I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: Movie and Book
The novel, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", by Maya Angelou is the first series of five autobiographical novels. This novel tells about her life in rural Stamps, Arkansas with her religious grandmother and St. Louis, Missouri, where her worldly and glamorous mother resides. At the age of three Maya and her four-year old brother, Bailey, are turned over to the care of their paternal grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Southern life in Stamps, Arkansas was filled with humiliation, violation, and displacement. These actions were exemplified for blacks by the fear of the Ku Klux Klan, racial separation of the town, and the many incidents in belittling blacks.
Maya knows that to be black and female is to be faced with violence and violation. This is brought into focus when she goes to live with her mother and is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. When Maya is faced with this catastrophe, tells who did this to her, and the man is killed, she believes her voice killed him. She withdraws into herself and vows never to speak again. Her mother feeling that she has done everything in her power to make Maya talk, but can cannot reach her, sends Maya and her brother back to Stamps. After Maya returns to Stamps and with the help of her Teacher-Ms. Flowers she begins to speak again.
The culmination of the novel is when Maya describes her eighth grade graduation. Angelou, her classmates, and parents listen to the condescending and racist manner in which the guest speaker talks. After listening to his insults, Maya realizes "she is the master of her fate" which was expressed in the valedictory address given by her classmate. Maya becomes a single parent at the age of eighteen, but it is her inner desire and willful fate that she realizes she can be an extraordinary mother.
The intersections we have been exploring have involved factional concepts based on fictional perceptions. Although this book is nonfiction Angelou uses elements from both fiction and fantasy. For this reason, the novel "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"
could have been a selected choice for our class. It reflects the realization and fantasized events of how Angelou overcomes social obstacles and her struggle to be accepted. Carol Neubauer gives one example of Angelou’s use with fiction and fantasy in this novel. It involves a visit to a racist dentist in Stamps. The bigoted dentist refuses to treat Maya. As a child, she images that her grandmother grows to gigantic height and gains super human strength to retaliate against the dentist (24). Another example of Angelou’s realistic but fictional struggles is how she is betrayed by the white world’s view of beauty. She pretends that she is really white and a cruel fairy stepmother, who was jealous of her beauty, turned her into a "too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet, and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil" (Angelou 1-3). Even though Angelou knows she is truly black, she uses this fantasy as a defense mechanism in order to survive the oppression of the south. This source of social barrier can be compared and contrasted with another text we have studied. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks shows some obstacles and struggles that Dr. P. faces. For example, after series of test in the doctor’s office, Dr. P and his wife prepare to leave. Dr. P. reaches out for Mrs. P’s head, mistaking it for his hat. Dr. S. was astonished, because Dr. P. beliefs he has no disabilities and he can see. Reality is Dr. P. can not see, but he will not accept this. It is Dr. P’s admiration and desire to view the world through music that he overcomes his barrier.
The novel speaks about the human condition-what we can endure, dream, fail and survive at. One problem Maya must over come is the reality that her mother is a sassy and street-wise lady who makes Black beautiful and language into a form of the body as well as an art of the mind. Her mother has femininity, beauty, and sensuality and does not mind flaunting it. It is these same characteristics that Maya exhibits during her teen years that eventually results in her becoming an unwed teenage mother. In the novel, "Sula" by Toni Morrison a similar situation evolves. Sula’s mother, Hannah was devoted to the practice and pleasures of sensuality. After being exposed to this type of behavior Sula set out to explore this self-indulgence that had merged in her.
Another point of intersection with "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and "Sula" is how the books reveal a girl’s coming-of-age experience in a small town with a black community, the attitude of whites, and the social and political tensions during the 1900’s. Although Sula is raised in the Ohio, she still encounters prejudice, hatred, racism, and the black lack of power. Both texts seem to display that society attempts to induce all blacks with a sense of impotence and nothingness.
The fictional aspects between the movie and the book "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" in comparison the movie uses more fiction. For example, the book talked about the children’s parents and never mentioned that Maya and her brother thought their parents were deceased. However, the film portrayed the kids being overly whelmed with hatred when they received gifts from their parents. It was like they never knew their parents existed. Another example of the difference between the book and the movie is Mr. Freeman (mother’s boyfriend) was presented as being very reserved with the children. In the movie he was seen as warm, talkative, and friendly towards Maya and her brother. The film also showed Mr. Freeman’s manly behavior by confronting Vivian (Maya’s mother) at her job. However, in the book Mr. Freeman never left the house, he always sat and waited at home for her.
Although reality involves a vast supply of details and you can not select them all. Many writers, directors, and artists, emphasis with this information and diminish other information in order to make the novels, movies, plays and etc. more vivid to our imagination.
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