I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

✨“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,

of things unknown, but longed for still,

and his tune is heard on the distant hill,

for the caged bird sings of freedom.”✨

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1969) is the first of Angelou’s six autobiographies. Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques like dialogue and plot in her autobiographies was innovative for its time and helped, in part, to complicate the genre’s relationship with truth and memory. Though her books are episodic and tightly-crafted, the events seldom follow a strict chronology and are arranged to emphasise themes.

One of the major themes of Angelou’s books is racism. In the autobiographical fiction, Angelou paints a vivid picture of a poor black girl, Marguerite, who, with her brother Bailey, was sent to live with their grandmother in Arkansas after their parents split. Marguerite internalizes the idea that blond hair (standards of American beauty) is beautiful and that she is a fat black girl trapped in a nightmare. Stamps, Arkansas, is so thoroughly segregated that as a child Marguerite does not quite believe that white people exist. As Marguerite gets older, she is confronted by more overt and personal incidents of racism, such as a white speaker’s condescending address at her eighth-grade graduation, her white boss’s insistence on calling her Mary, and a white dentist’s refusal to treat her. The importance of Joe Louis’s world championship boxing match to the black community reveals the dearth of publicly recognized African American heroes. It also demonstrates the desperate nature of the black community’s hope for vindication through the athletic triumph of one man. These unjust social realities confine and demean Maya and her relatives.

The book does not stop at recording and cataloguing the racial inequality between black people and white people. It also identifies a complex hierarchy within the black community between light-skinned black people and dark-skinned black people. Light skin is considered more beautiful and garners more respect. Marguerite’s mother, Vivian, is light-skinned. Marguerite, upon reuniting with her at the age of 8, thinks that Vivian is too pretty to be a mother. She rationalizes her own rejection by appealing to a general cultural appreciation of light skin over dark skin. Marguerite is dark but her mother is light—she thinks this must be the reason her mother sent her away. Marguerite is also envious of other children in the town, who are either bi-racial or borne of light-skinned parents, who are lighter and therefore, in her mind, better than her.

Another theme that is portrayed in the novel is female sexuality- in the whole of humankind, the hierarchy goes in the order of- man, woman, child and beasts but when taken race into account the order changes- white man, white woman, white children, black man, black woman, black children and beasts. Black women are dominated by not only their “racial superiors” but even by the black men in the community. Angelou illustrates an example of how black women are further suppressed by sharing the horrific sexual assault of Marguerite by Mr. Freeman, who was her stepfather. At the same time, Maya subverts this hierarchy by showing how Vivian earns more than Freeman and brings bread to the table. As Marguerite grows older, she feels comfortable in her own skin- as an African-American and as a black woman.

Maya Angelou portrays the effects of racism and female sexuality through the mind of a child. This insight makes the readers realise that how even the young minds and lives are affected by these practices, and how much the blacks struggle to get out of this bind of racism, and how much black women suppressed.

The writing style of the book is simple, direct and effective. Maya doesn’t drape a safety blanket when comes to discussing violence- she presents it as it is, not for shock value, but to make the readers realise that these disgusting acts were present in the time and some of them still exist and occurs. The plot structure is chronological in nature- there are time leaps but it is linear. The characters are presented through the eyes of Marguerite, written in first-person narration; thus, we are shown only parts of them which she observes.

This is the first book in a seven-part collection, ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’, is a phenomenal book and is to be read by everyone. The fictional aspect of the book makes it further potent and the autobiographical elements make the book personal and more heartfelt.

I, though, would not recommend this to people who are triggered by violence and sexual assault, as the book discusses the acts in detail.