Word: angelou
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...Maya Angelou cannot use the same excuse. She has not been forced, by the threat of Hollywood unemployment, to reduce her past to sentimental and glib reminiscences. For she too has become observer of her own past in bringing her audience closer to famous Black men and women in American social history. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Angelou's first major work, told a complicated, autobiographical tale of the author's childhood and expressed the voice of a timid and surprised child in mature prose. Her stepfather introduced her to sex by raping her, her mother abandoned...
...that contagious Hollywood sentimentality have changed the power and the subtle prose. The closer in age Maya Angelou-the-writer comes to Maya Angelou-the-heroince, the more difficult it is for her to maintain an insightful distance and the more her emotions obscure her vision of the past. The Heart of a Woman proves that Angelou has not had time to situate her remembered self into a story which transcends mere social history. She is still too carried away by the names she became involved with, and like the aritificial reminiscences of Bill Bojangles' narrative, she writes...
...catch herself from losing the artist's connection with the past, Angelou begins her latest work with a slave spiritual--a calling to an emotional memory--that sings, "The ole ark's a-moverin', a-moverin', a-moverin', the ole ark's a-moverin' along." The ole ark is Black people, now moving to realize the goals of the Civil Rights Movement and Malcolm X. The heroine is again Maya Angelou, no longer a little girl but now a single mother trying to raise her only son. The book tries to illustrate how closely allied the political lives of Angelou...
This is a difficult, complex relationship to explain, and if Angelou does explain it, she does not do so nearly as effectively as she portrayed the relationship between the South's social code and Black children in the 30s and 40s. She writes very well, however, of the challenging intimacy between herself and her son, Guy. The rest of Maya's life pales in comparison to the poignancy of the mother-son bond. She ends up a loving and concerned mother but a boring social observer...
Participants will view several films and discuss works by authors including Maya Angelou, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and W.E.B. DuBois. The group will also attend speaches and symposiums in the Boston area...