Book Review - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Hearing Maya Angelou’s voice in this first compilation to a series of memoirs that Angelou wrote as she chronicled her life raised as a young black woman in the South, we hear her testify the life that was given to her and the times she had risen into. Both poetic and lyrical, Angelou’s prose eases readers into a world both with what James Baldwin called “luminous dignity” and hope.

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" is a vast achievement. Never complaining about the conditions she was born into, Angelou takes readers into her world with open arms. Growing up in the South black and a woman had never been easy. But for Maya Angelou her Grandmother’s love and her religious upbringing had taught her some things. From an early age, books and words have played an important role in Angelou’s life. Never the pretty thing, but the plain girl everybody ignored, it will be this gift for words that will carry forth this blossoming writer.

Filled with fraught scenes that flow righteously from sentence to sentence, we are given Angelou’s testimony of the political times she was born into and had learned to exist in. Never a dull moment: from the first pages of her desire for pineapples straight from the can to the taste of her first-born’s skin on her lips, we learn second-hand what it is like to be black and a woman in such times.

My only complaint is that although her prose is unquestionably melodic, the first few pages felt like it needed better editing. A few excessive wordings seemed to hinder my progress. But as the memoir went on, I become more convinced as a reader that I was in sure hands. The memoir in itself is very honest. It gives us a complete view of what the Southern experience would be like for a young black girl in the 1950’s. Even Maya Angelou’s rape was rendered in such distinct detail and honesty, that readers themselves will be scarred, the experience on the page becoming too frightening and real. As Baldwin claims, Angelou’s prose will liberate readers to their own hearts. Freed from the chains that kept her ancestor’s immobile and imprisoned, we learn of Angelou’s own imprisoned silence after her rape, and so hearing her voice we will be more open to our own.