By Niyi Osundare
She enriched our world with her
astounding array of talents and accomplishments: she was a singer, dancer,
composer, producer, actress, journalist, teacher, motivational speaker, writer,
and civil rights activist.
Yet, that world, given the
time, place, and circumstance of her birth, gave her little chance to
demonstrate those talents, and even less possibility for carrying them to
ultimate fulfillment. For she was born Black and female in American South at a
time when both designations were nothing short of double jeopardy.
Life for Black people in Jim
Crow South was hard, brutish, almost forbidding, but the proverbial reality of
America as a land of dreams and possibilities enabled her to make lemonade with
the lemon sold to her by a society still trying to grapple with the searing
contradictions between the lofty democratic ideals enshrined in its
constitution and the grave inequities meted out to its racial and gender
underclass.
Maya Angelou was a victim of
the American nightmare and shining example of its dream. Her entire life
provided a lesson in the act of snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat. In
an interview with African American critic Claudia Tate a couple of years ago,
Angelou declared: “All my work is meant to say ‘You may encounter many defeats
but you must not be defeated’” (See The Norton Anthology of African American
Literature, 2nd Edition, p. 2155).
This is the empowering credo of
a woman who was raped when she was eight years old and plunged into
trauma-induced silence for many years thereafter; then became a teenage mother
one month after graduating from high school at 16.
This is the rousing lesson
of a woman who rose from acute obscurity to global acclaim; a woman once
‘dumbed’ by unspeakable adversity but who rose to develop a voice strong and
eloquent enough to qualify her as the chosen poet at President Clinton’s
inauguration on January 21, 1993, thus becoming the first African American and
the first woman to be so recognized and honored.
To Maya Angelou, drawbacks and
adversities are, most times, the building blocks of the house of glory; for
life without its vicissitudes is like Christianity without the Cross. She has
so much to say because her own life is a compendium of tellable stories.
This is why she is most widely
known for her autobiographies, the two famous of which are I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings (1970) which became an instant best-seller and literally launched
her career as a writer and global voice; and All God’s Children Need Travelling
Shoes (1984), an engaging account of her travel to Ghana, and the many ways her
Africa journey helped her self-definition as an African American by deepening
her understanding of the African condition beyond the silences, half-truths,
and blatant lies in the history books.
An authentic apprehension of history
and its poignant impact on the present, a touching narrative of the battles of
life; the archaeology of adversity and its delicate relationship to eventual
triumph, the never-say-die spirit and desirability of the proverbial pie in the
sky; the necessity of love and the possibility of hope; the redemptive
functions of art and culture; a spirituality older, deeper, and much wider than
the troubling superficialities of the workaday world; a ceaseless insistence on
lasting values: these are the recurrent themes of Maya Angelou’s works.
These are the principles which
ruled her life. This is why, bolstered by uncommon courage and conviction, she
was able to say this to a world that has been largely unkind to her race and
gender:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very
dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise
Yes, the incredible Maya has
picked up the horsetail and danced to the other side of the Great River.
But she has left us her lyrical verse and soulful music, her imperishable
stories, her electric stage presence, her sweet (and sour) voice, the
epigrammatic force in her moral injunction:
When you learn, teach
When you get, give
Said the iconic persona in
Angelou’s ‘Our Grandmothers’: ‘I have a certain way of being in this world’.
Maya Angelou’s 86 years on earth are a telling testimony to that declaration.
The world has lost a truly phenomenal woman. How so grateful we are that she
came our way and touched our lives with the music of her soul and the gravitas
of her grace.
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