Freeing the Song Bird from Symbols - Literature review Example

Freeing the Song Bird from Symbols Maya Angelou’s novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a mostly autobiographical novel about the early life of the author. Told in frank and feeling narrative, the reader gains the sense that any embellishments or not-quite-truths told within the story are the accident of memory rather than intentionally misleading. Essentially, the story tells of Maya’s existence from the age of 3 when, with her 4-year-old brother, she was placed on a train with nametags and an address and shipped to her paternal grandmother’s home in the South to the age of 18 when she goes to sleep with her tiny son. The years in between are marked by at least seven major upheavals of her life, moving from her parents home as a tiny child to her grandmother’s house in Stamps, back to St. Louis to live with her mother and back to Stamps following a rape by her mother’s boyfriend. Eventually, she is returned to her mother, this time in San Francisco. Her visit to her father in Southern California turns into a nightmare period of living on the streets until she is finally able to return to her mother’s home in San Francisco. Throughout the story, Angelou employs a great deal of symbolism to relate her personal journey to the greater journey of the black woman of her generation through such devices as Maya’s Easter Dress, Momma’s store, Maya’s rape at the age of eight, the metaphor of the cage and the concept of voice. The story begins with a particularly poignant scene from Maya’s early life in Stamps that instantly identifies the degree to which the black community was subdued under the yoke of white expectations through the symbol of the lavender dress. Although Maya’s community is entirely black, her ideals regarding what is beautiful are established by the white world outside. This concept is symbolized in the form of her lavender Easter dress. “I knew that once I put it on I’d look like a movie star … I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody’s dream of what was right with the world” (Angelou 1). In this statement, Angelou captures the primary desire of all black girls of her generation and before and many since who have felt the only way to find social acceptance was to somehow rid oneself of one’s ‘blackness.’ Angelou herself has indicated that she “wasn’t thinking so much about my own life or identity. I was thinking about a particular time in which I lived and the influences of that time on a number of people … I used the central figure – myself – as a focus to show how one person can make it through those times” (Tate 6). Of course, wearing the lavender dress doesn’t instantly transform Maya into the girl with long blond hair and hypnotizing light-blue eyes who suddenly gains proper respect. She is still the “too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil” (Angelou 2). What makes this reaction on the part of the young girl so telling regarding the state of the black community psyche is her community’s relative isolation from the world of the white people. When white people do arrive, it is in association with fear and superiority, as in the appearance of the ‘boys’, “Those cement faces and eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday” (Angelou 14). The image of the little girl in the lavender dress trying to be a white girl captures this entire atmosphere of subdued culture and quiet shame. However, Angelou tempers this image with a symbol of the central strength of her community in the form of Momma’s Store. Angelou’s description of this self-made woman and her store stands for the underlying strength and resilience of the entire community, despite the hardships or the seeming impossibilities before them. “Her crisp meat pies and cool lemonade, when joined to her miraculous ability to be in two places at the same time, assured her business success” (Angelou 4). Although there was no money and no opportunity in this small town, particularly for black people, Momma was able to build her store in the heart of the district. “Over the years it became the lay center of activities in town” (Angelou 5). Momma’s innovation in starting her own business is coupled with her concern for her own community – consistently working to meet the needs of the black workers and continuing, in her store, to extend credit to workers she knows will never be able to repay her yet surviving just the same. “It is in the store that Maya learns sympathy for the morning hopes and evening disappointments of the unfortunate cotton-pickers, where she witnesses her grandmother’s painful encounter with the ‘powhitetrash’ children, where she observes her grandmother’s resourceful bartering during the Great Depression, and where she gathers with her community to listen to Joe Louis’s fight with Primo Carnera, a white boxer” (Megna-Wallace 5). Although Momma often confuses her, is quite strict and devoutly religious, Maya develops a strong bond with her grandmother that enables her to receive some of her grandmother’s strength through emulation and example. It is this stubborn refusal to accept defeat even when struggling under extreme opposition that enables Maya to begin finding worth in herself. This underlying strength and resilience is the center of the black community as much as Momma’s Store is the center of Stamps’ black community. Had Maya remained with her grandmother in Stamps, it is possible she would have broken out of the oppressed state she’d been living in much sooner, but the rape at her mother’s house in St. Louis ensured Maya remained firmly in her ‘proper’ degraded place as a black woman for several more years. Regardless of race or gender, “a child may interpret violence at home and in the community to mean that the world is unsafe and that he or she is unworthy of protection. This interpretation may engender helplessness and lead to negative self-perceptions” (Margolin & Gordis 153). The depth of the domination in this scene is painful to read and painful to understand, but stands as a symbol for the violence that has been perpetrated on the black community by the white in every sense and in every location experienced by Maya. Although her mother and her mother’s family seems to have found a degree of wealth, status and freedom in St. Louis, Mr. Freeman deems it necessary to put Maya in her proper place using the most violent and traumatic means possible, by raping her and threatening