Maya Angelou

by Lupton, Mary;

  Thematic Issues

  Angelou introduces the theme of home in the opening citation of the nineteenth-century spiritual. Like Noah, she had been struggling for a place to land, a place called “home” which she had hoped to find in Ghana. With Guy no longer needing her and with her Ghanaian relationships strained, she decides to return home to America to work for Malcolm X. But home is a nebulous destination for the child who hadn’t come to stay. As she wrote so passionately in Letter to My Daughter (2008): “I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe” (6).

  A second theme, rising, dominates the final pages of Song. The author sits at her mother’s kitchen table, pen and yellow legal pad in hand, jotting down phrases for the book she plans to write. “I thought if I wrote a book, I would have to examine the quality in the human spirit that continues to rise despite the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (210). The allusion to Hamlet puts her in good company; Shakespeare, one of her favorite writers when she was a child, foretells Angelou’s reconstruction of her youngest self. The verb rise, which appears four times in the concluding paragraphs, indicates that, like Noah, she and her people are “headed for higher ground.” They will “(r)ise and be prepared to move on and ever on” (210). The repetition of the word rise reiterates the title and the theme of one of her most popular poems, “And Still I Rise” (1978), published more than two decades before A Song Flung Up to Heaven.

  There is yet another strong undercurrent in the final autobiography, one that has been virtually ignored by reviewers: the theme of sexuality. From her first to her final autobiography, Angelou had been open about her sexual relationships. One will recall the rape and the pregnancy in Caged Bird, and her hesitations in the second volume when she revealed to her family that she had been a prostitute. She introduces the sexual motif in the early pages of Song when she compares her lover to a hurricane: “He was a powerful West African who had swept into my life with the urgency of a Southern hurricane” (6). She feels “uprooted” in the presence of “the African,” who “blew down all of my firmly held beliefs about decorum” (Song, 6). A similar metaphor of being swept off her feet recurs in her description of Jimmy Baldwin, who was “a whirlwind who stirred everything and everybody. He lived at a dizzying pace and I loved spinning with him” (145).

  Other sexual moments spin, percolate, and spill over. After Maya and Dolly regret their attempt to get even with their cheating lover, Angelou describes their misgivings in two sexually charged passages. Noticing the African’s embarrassment, she confesses: “I had meant to prick him, not pierce him.” Switching verbs, she continues: “Well, sister, we couldn’t swallow the big cat easily. He seems to have stuck in our throats” (171). Prick, pierce, swallow, throats: these words have sexual innuendos.

  In a more philosophical section of Song Angelou presents a serious discussion of sexuality (157–60), developing her concept of “frictional electricity.” She explains “frictional electricity” as a source of sexual energy that runs between people, sending “luscious thoughts” from one body to another by way of the hands, the mouth, and the eyes. Although she does not identify her source for this concept, she is possibly referring to the theories of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst (1897–1957) who had argued that sexual experience was a “bioelectric” phenomenon, a type of energy that “moved through and outside the organism” (Bakhtunin, “The Art of Making Love,” January 15, 2014. Web. February 5, 2015). Angelou claims that her quotient of “frictional electricity” is low. The evidence in Song suggests otherwise.

  Near the end of Song, on her way to Harlem after Martin Luther King’s assassination, she “turned [her] thoughts over as one turns pages in a book.” Suddenly, her writer-thoughts are interrupted by a rather sexual moment, when she hears an eruption of noise, “followed by thuds like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting time” (188–89). Her comparison of African American protesters to rutting beasts baffles the mind. Buffalo bulls usually “rut” or “herd” or attack another bull when they are in pursuit of a female (“Yellowstone National Park: Bison in August,” Web. February, 3, 2015). Yet there is no sexual competition implied in this simile; the raucous rutting seems to exist only in the ears of the narrator.

  Putting Angelou’s life in perspective, she wrote A Song Flung Up to Heaven at the age of seventy-four to describe a woman who had just celebrated her fortieth birthday and was experiencing a new burst of sexual freedom. She had said farewell to her son, who was no longer her major responsibility. She had left Ghana and its restrictions on women to reestablish her roots in America, where she was able to immerse herself in a new freedom of self-expression. She never mentions female orgasm or contraception or the menopause, topics being widely explored during the late 1960s, during what has been called the Sexual Revolution. Yet Song makes it clear that Angelou and her good friend Dolly McPherson enjoyed sex, joked about their shared African lover, and were able, as liberated women, to challenge his arrogance and his duplicity.

  Possibly Maya Angelou had read several of the influential articles and books being published in the 1960s by Masters and Johnson, Anne Koedt, Mary Jane Sherfey, and other theorists. However, rarely did chroniclers of the so-called Sexual Revolution address the particular needs of the black female. Betty Friedan, for example, virtually ignored black women in her book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), directing her arguments toward the bored white housewives of the American middle and upper classes (see Ashley Fetters, “4 Big Problems with ‘The Feminine Mystique,” 2013. Web. February 13, 2015). In an article published in the black-oriented magazine Ebony in August 1966, Kermit Mehlinger observed that the civil rights chant, “Freedom Now,” also signaled “more freedom for the Negro woman to enjoy and understand the sexual aspects of her being” (rpt. Escoffier 2003, 45). It seems that several factors contributed to Angelou’s confident sexuality: first, the emotional and financial support she received from her family when she was pregnant teenager; second, her open relationships with men of different classes and ethnicities; third, her enormous range of independent work and life experiences in America, Europe, and Africa; and finally, her keen sense of self, as articulated in the six autobiographies.

  Style and Literary Devices

  Of the many stylistic techniques that recur in Song, the dynamic portrait or vignette has received the most positive response from the critics. According to Margaret Busby, Song is “a series of beautifully crafted vignettes” (2002, 2). Angelou had used the technique of portraiture in all of the volumes, from the nurturing Mrs. Flowers of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to the endearing houseboy, Kojo, in All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes. In the sixth autobiography the technique of portraiture occasionally dominates the action, three major exceptions being the depictions of Dolly McPherson, of their African lover, and of James Baldwin.

  A few of Angelou’s vignettes in A Song Flung Up to Heaven are mini-studies of famous African Americans, characters who appear offstage but who give the illusion of being fully realized participants in the action. Thus the reader meets Malcolm X, but mainly in a phone call and in a fully quoted letter. The reader briefly encounters Martin Luther King Jr. but only for a fleeting instant following a speech he had given in New York City. The reader becomes acquainted with the Black Panthers, but only in Maya’s conversations with James Baldwin.

  Angelou’s genuine gifts for characterization and for heightened dramatic effects are at times overshadowed by her tendency to philosophize. It must be remembered that Song was written in 2002, a number of years after the publication of her highly successful books of musings, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) and Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997). Both of these books combine autobiographical recollections and moral observations, a mixture that works well enough in a collection of essays but that does not provide th
e more direct emotional contact of customary autobiographical form.

  The narrative is frequently interrupted by her ruminations on motherhood; by her lengthy discourse on “curiosity” (69–70); and by the speculations on “frictional electricity.” Nowhere is this problem more evident than in the concluding chapter of Song, where almost every sentence is prefaced by the clause “I thought about.” She thinks about black women, about the history of “human beings,” about “naturally bellicose creatures,” about “the singing of angels,” about the “music of the spheres,” and finally about writing a book. This almost-endless series of abstractions closely resembles the airplane-thoughts with which Song begins.

  Surpassing her inclination toward moralizing is Angelou’s questionable use of metaphor, a literary technique that has brought her praise as well as severe criticism. Shortly after the publication of A Song Flung Up to Heaven, black poet Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) wrote a book review for the Los Angeles Times, accusing Angelou of “dead metaphors,” “sweeping generalities,” “empty phrases,” and “clumsy similes.” The review was vitriolic, with no kind words for the famous autobiographer. Coleman, winner of a 1984 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, claimed that “extravagant statements come without explication, and schmooze substitutes for action”; retold disasters—the car accidents, the rape—are “milked for residual drama” (rpt. Salon, 3, October 21, 2002.

  The review was so controversial that Eso Won, a black-operated bookstore in Los Angeles, canceled Coleman from its lineup of speakers. Although many Angelou fans were infuriated by Coleman’s attack, other found her criticism to be justified. Thulani Davis of the Village Voice, for example, defended Coleman’s position, regretting that there was no suitable outlet for black reviewers to express negative responses to other black writers (September 4–10, 2002, 1–6). Coleman sheepishly admitted that “to this date I have received more attention for my review of Maya Angelou’s A Song Flung Up to Heaven than anything else I have ever written” (“Black on Black,” 2002, 12).

  Alternative Reading: Reader-Response Criticism

  Reader-response critics may have different approaches to literature (feminist, psychological, deconstructive), but they share the conviction that a literary text has no definitive meaning in itself and that the presence of a reader is a necessary aspect of any literary evaluation (Peter J. Rabinowitz, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 1994, 606–9). Reader-response criticism, which attained the height of its popularity in the 1970s and the 1980s, presumes that a literary text cannot exist as a separate entity. This form of inquiry marks the disappearance of “the expert,” the one who promises the only possible interpretation. Each person makes his or her own judgments based on his or her experience as the “reader.” According to Jane Tompkins, “Reader-response critics argue against locating meaning in the text, against seeing the text as a fixed object, and in favor of a criticism that recognizes the reader’s role in making meaning” (1980, 225).

  Stanley Fish (1938–), the author of Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), helped to establish reader-response as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. Other practitioners who incorporated students into their theoretical assumptions include David Bleich (“Motives and Truth in Classroom Communication,” 1975) and John Clifford (“Transactional Teaching and the Literary Experience,” 1979). In practicing and illustrating their theories, reader-response critics have relied heavily on a student audience. While students have traditionally been limited to the classroom in expressing their responses to a designated piece of literature, an increasing number are trying to change this teacher-student dynamic by self-publishing their opinions on the Internet, in the form of blogs or essays or chats or mini-books.

