The lessons of a colourful life

THE 86 years of Maya Angelou’s life, from 1928 to May 28, 2014, saw enormous changes for black Americans. She worked with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and read one of her poems at the US presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. She lived to see a black American president, Barack Obama, who describes her on the dust jacket of Rainbow in the Cloud, a collection of her writings, as “a phenomenal woman”.

Sales of Angelou’s works, which include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), peaked at 400,000 copies a year. Her autobiography recounts how she was raped, aged eight, by her mother’s boyfriend, who was tried and found guilty, but released after one day in jail. Four days later, he was murdered, probably by Angelou’s uncles. She remained mute for five years, convinced that her voice had caused his death.

It was then that she discovered reading. Angelou’s sayings (such as ‘Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud’) are tailor-made for the internet; there is a competition on her Facebook page to rank the top ten. So why buy an expensive book when the material is free online? Angelou’s poetry is praised more for its content than its poetic merit, and it is easy to scoff at her simplicity and directness. She places her autobiographies in the slave-narrative tradition, alongside the work of the escaped slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. Anyone who saw the film Twelve Years a Slave will read Angelou’s work with fresh eyes. Certainly, her reputation will be enhanced by this careful collection, which is arranged thematically under headings, including ‘Black Identity’, ‘Love and Relationships’, ‘Art and Literature’, ‘Spirituality’, ‘Grace’, ‘Courage’ and ‘Womanhood’.

By 1969, Angelou had lived fully: she had been a singer, dancer, actress and political activist. Her son, Guy Johnson, lived with her in Cairo, and Accra, Ghana, during the early 1960s, when she was involved with the South African freedom fighter, Vasumzi Make, and Johnson edited this collection. Angelou was in Watts during the riots of the summer of 1965, and was working with Luther King when he was assassinated in 1968.

That was when her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, encouraged her to publish her autobiography. This new collection has a cumulative effect that online snippets do not. It is effectively a condensed history of black America, filtered through the consciousness of one extraordinary and unusually energetic woman. She wrote songs and music, directed plays, and she even had a supporting acting role in the seminal TV series, Roots.

Later, she became a university professor, and was awarded 50 honorary degrees. And she had a gift for putting her observations into what the New York Times newspaper has called “clear messages with easily digested meanings”.

Let Angelou have the last word: “There were times when it was said that I had more determination than talent. This may be said of many. It may also be said that life loves the person who dares to live it.”