Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells
the story of her childhood and her upbringing in a segregated Arkansas town.
Angelou was born in California but was sent to live with her grandmother who
owned a small store in Stamps, Arkansas. By repeating words that define a
person’s race, such as Negro or white folk, Angelou makes the reader understand
how, “growing up is painful for the Southern black girl, [and] being aware of
her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.” (Angelou
4) Angelou grew up in a deeply segregated time where words like Negro, Colored,
or even Nigger were not uncommon, and while all of these are all very hurtful
and belittling words Angelou chose to use them to describe herself and other
members of the black community with them. While it seems that she is degrading
herself, she actually seems to embrace these titles. She used the connotations
of these words to trick the readers in some way, while they think that she
despises her upbringing in the black community, the people she really spites
are the white people who put those labels on the people that she loves. The
white folk were, “strange pale creatures that lived in their alien unlife”,
people that she couldn’t even think of as people, her community of black people
where the normal ones, and while all of the other children were blinded by the
ignorance of not knowing any better she was fully aware of her situation. Maya
Angelou didn’t understand why her people, the normal people, were being labeled
by these people who she saw as less then people, the white folk. In the end,
Angelou makes the reader comprehend her experience growing up it a world that
was controlled by people that she didn’t understand.
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