Maya Angelous Influences - Literature review Example

Angelou cares for black people and women. In her writing, for example, she abolishes various stereotypical myths regarding black women, something that is very uncommon in American literature. She speaks for all blacks in her autobiographies. As Williams puts it, she writes for the Black voice and ear that can listen to it. She writes for the reason that she is Black, listening attentively to her fellow African Americans (Gaines, 3). Having grown up in the midst of the strain of the black-white divide in America, Maya Angelou went through numerous struggles.

She uses her poetry to convey her ideas and emotions. The unity of her autobiographies highlights the injustices that racism produces and the way in which people can curb it. This is one of her major themes throughout her works. Through her writings, she discloses her encounter with humiliation, discrimination, racism, and hatred. As earlier noted, she has earned herself respect and recognition as women and blacks’ spokesperson through her autobiographies. For instance, in the poem, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she uses the metaphor of the caged bird struggling to flee from its cage to represent her as well as black people’s confinement stemming from oppression and racial discrimination.

The poem also speaks to the purported contradiction of the birds singing amid its strains (Long, 1&2). She indicates that the only thing that African-Americans wanted was to share freedom as that of white persons. Rather than experiencing segregation and discrimination, Angelou indicates that African-Americans wanted to experience America as it should be for the reason that their color was the same as that of ‘Normal Americans’. They were tired of being treated as inferior and were ready to do anything to get equal rights (Jenkins, 1).

Angelou also discusses political and social issues that are significant to African Americans. Her poem ‘On the Pulse of the Morning’, for example, calls for a new national devotion to social improvement as well as unity. She made recitation of this poem at Bill Clinton’s 1993 induction (Notablebiographies.com, 6). Als notes that not only did Angelou’s autobiographies lead to increased writings by black feminists in the 1970s/set a precedent for other black female writers, they also set a precedent for the genre of autobiography altogether.

Her works have brought liberation to many women writers, enabling them to open up with no shame to the world’s eyes. Angelou illuminates and elucidates African Americans’ condition in the United States without isolating her readers. She, for instance, throughout all her autobiographies, endorses the significance of hard work with the intention of breaking the African-American stereotype of laziness (Hagen, 8). Conclusion Maya Angelou remains a great voice of modern literature that fascinates her audiences by means of the sheer beauty and vigor of her lyrics and words.