What we see depends on what we are looking for. Are you familiar with Maya Angelou thoughts on life and her work? Outstanding on both counts, we recently read a very interesting article from Brain Picking’s Weekly.
Have you ever read from this weekly? Always chock full of interesting reads. Certainly the case here. This is a story about Maya Angelou sharing her thoughts on life as well as her views on identity and the meaning of life. Certainly, a topic that I could not pass up sharing.
Maya Angelou is a poet and award-winning author known for her acclaimed memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and her numerous poetry and essay collections.
Her 1969 memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which made literary history as the first nonfiction best-seller by an African-American woman.
In 1971, Angelou published the Pulitzer Prize-nominated poetry collection Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘Fore I Die.
She later wrote the poem “On the Pulse of Morning”—one of her most famous works—which she recited at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993.
The legacy of Maya Angelou sharing endures as a luminous beacon of strength, courage, and spiritual beauty. Angelou’s timeless wisdom shines with unparalleled light in a 1977 interview by journalist Judith Rich, found in Conversations with Maya Angelou (public library) – the same magnificent tome that gave us the beloved author’s conversation with Bill Moyers on freedom – in which Angelou explores issues of identity and the meaning of life.
Reflecting on her life, Angelou – who rose to cultural prominence through the sheer tenacity of her character and talent, despite being born into a tumultuous working-class family, abandoned by her father at the age of three, and raped at the age of eight:
I’ve been very fortunate… I seem to have a kind of blinkers. I do not allow too many negatives to soil me. I’m very blessed. I have looked quite strange in most of the places I have lived in my life, the stages, spaces I’ve moved through. I, of course, grew up with my grandmother: my grandmother’s people and my brother are very very black, very lovely. And my mother’s people were very very fair. I was always sort of in between. I was too tall. My voice was too heavy. My attitude was too arrogant – or tenderhearted. So if I had accepted what people told me I looked like as a negative yes, then I would be dead. But I accepted it, and I thought, well, aren’t I the lucky one.
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She later revisits the question of identity, as she reflects on the visibility her success granted her and the responsibility that comes with it:
What I represent in fact, what I’m trying like hell to represent every time I go into that hotel room, is myself. That’s what I’m trying to do. And I miss most of the time on that: I do not represent blacks or tall women, or women or Sonomans or Californians or Americans. Or rather I hope I do, because I am all those things. But that is not all that I am. I am all of that and more and less. People often put labels on people, so they don’t have to deal with the physical fact of those people. It’s easy to say, oh, that’s a honkie, that’s a Jew, that’s a junkie, or that’s a broad, or that’s a stud, or that’s a dude. So you don’t have to think: does this person long for Christmas? Is he afraid that the Easter bunny will become polluted? … I refuse that… I refuse to have my life narrowed and proscribed.
To be sure, beneath Angelou’s remarkable optimism and dignity lies the strenuous reality she had to overcome. Reflecting on her youth, she channels an experience all too familiar to those who enter life from a foundation the opposite of privilege:
It’s very hard to be young and curious and almost egomaniacally concerned with one’s intelligence and to have no education at all and no direction and no doors to be open… To go figuratively to a door and find there’s no doorknob.
Angelou acknowledges with great gratitude the kindness of those who opened doors for her in her spiritual and creative journey.
Remembering the Jewish rabbi who offered her guidance in faith and philosophy and who showed up at her hospital bedside many years later after a serious operation, Angelou tells Rich:
