maddog
03-01-2005, 08:05 AM
I’ll open the discussion with a few observations:
I first paid attention to Maya Angelou when a big to-do was made over her invitation to read at Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. I had heard of her most famous book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” but had never read it. In fact, although I knew something vaguely of the story line when I went to purchase it for this reading, I was so ignorant that I didn’t realize it was an actual biography, rather than a fictionalized account based on her life.
What did I know about the story? My understanding was that it was the story of a young girl who had been raped, and who responded to the trauma by refusing to speak for many years. I had understood the book to be an account of her journey back, her recovery: thus, my initial impression of the title, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Her journey would represent the recovery of dignity, personhood, and individual expression – literally, finding her voice – out from under the burden or imprisonment that happens to victims of rape.
Of course, it is also the story of an African-American woman, and the entire history of Africans in the United States has been of finding a human voice while in chains.
This book has been the occasion of MY liberation from certain aspects of my own ignorance. A very minor example: reading the book prompted me to look up a little bit more about the author; I didn’t know she was an actor as well as a writer. The MOST eye-opening part of the story for me was simply the kind of life she and her brother lived with Momma, their grandmother. The question of race was everywhere. While I knew or suspected that Whites in the rural South may have had a difficult time viewing Blacks as human beings, it had never occurred to me that Black people might fear that White people were not really the same species as themselves.
I found the sweep of the book both greater and less than I had imagined from what I knew of the plot line. Although Ritie’s rape by her mother’s boyfriend is an important event in her life, the story does not, in my estimation, focus centrally upon that event. I had thought the story was going to be about the retreat into silence, and the process of re-finding her voice, but there is no identified point of recovery or decision by the “caged bird” to resume “singing.” The chapter with Mrs. Flowers identified one important step on the road to recovery, but the story does not focus on Ritie’s emergence into open communication. Rather, the rape incident and Ritie’s response is simply part of a larger imprisonment of race, poverty, culture, violence, death, and sex. In addition, the child did not retreat into silence solely because of the personal trauma of being raped, though that was bad enough; I think she decided to stop saying anything important to people around her because she felt that her testimony had been responsible for her rapist’s murder. What a responsibility for an eight-year-old!
OTOH, the book ends with the birth of Ritie’s son, out-of-wedlock, just after she graduated from high school at 17 or 18. To me, the ending was quite abrupt, and without enough detail or information to place it into a perspective. What does this new mother-son relationship do to aid or complete the reemergence of the writer’s voice? Is it even connected to that process, or had the process already been completed?
I’m also confused by the opening vignette, of forgetting the lines to the song: “What are you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay . . . .” I can’t place that incident, time-wise, into the narrative, and do not understand its significance, except possibly in a fairly superficial way – this waif has been shoved around from here to there and doesn’t really know where she belongs.
I enjoyed the writing style. I was looking for a passage I had thought when reading it was very well put, but forgot to mark it. Perhaps I’ll find it when I look again. One place I did mark was in the chapter about the confrontation between Ritie and her father’s SO, Dolores. Dolores has stabbed Ritie and Ritie realizes she’s wounded. She says, “The dread of futility has been my lifelong plague.” I don’t know what it is that informs the character and personality of each individual, but Ritie is a fighter, a fighter against futility, a fighter for the experience of life.
Anyway, some thoughts for discussion: What DOES the title signify? What is it about the story of this person’s life that is compelling? How much of our destiny is our own?
#332
I first paid attention to Maya Angelou when a big to-do was made over her invitation to read at Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. I had heard of her most famous book, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” but had never read it. In fact, although I knew something vaguely of the story line when I went to purchase it for this reading, I was so ignorant that I didn’t realize it was an actual biography, rather than a fictionalized account based on her life.
What did I know about the story? My understanding was that it was the story of a young girl who had been raped, and who responded to the trauma by refusing to speak for many years. I had understood the book to be an account of her journey back, her recovery: thus, my initial impression of the title, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Her journey would represent the recovery of dignity, personhood, and individual expression – literally, finding her voice – out from under the burden or imprisonment that happens to victims of rape.
Of course, it is also the story of an African-American woman, and the entire history of Africans in the United States has been of finding a human voice while in chains.
This book has been the occasion of MY liberation from certain aspects of my own ignorance. A very minor example: reading the book prompted me to look up a little bit more about the author; I didn’t know she was an actor as well as a writer. The MOST eye-opening part of the story for me was simply the kind of life she and her brother lived with Momma, their grandmother. The question of race was everywhere. While I knew or suspected that Whites in the rural South may have had a difficult time viewing Blacks as human beings, it had never occurred to me that Black people might fear that White people were not really the same species as themselves.
I found the sweep of the book both greater and less than I had imagined from what I knew of the plot line. Although Ritie’s rape by her mother’s boyfriend is an important event in her life, the story does not, in my estimation, focus centrally upon that event. I had thought the story was going to be about the retreat into silence, and the process of re-finding her voice, but there is no identified point of recovery or decision by the “caged bird” to resume “singing.” The chapter with Mrs. Flowers identified one important step on the road to recovery, but the story does not focus on Ritie’s emergence into open communication. Rather, the rape incident and Ritie’s response is simply part of a larger imprisonment of race, poverty, culture, violence, death, and sex. In addition, the child did not retreat into silence solely because of the personal trauma of being raped, though that was bad enough; I think she decided to stop saying anything important to people around her because she felt that her testimony had been responsible for her rapist’s murder. What a responsibility for an eight-year-old!
OTOH, the book ends with the birth of Ritie’s son, out-of-wedlock, just after she graduated from high school at 17 or 18. To me, the ending was quite abrupt, and without enough detail or information to place it into a perspective. What does this new mother-son relationship do to aid or complete the reemergence of the writer’s voice? Is it even connected to that process, or had the process already been completed?
I’m also confused by the opening vignette, of forgetting the lines to the song: “What are you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay . . . .” I can’t place that incident, time-wise, into the narrative, and do not understand its significance, except possibly in a fairly superficial way – this waif has been shoved around from here to there and doesn’t really know where she belongs.
I enjoyed the writing style. I was looking for a passage I had thought when reading it was very well put, but forgot to mark it. Perhaps I’ll find it when I look again. One place I did mark was in the chapter about the confrontation between Ritie and her father’s SO, Dolores. Dolores has stabbed Ritie and Ritie realizes she’s wounded. She says, “The dread of futility has been my lifelong plague.” I don’t know what it is that informs the character and personality of each individual, but Ritie is a fighter, a fighter against futility, a fighter for the experience of life.
Anyway, some thoughts for discussion: What DOES the title signify? What is it about the story of this person’s life that is compelling? How much of our destiny is our own?
#332