In the novel I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou goes from a little southern black girl who wishes to be a “a long and blonde haired, light-blue eyed, white girl”, to a very mature young adult that is proud of her race. Throughout ’s (Maya’s) life she goes through many difficulties and triumphs. Some of which a person could never imagine of going through. Maya goes from being a very shy and strange black girl, to a certain and self-confident young woman. In I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, has to deal with prejudice, rape, and also the issues of abandonment in her course of becoming a mature woman.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings takes place in the 1930s to the 1940s. During this time period Blacks were discriminated against. Being a child in this period, Maya experiences how difficult life is with prejudice people. For example, with all the discrimination going on, Maya wishes to be a white girl. She says “Wouldn’t they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten? My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them.....Then they would understand why I had never picked up a Southern accent, or spoke the common slang, and why I had to be forced to eat pigs’ tails and snouts. Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth”. She experiences how mean and harsh white people are to the black people. For example, Maya saw her grandmother “Momma” be insulted by a bunch of “powitetrash” kids. They were making fun of how she was standing on the front porch and how she was humming Church songs. After getting bored of mocking her, one of the girls had revealed herself to Momma. Throughout the whole episode Momma stood straight and stiff and kept humming her Hymns. This showed Maya that a black person doesn’t have to always react to what white people say or do towards them. Being strong and showing that a person is not afraid is the best thing to do when being harassed. Momma also contributes to Maya’s maturing by Maya starts to take pride in her race even with all the prejudice. Momma stands up and speaks out to the white dentist, which was...
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...a lesbian or not. So, without help from her mother she goes to the first guy she sees and has sex with him. If her mother had not let her alone and guided her through this problem she would never had done this. In doing this she becomes pregnant. This is when Maya really matures and learns that she must grow up. Without any guidance through her life she never knew the difference between right or wrong. All the times that she was abandoned or not guided through her childhood resulted in her getting pregnant. If Maya was never abandoned from her parents and other people then maybe she would have never made these bad choices. During this time period and living in the South, it makes Maya’s life difficult to experience. She grows up very fast and learns about things that a normal child or teenager would not know at this time. She matures quickly by the discriminations, her rape, and being abandoned throughout her childhood. As a teenager, Maya seems to be an older woman because of all the difficulties and the triumphs that she has gone through. Today, kids are growing up very quickly, and they need the help of adults and examples from adults to understand what’s going on around them.
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.
Do you think different adversities are solved similarly? Are there any correlations between different adversities? Is there a way to overcome one’s adversities? Well in the book I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, the main character has the capability to solve her most important ones. The main character, Maya Angelou, experiences the wrath of racism while living in the south during the 20th century. Racism is the stem of many adversities such as low-self esteem and poverty which Angelou must face.
But I had seen the fingers cut by the mean little cotton boils, and I had witnessed the backs and shoulders and arm and legs resisting any further demands." The importance of this quote is really integral to the rest of the book. To be able to criticize something you should have experienced it. This passage shows that Maya has experienced the non-privilege of being a Negro during the thirties, and experienced it at a young age. Maya wrote that she later confronted the stereotype, She had a right to because of her previous position.
What is a Myocardial Infarction? Myocardial Infarction, also known as a heart attack, occurs when there is a blockage in one of the coronary arteries. The heart is a muscle that needs oxygenated blood and nutrients to survive. When a blockage occurs in the arteries, oxygen and nutrients are cut off from the heart for an extensive time. The blocked portion of tissue in heart dies. Blockages can occur due to several factors. Coronary artery disease is the most prevalent cause. Coronary artery disease or atherosclerosis is due to plaque buildup and narrowing in the artery walls. These plaques are made from cholesterol and waste products. This buildup on artery walls can restrict blood flow; a process that can take
Oxygen is vital to a beating, healthy heart because it is needed to perform cellular respiration in order to pump the blood. When there is no oxygen being transported to the heart, the heart cannot pump blood, and eventually after being inactive, the heart tissue dies . This results in a heart attack. Heart attacks can be diagnosed before it is too late. One method of diagnosis is through a blood test. Blood tests are capable of sorting through the material found in blood, and if heart cell contents are found in the specimen, a heart attack can be diagnosed. If the levels of the cell contents are higher, this signifies that the heart attack is more severe. Another method of diagnosis is an electrocardiogram (ECG). An ECG measures the rhythm of the heart in order to detect defects. There are many other strategies that are used by doctors in order to diagnose a heart attack, such as chest x-rays, stress tests, tilt table tests, and echocardiograms, to name a few. A myocardial biopsy involves looking at the heart cells, and is accomplished by collecting a sample of heart cells from the patient. If the results are positive, a heart attack is diagnosed. A heart MRI involves looking at images of the heart in order to detect heart failure. The doctor uses the images to look for disorders in the structure of the
If an artery becomes so clogged that blood cannot flow through it, the result is chest pain which could progress to a heart attack, or myocardial infarction (MI). "Myocardial" is a medical term that means "having to do with the heart" or "heart muscle". "Infarct" is a medical term for tissue death. During a myocardial infarction, the portion of the heart that is supposed to get blood from the diseased artery dies. However, cardiologists are trained to recognize symptoms like chest pain, shortness of breath, and fatigue of coronary artery disease in patients before the symptoms becomes severe. A cardiologist is often able to treat coronary disease before it causes an MI. – http://myweb.com/contents/dmk_article396168
An acute myocardial infraction is commonly known as a heart attack. A heart attack is a serious medical emergency that can cause death if not taken serious! “Every year, there are more than 3 million cases in America.” Says Mayo Clinic. Although, a heart attack can happen at any age the majority of the victims are 40 and up. An attack occurs when the blood supply to a part of the heart is damaged or interrupted. Heart attacks are usually caused by obesity, stress, high blood pressure, smoking and many other diseases or poor decision.
