As Maya Angelou departs

African-America writer, Maya Angelou. But for us in the writer’s guild, for all citizens of the world engaged in the fight for peace and justice, Maya’s departure is death coming to soon. All the accolades showered on her are simply not enough to assuage the pangs of pain caused to all literary and performance souls […]

African-America writer, Maya Angelou. But for us in the writer’s guild, for all citizens of the world engaged in the fight for peace and justice, Maya’s departure is death coming to soon. All the accolades showered on her are simply not enough to assuage the pangs of pain caused to all literary and performance souls of the Black world by the demise of the Mother of the written and spoken world, wielder of sonororous tunes and soother of wounds for the aggrieved world. Now, who will write and sing at the grave-sides of the next departing heroes as she sculpted and voiced the elegiac lyrics for Malcolm X and Martin Luther King? Who will mount the podium and rouse the national patriotic spirit at the coming of the next President as Maya did for Bill Clinton-a feat that presaged the first black president, Barack Obama? At the inauguration of President Clinton in January 1993, Marguerite Annie Johnson (Maya’s original name) recited and performed her poem, ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ to resounding applause.
There have been well-won celebrations of the life of this great and foremost female artist and literary icon. Memorial services, poetry performances, prayers and homilies, have been rendered to guide her gentle steps beyond the firmament unto the land where return, in the physical sense, is impossible. First ladies have hailed and sang her impressive tributes-Hilary Clinton showered encomiums of her illustrious life and times. Michele Obama crooned her heroic exploits. Presidents, renowned men and women of letters, have given testimonies of her vibrant, active and patriotic life full of humaneness and compassion. But all of these are not enough substitute for the great library she has carried away with her to the great beyond and for which we must continue to sing beyond the ‘pulse of morning’
I never heard the fortune of meeting this great Mother of Words, Matriarch of Songs. The closest I got to her was my teaching her poetry to my class of African-American Literature at the Western Illinois University, Macomb in the United States in the year 2009. This has left a permanent impression on me about her passion for and commitment to peace and justice, humane life and living and the need to deploy the arts, letters and performances to the cause of freedom and the support for equity and social justice all over the world. Beyond words, her poetry reminds of the verses of Pablo Neruda about the needs for words to transmute into hammers of warfare. Thus, this multi-sided poet, civil rights activist, television and film producer, dancer, film director, playwright, actress, intellectual is in the forefront of the movements to make art, indeed, the cultural industry serve socio-political interests of humanity.
Those who have not been awake to Maya Angelou’s mammoth works should pay tribute to her by engaging and interrogating her creative works spanning nearly half of century, the creative and social vision embedding the works and the lyrical passion characterizing them. A few of Angelou’s typifying aesthetics include; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 1969), On the Pulse of Morning, All Children Need Travelling Shoes who does this remind you of around here?), Read her seven autobiographies, three full-length scholarly studies, plays, movies, numerous poetic volumes, television production. Encounter the powerful tropes and imagery of ‘caged birds’-real and imagined incarceration of weaverbirds, who continue to sing of freedom and liberation for all disempowered citizens of her country and the world all over. You will discover her deliberate attempt to shatter and rupture conventional perception and technique of auto-biographical writing. This includes her conscious entry into critiquing, dialoguing and expanding the genre-a style which leads some of her critics to regard and place her works in this genre as quasi/ fictional autobiographies! This is a facile characterization since, as scholars have argued, all the formal structural features of autobiographies are discernible and present in her works-single authorship, chronological narrative, thematic focus, characterization, name it. What she has done is to renew and re-invent the genre with originality and aesthetic newness, for which she deserves applause rather than denunciation!  I may add here that her main literary engagement began with I Know Why the caged Bird Sings (1969) which became an early marketer of her literary career. This is an early work about her early life which became an instant hit, fetching her acclaim and international attention as a poet after years of menial and unedifying labour, including being a pub girl and night club crawler and dancer.
 Let those who want to discover her afresh engage her well-known seven autobiographies, some of  which are mainly devoted to ‘her age of innocence’-her childhood years and early adulthood-her numerous travails and traumatic experience a as young girl raped by her mother’s lover, and the sorrow and pain of carrying the bruise in her heart for numerous years; her life of growing up in the middle of separated parentage; her numerous menial employments as a waiter, pub girl, minor Chef and the more relieving ones of a singer, actress, writer, journalist, poet and teacher. By fairly late middle age at 54, in 1882, she went into the classroom at the Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and became recipient of the lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies.
Besides her established and successful literary career, Maya made tremendous contribution to the socio-political life of the Black American in their struggle for social and political emancipation and liberation, working hand in hand in the Civil Rights Movement with great revolutionaries like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. She and functioned, quite remarkably as a public intellectual and campaigner and public appearances for civil rights, liberties and freedom. She gained nation-wide respect as a spokes-person for women and the black people, whose rights she defended with inimitable vigour and genuine-ness. It is remarkable that in spite of numerous obvious and subtle attempts to censor her and ban her books form libraries, many colleges and universities teach her woks as compelling read for degree studies in America in their loud criticism of racism and critique of identity, family concerns and travelogues. 
For her contribution to humanity through her numerous works, productions, political activism, recitations, songs, dances, all in the belly of time, she has been decorated with numerous honours, awards and over thirty honorary degrees.
   We shall certainly miss mama of Songs, Maya Angelou, as literary matriarch, as revolutionary, as unconventional auto-biographer, who adopted the slave narrative tradition in the defence of the African-American culture against the devaluing ethos of stereotypes; we shall miss her public performances and contribution to the creative industry as a weapon for political discourse and social intervention.
Adieu, Mother of letters; Mother of Action.
Those who know the path of Sparrows
Spare no dirge for a shower of Indigo;
Those who dare to dine with Alike,
Let them dress their chords gingerly
Smoothen their skins with Camwood;
Let them raise a song
For Mother of song
Mother of Action
On her journey of no return.