  The Internet can also be a refuge for retired professors who no longer have classrooms but who believe in the democratic assumptions of reader-oriented criticism. By examining readers’ comments from three different websites accessed in January 2015 (amazon.com, goodreads.com, and barnesandnoble.com), it is possible to measure readers’ responses to A Song Flung Up to Heaven, with no professor present to react in disfavor on matters of spelling, grammar, or other lapses. The readers who comment on their reading experience are all volunteers, free agents who operate outside of the classroom and beyond the authority of judgmental academic communities. All readers—ordinary, informed, or otherwise—have at their disposal brief customer reviews, overall ratings, a statistical overview, and, in the case of Good Reads, occasional photographs of the reviewers.

  The fifty-one readers who wrote reviews for Amazon.com gave Song 4.3 out of 5 stars. Only two of the reviews were negative. The ones voted “most helpful” applauded Maya’s “strength to rise again” or admired Song as the “continuation of a rich and full life.” One reviewer, responding negatively, found the sixth autobiography to be “disappointingly thin.” The Amazon site allows the reader to closely examine all fifty-one reviews and to write a customer review, if so desired.

  Twenty readers responded to Song on the Barnes and Noble site, awarding it a rating of 4.5 out of 5—a slightly higher percentage than Amazon readers but based on a fewer number of responders. Three gave the book 3 stars or below, while fourteen loved it. Reviewers had the options of creating a pen name or of submitting their evaluations anonymously. Opinions were mainly positive: “excellent,” “great,” “incredible,” “outstanding.” Because there was no classroom, there was no need to receive a grade, as would the reader who wrote in Angelou’s favor: “People who criticise Maya for her endever obviosuly are the reason why the quakity of humans continues to decline.”

  The “Community Reviews” section of Good Reads boasted a total of 1,041 ratings, with eighty-four full reviews. The overall approval for the sixth autobiography earned the lowest percentage of the three sites: 4. 13 out of 5. Evaluations such as “beautiful,” “a page-turner,” “easy reading,” and “refreshing in its beauty” were typical. Natalie thought that A Song Flung Up to Heaven would be “more meaningful and enjoyable for people if they’ve read all of her previous autobiographies in the series.” Another reviewer particularly appreciated the “social commentary.” Still another confused Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. It is interesting that at least three readers preferred the audio version of Song to the written version.

  These readers appear to share similar assumptions. They prefer to purchase their books online rather than in college bookstores. Almost all of them have read at least one of Angelou’s earlier autobiographies. Almost all of them are drawn to literature that is either “black” or “feminist” or both. Almost all of them seem to derive pleasure from the act of reading. It would be challenging to learn their opinions on the identity of “the African,” or to ask them if they thought the book was sexual in nature, or to seek their reactions to the first eight or to the last three pages. But such questions would take a classroom or, if provided, perhaps a chat room.

  A Song Flung Up to Heaven was on the New York Times best-seller list for two years; in terms of reader-response, it would surely merit a very high rating. In 2002 Angelou won a spectacular third Grammy, in the nonfiction category, for her recording of the sixth autobiography. An investigation of the “closed” fan mail at the Schomburg Center would also shed further light on the reader-response approach. What seems pertinent is that reviewers and other judges were possibly more impressed by Angelou’s delivery than they were by the text which she had written. Her extraordinary voice and her dramatic rendition turned many of her readers into listeners. For in her recording of the final autobiography she evoked memories of her 1963 Grammy winner, “On the Pulse of Morning,” and allowed us to experience once again the swelling cadences of her dramatic reading.

  Chapter 9

  In Memoriam

  During our 1997 interview I remarked that there was already a significant body of scholarship about Angelou’s work available in school libraries. I asked her: “C
ould you give me any special message to students as they read the autobiographies and the criticism?” She replied, “Somebody needs to tell young people, listen, I did this and I did that. You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated” (“Icon” 1997).

  Death did finally defeat Dr. Maya Angelou, who died at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on the morning of May 24, 2014. She was eighty-six years old. On June 7, Wake Forest University held a funeral in her memory entitled “A Celebration of Rising ‘Joy’”! The entire ceremony was televised by Wake Forest University and is still available on the Internet, as is the funeral program (Wake Forest University Funeral. http://new.livestream.com/wfu/angelou. Web. May 5, 2015).

  The elaborate preparations for the funeral were overshadowed by threats from the Westboro Baptist Church, a notorious right-wing organization. Wake Forest University wisely closed its campus to the public on June 7, permitting entry only to the designated guests and to selected media. According to Old Gold & Black, Wake Forest’s student newspaper, The Secret Service and other agencies assisted the university in its efforts to prevent disruptions from unwanted protesters (http://oldgoldandblack.com/?p=40652).

  Speaking at the service were former president William Clinton; First Lady Michelle Obama; Angelou’s close friend Oprah Winfrey; her son Guy Johnson; her grandson, Colin; actress Cicely Tyson; singer Lee Ann Womack; Ambassador Andrew Young; and other members of the family and of the artistic and political community. A string quartet composed of members of The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra played the prelude. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy,” the poem which had inspired I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and A Song Flung Up to Heaven, appeared at the beginning of the program and was followed by a photograph of Dr. Angelou along with one of her famous sayings: “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.”