Maya Angelou: A relentless woman of creativity

Reading ‘I know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ (1969) and watching her play, her Emmy nominated role as Kunta Kinte’s grandmother, Nyo Boto, in television series, ‘Roots,’ was the first contact many of today’s youths had with the celebrated writer and poet, Maya Angelou. Starting to fend for herself at age 16, Angelou was the […]

Reading ‘I know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ (1969) and watching her play, her Emmy nominated role as Kunta Kinte’s grandmother, Nyo Boto, in television series, ‘Roots,’ was the first contact many of today’s youths had with the celebrated writer and poet, Maya Angelou.
Starting to fend for herself at age 16, Angelou was the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco and also the first female to take on the job. Going on from there, she worked as a waitress, cook, dancer, prostitute, madam, actress, playwright, journalist in Egypt and Ghana, and a calypso singer (her one album is entitled ‘Miss Calypso’). All these she had done by the time she turned 40. In her 41st year, she wrote her first widely acclaimed book, ‘I know why the caged bird sings’. It was her memoir chronicling her life until age 17.
Her life was as eventful as the narratives of her works. Born Marguerite Ann Johnson in 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, at age three, her parents divorced; at age seven her mother’s boyfriend, Freeman, raped her and she testified in court against him. He was found guilty but was jailed for only one day. Four days after his release, he was found beaten to death in an alley.
Following the incident, Angelou became mute for almost five years, believing, as she stated in her first book of essays, ‘Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now,’ (1993), “I thought, my voice killed him; I killed that man, because I told his name. And then I thought I would never speak again, because my voice would kill anyone …”
These years, she often referred to as a time when she became intimately aware of the written word.
Nicknamed ‘Maya’ by her older brother, Angelou eventually regained her voice. She became a mother at 17, right after high school. Leaving in several cities and on various jobs, she had various marriages as well, one, from which she picked the name, Angelou. 
Succumbing to friends’ pressure to document her life gave birth to the lyrics of ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’. Angelou describes herself as “a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil.” Read as a set text over the years in schools, the story of her experience as a black living in the South during the depression, and of her sexual abuse, is not easy reading. It’s been described as “Angelou’s tough, funny, lyrical voice that transforms her story from a litany of isolation and suffering into a hymn of glorious human endurance. That extraordinary voice-dense, idiosyncratic, hilarious, alive-brought novelistic techniques to the task of telling a life story, and its influence on later generations of memoirists, from Maxine Hong Kingston to Elizabeth Gilbert, is incalculable.”
Reputed for mixing fact and fiction, she treated themes of suffering and self-reliance in her first work; a pattern evident in the rest of her works. “All my work, my life, everything is about survival,” Angelou is quoted to have said. “All my work is meant to say, ‘You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.’ In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.”
With ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ nominated for a National Book Award, Angelou followed it with other masterpieces including five more volumes of autobiography and six books of poetry. Her works included children’s books and essays as well as the lyrics to a musical, ‘King’. Her versatility went beyond literature as she acted in more movies and even directed one, ‘Down in the Delta.’ She rendered her poem, ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ in 1993 at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
With only a secondary school education, Angelou lectured 80 times annually and held a lifetime professorship at Wake Forest University as well as received honorary degrees from 50 more colleges and universities, including ‘Presidential Medal of Freedom,’ America’s highest civilian honour; awarded her by President Barack Obama. 
The mother of one regardless her several marriages, lived alone in a brick house in Winston-Salem all her life from 1981. Standing at 6 ft. tall, Angelou, reportedly, rose at four or five every morning and went to a bare room at a nearby motel to work, alone with a stack of legal pads, a Bible, a dictionary, a thesaurus, and a bottle of sherry.
Stating in a 1985 interview on how she would like to be remembered, Angelou said: “What I would really like said about me is that I dared to love. By love I mean that condition in the human spirit so profound it encourages us to develop courage and build bridges, and then to trust those bridges and cross the bridges in attempts to reach other human beings.”
Genius for her being an inspiration, Angelou encouraged her over 471 thousand twitter followers with a regular dose of motivational words. The most re-tweeted of these is ‘Listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of God,’ which at press time had been re-tweeted 85, 673 times.
She impacted on the likes of talk show legend, Oprah Winfrey, who said of Angelou her mentor on twitter: “This I learned about 20 years ago one of top five Maya Lessons: ‘courage is the most important of the virtues’.”
Her influence was also felt in Nigeria. For author and poet, Diego Okenyodo, Angelou lived a most fulfilling artistic life, playing in almost every literary form and genre: “That was what inspired me as a fledgling writer to dabble into a number of genres. I guess many do not know that Maya co-wrote a song with Roberta Flack in the early 80s. I’ve been enthralled by the simplicity and musicality in her poetry. I play her recording of ‘Phenomenal Woman’ every other day in the car and on my phone. There is a playful characteristic about her poetry that’s revolutionary in how it masks the heavy messages her poems pack. That’s been another attribute I love. She will be sorely missed.”
Commenting on her crossing different genres, poetry, dance, drama, activism and all that she did and still be able to mobilise all of them to get out of a terrible beginning, for Prof. of Theatre Art, and Participatory Communication, Steve Abah: “Shows how phenomenal a woman she was. Like she said, she shut down for those years because she felt her voice killed the man… to be able to go through that trauma and still find her voice to achieve the much she did, reflects a truly talented human being.”
Contrary to her tough formative years, in her last years, Angelou’s works were reflective of a certain easy, commercial sentimentality, like loaning her name to a line of hallmark cards.
The outstanding 86 years of a legendary renaissance woman, an award-winning writer, poet, actress and witness to history, ended quietly last Wednesday morning at her home on the North Carolina campus of Wake Forest University.
A statement from her son, Guy Johnson, says: “She lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. She was a warrior for equality, tolerance and peace.”
No cause of death was immediately announced, but her long time literary agent, Helen Brann, has said Angelou had been in frail health for some time.