In Maya Angelou's autobiographical novel, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", tender-hearted Marguerite Johnson, renamed Maya by her refined brother Bailey, discovers all of the splendors and agonies of growing up in a prejudiced, early twentieth century America. Rotating between the slow country life of Stamps, Arkansas and the fast-pace societies in St. Louis, Missouri and San Francisco, California taught Maya several random aspects of life while showing her segregated America from coast to coast.
Thomas Carlyle expresses culture as: “the process by which a person becomes all that they were capable of being.” By unifying people, culture empowers us to be everything we can be. World-renowned author and activist, and possibly the most inspirational woman of all time, Maya Angelou, both explains and proves this idea in “Champion of the World,” an excerpt from her collection of memoirs: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Through the use of many types of rhetoric, she illustrates how cultural identities can unite us and bring out many emotions in us, bad and good. She demonstrates her purpose: how culture gives us an identity, and brings us together to grow in places we could not alone. She uses syntax, diction, tone, and other rhetorical
Maya Angelou’s excerpt from her book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” reveals the challenges facing a young black girl in the south. The prologue of the book tells of a young Angelou in church trying to recite a poem she has forgotten. She describes the dress her grandmother has made her and imagines a day where she wakes up out of her black nightmare. Angelou was raised in a time where segregation and racism were prevalent in society. She uses repetition, diction, and themes to explore the struggle of a black girl while growing up. Angelou produces a feeling of compassion and poignancy within the reader by revealing racial stereotypes, appearance-related insecurities, and negative connotations associated with being a black girl. By doing this she forces the
Walker, Pierre A. Racial protest, identity, words, and form in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Vol. 22. West Chester: Collage Literature, n.d. Literary Reference Center. Web. 8 Apr. 2014. .
The book thus explores a lot of important issues, such as: sexuality and race relations, and shows us how society violated her as a young African American female. In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou clearly expresses the physical pain of sexual assault, the mental anguish of not daring to tell, and her guilt and shame for having been raped. Her timidity and fear of telling magnify the brutality of the rape. For more than a year after the rape she lives in self-imposed silence, speaking only very rarely. This childhood rape reveals the pain that African American women suffered as victims not only of racism but also sexism.
The novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings goes through the childhood of Maya Angelou as she faces the difficult realities of the early South. This novel does not do a very good job at portraying the hardships of the blacks because she
According to the The Free Dictionary “A heart attack is the death of, or damage to, part of the heart muscle because the supply of blood to the heart muscle is severely reduced or stopped.” The conditions within the body leading up to a heart attack can take years to progress to a point severe enough to cause an attack, and usually do not present any warning signs until the tragedy occurs. A heart attack is the result of increasing blockage to the coronary arteries, which supply blood and oxygen to the heart. This is a gradual process that leads to coronary artery disease, which in turn can cause a heart attack once the blockage has become severe enough. A heart attack is often the first sign of coronary artery disease, and is the most common form of heart disease. A heart attack is the number one cause of death in the United States. Of the more than 1.5 million Americans who suffer through a heart attack, half a million of them do not survive. (Heart Attack, thefreedictionary.com). According to the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention “Every year about 715,000 Americans have a heart attack. Of these, 525,000 are a first heart attack and 190,000 happen in people who have already had a heart att...
Throughout I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, racism is a frequent obstacle that non-whites had to overcome. When Maya is young, she doesn’t recognize the racism and discrimination as well as her grandmother does. As Maya gets older, she begins to recognize and take notice to the racism and discrimination towards her and African Americans everywhere. Maya may not recognize the racism and discrimination very well at her young age, but it still affects her outlook on life the same way it would if she had recognized it. The racism and discrimination Maya faced throughout I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, affected her attitude, personality, and overall outlook on life in a positive way.