her most beloved relation, her brother. This sense of the dominated spirit also is a large-scale condition for the people of Angelou’s community, particularly as it related to the women of the community, making this symbolic and true-life event incredibly powerful. “Because from girlhood, these women faced the dual injustices of racial hostility and male exploitation, their life histories are told with no hint of romantic conventions. They describe, instead, a quest for physical and psychological survival” (Conway 3). It is from these events that Maya began to grow as she first began to gain some sense of the cages that held her captive and then began learning the tools she needed to find her release. Early in the novel, it can be discerned that Maya longed for escape from a cage she perceived even as a young child. The lavender dress, already a symbol of the suppression of the psyche, emerges as a symbol of the entrapped nature of the community at large. “[This] primal childhood scene brings into focus the nature of the imprisoning environment from which the self will seek escape. The black girl child is trapped within the cage of her own diminished self-image around which interlock the bars of natural and social forces” (Smith 368). Any sense of stability or understanding Maya might have gained from her grandmother is ripped away as the seven-year-old girl discovers herself trapped in the cage of being someone else’s child. She finds herself trapped in her father’s car on the way to St. Louis regardless of what she wants to do, she is prevented from communicating openly with the only person she trusts when her father reveals his knowledge of Pig Latin and trapped in a world of beautiful black people when she is not beautiful. After her first sexual encounter with Mr. Freeman, Maya confesses, “It was the same old quandary. I had always lived it. There was an army of adults, whose motives and movements I just couldn’t understand and who made no effort to understand mine” (Angelou 62). Having illuminated the various cages that existed in Stamps in the Old South, and then discovering the cages that were still present in the cities, such as St. Louis, Maya is not overly surprised to find that even in the large, ‘enlightened’ cities such as San Francisco, she remains trapped in the cages of her race, her gender and her background. Her escape from these cages only begins with this careful mapping of the bars that make it up. There requires yet another step before she can begin to find the freedom she discovers in her later life. The key to the cage is eventually found in her voice and in the literature that returns her voice to her following Mr. Freeman’s death. Throughout her early childhood and into St. Louis, Maya is seen to be heavily involved in discovering the voices of the past and present through literature. “During these years in Stamps, I met and fell in love with William Shakespeare” (Angelou 11), Angelou writes regarding her early childhood, listing several other influential writers she enjoyed before the age of seven. With the delivery of the news of Mr. Freeman’s death, though, Maya’s expanding voice is silenced as she imagines “the evilness flowing through my body and waiting, pent up, to rush off my tongue if I tried to open my mouth” (Angelou 72). While children who have been abused have a variety of responses including low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, fewer interests, extreme loneliness and fear (Berry 131), this silencing of the child reaches even further to illustrate the silencing of the black community under the yoke of white domination. These symptoms provided the child are thus translated to apply to the community as well. Back in Stamps, Maya notes the condition of the people who lived there. “They showed me a contentment based on the belief that nothing more was coming to them, although a great deal more was due” (Angelou 74). The pathway out of this new kind of cage was again through the example of a strong woman and the vehicle of literature as Mrs. Flowers begins reintroducing Maya to the world of language by bringing her into a more refined approach. “Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning” (Angelou 82). As Angelou slowly began learning the strength of her own voice, with a great deal of help from Mrs. Flowers, Momma and her mother, she becomes capable of challenging the system and facing the future unafraid. By examining the symbols and metaphors used within the novel, one can begin to understand the meaning underlying the title and the connections this has with the black experience in 1930s America. The degree to which the white culture had enforced its standards upon the black community can be discovered in the symbol of the lavender dress while the underlying strength of the community shines forth in the figure of Momma and her store. Maya’s rape, included within this carefully shaped context, is then used to symbolize the raping of the black psyche, creating as side effects many of the adverse effects typically found in people who have suffered personal violence as, in fact, the entire black community has. These symbols help to illuminate the various cages that keep Maya continuously oppressed within the various worlds she inhabits to the extent that she finally literally loses her ability to express herself. With the reintroduction of literature and a more refined means of looking at the world, Maya learns to again speak for herself, slowly gaining in strength throughout the remainder of the novel to a point where she fearlessly faces a future as a single mother in 1940s San Francisco as a strong black woman ready for any challenge that presents itself. Works Cited Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Bantam Books, 1969 (1993). Berry. D. B. The Domestic Violence Sourcebook: Everything you need to know. Los Angeles, CA: Lowell House, 2000. Conway, Jill Ker (Ed.). Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology. New York: Vintage, 1992. Margolin, G., & Gordis, E. B. “Children’s violence exposure in the family and community.” Current Directions in Psychological Science. Vol. 13, (2004): 152-155. Megna-Wallace, Joanne. Understanding I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998. Smith, Sidonie. “The Song of a Caged Bird: Maya Angelou’s Quest after Self-Acceptance.” Southern Humanities Review. (Fall 1973): 365–75. Tate, Claudia (Ed.). Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Read More