained critical acclaim and brought Angelou her fame.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”

In 1940 Angelou moved with her mother to San Francisco, where she had several jobs including a cocktail waitress, a prostitute and madam, a cook, and a dancer. It was as a dancer that she assumed her professional name (taken from a childhood nickname her brother gave her, and her first husband’s surname). In the late 1950s, she moved to New York City and began to pursue her literary talents at the Harlem Writers’ Guild. Simultaneously, Angelou was cast in George Gershwin’s folk opera Porgy and Bess; with which she toured 22 countries in Europe and Africa. In 1961, she and her second husband moved to Cairo where she worked as a journalist, before moving to Ghana where she also worked in media. Thus, by the time she returned to the USA in 1966 she had become a true citizen of the world.

Upon returning to California in 1965, Angela wrote Black, Blues, Black (aired 1968), a 10-part television series about the role of African culture in American life. As the writer of the movie drama Georgia, Georgia (1972), she became one of the first African American women to have a screenplay produced as a feature film. She also acted in such movies and tv series, including the famous mini-series Roots (1977). She also received a Tony Award nomination for her performance in Look Away (1973). In 1998, she fulfilled another ambition of hers by making her directorial debut with Down in the Delta (1998).

Angelou’s poetry, collected in such volumes as And Still I Rise (1978) drew heavily on her personal experiences. She also wrote a book of meditations and children’s books that featured the stories of children from around the world. Her works mainly spoke to a female audience, including Letter to My Daughter (2008) – although Angelou had only one son.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.”

In 1960, after meeting civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. she helped organise "the legendary" Cabaret for Freedom to benefit the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and was named SCLC's Northern Coordinator. Her contributions to civil rights as a fundraiser and SCLC organizer were regarded as successful and "eminently effective". Angelou also began her pro-Castro and anti-apartheid activism during this time.

She also became close friends with Malcolm X. In 1965, Angelou returned to the U.S. in to help him establish a new civil rights organization, the Organization of Afro-American Unity. Malcolm X was assassinated soon after and Angelou moved to Hawaii to join her brother and resume her singing career while she grieved for her friend. Struggling with direction, she then moved back to Los Angeles to focus on her writing career, and returned to New York 2 years later after witnessing the 1965 Race Riots. She acted in and wrote plays, supported (emotionally and financially) by her powerful friends including Rosa Guy, James Baldwin and Jerry Purcell.

In 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. asked Angelou to organize a march. She agreed, but the march was postponed. Tragically, MLK was assassinated on Maya’s 40th birthday.  Again destroyed by grief for another of her friends and mentors, she was encouraged out of her depression by her friend James Baldwin.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I don't trust people who don't love themselves and tell me, 'I love you.' ... There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.”

In 1973, Angelou married Germaine Greer’s ex-husband, Paul du Feu, in San Francisco. In the following decade: Angelou ‘had accomplished more than many artists hope to achieve in a lifetime.’ She worked as a composer and lyricist. She also produced countless articles, short stories, TV scripts, documentaries, autobiographies, and poetry. She produced plays and was named visiting professor at several universities.

From that point on, she considered herself "a teacher who writes". Angelou taught a variety of subjects, including philosophy, ethics, theology, science, theatre, and writing. The Winston-Salem Journal reported that even though she made many friends on campus, "she never quite lived down all of the criticism from people who thought she was more of a celebrity than an intellect...[and] an overpaid figurehead". For example, despite having no formal education or degree, she requested to be called “Dr” by those outside her close circle, which I can imagine didn’t go down too well with qualified PhDs. However, in 1981 Angelou, formally became a professor of American studies at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya was openly political throughout her life. Among numerous honours was her invitation to compose and deliver a poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” for the inauguration of U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in 1993. She celebrated the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in the poem “A Brave and Startling Truth” (1995)

In the 2008 presidential primaries, Angelou campaigned for the Democratic Party, giving her public support to Hillary Clinton. Clinton ran ads featuring Angelou's endorsement in an attempt to rally support in the black community; however Barack Obama won the South Carolina primary, finishing 29 points ahead of Clinton and taking 80% of the Black vote. When Clinton's campaign ended, Angelou put her support behind Obama, who went on to win the presidential election and became the first African-American president of the United States. After Obama's inauguration, Angelou stated, "We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism." I wish this were true.

She elegized Nelson Mandela in the poem “His Day Is Done” (2013), which was commissioned by the U.S. State Department and released in the wake of the South African leader’s death. In 2011, Angelou was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In 2013, at the age of 85, Angelou published the seventh volume of autobiography in her series, entitled Mom & Me & Mom, which focuses on her relationship with her mother who had died of a stroke years earlier.

Angelou had one son, Guy, whose birth she described in her first autobiography; one grandson, two great-grandchildren, and, according to biographers, a large group of friends and extended family.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

In 2013, Angelou told her friend Oprah Winfrey that she had studied courses offered by the Unity Church, which were spiritually significant to her. She owned two homes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a "lordly brownstone" in Harlem, which was purchased in 2004 and was full of her "growing library" of books she collected throughout her life, artwork collected over the span of many decades, and well-stocked kitchens.

Beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou used the same "writing ritual" for many years. She would wake early in the morning and check into a hotel room, where the staff were instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She would write on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, a thesaurus, and the Bible, and would leave by the early afternoon. She would average 10–12 pages of written material a day, which she edited down to three or four pages in the evening. She went through this process to "enchant" herself, and as she said in a 1989 interview with the BBC, "relive the agony, the anguish, the Sturm und Drang". She placed herself back in the time she wrote about, even traumatic experiences such as her rape in Caged Bird, in order to "tell the human truth"about her life. Angelou stated that she played cards in order to get to that place of enchantment and in order to access her memories more effectively. She said, "It may take an hour to get into it, but once I'm in it—ha! It's so delicious!" She spoke of finding relief in "telling the truth".

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“All my work, my life, everything I do is about survival, not just bare, awful, plodding survival, but survival with grace and faith. While one may encounter many defeats, one must not be defeated.”

Angelou died on the morning of May 28, 2014 at the age 86. Although Angelou had reportedly been in poor health and had cancelled recent scheduled appearances, she was working on another book, an autobiography about her experiences with national and world leaders. During her memorial service at Wake Forest University, her son Guy Johnson stated that despite being in constant pain due to her dancing career and respiratory failure, she wrote four books during the last ten years of her life. He said, "She left this mortal plane with no loss of acuity and no loss in comprehension."

Tributes to Angelou and condolences were paid by artists, entertainers, and world leaders, including Obama, whose sister was named after Angelou, and Bill Clinton.

She once wrote: ‘My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style”> I think it’s safe to say she achieved that.

Finally, I want to share Maya Angelou’s most famous poem in full, because it’s one of my favourites, and no one quote from it captures the full power of the entire piece together.  It’s basically black herstory all in one beautifully eloquent package. Enjoy.