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The article “Maya A Precious Prism” by Maitefa Angaza states that at the age of eighty-six Maya Angelou still believes that everyone needs to be satisfied with everything in the world. Maya was nominated with a Treasures National Literary Resource and poetic visionary in the year of 1993 also receiving the National Medal of Arts. Maya was known for her poetic voice, wisdom, confidence, and leadership making her one of the best writers. Angelou is a very well-known woman. She went from having nothing to becoming an artist, dancer, madam, teenage mother, poet, a queen a multimillionaire and becoming nominated for Tony and Emmy as well as receiving a Grammy. A lot of places have been named after her such as streets, schools, and children.
From working side by side with Martin Luther King Jr., planning strategies with Malcolm feeding Billie Holiday, living in Egypt, Ghana, Brooklyn and many other places and learning how to speak in five other languages, makes Maya one of the most inspired African American Woman. Maya’s mind was very sharp at the age of seventy-two despite the fact that she was still smoking cigarettes; she also did little things like word puzzles and mind games. She was the top requested speaker to attend colleges because she has ways of getting through to the younger crowds.
While reading “Songs of herself; the 80- year-old Maya Angelou offers poems, reflection and plain talk” by Maya Angelou I learned that Maya published her own memoir called I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing in the year of 1969. Maya Angelou flattered almost everybody especially when people of the other race would interview her and she talks about how she grew up in the Jim Crow South. Angelou was one of the few who decided to tell her story and pu...
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...e Maya was so courageous. Maya Angelou inspired so many people such as classrooms and some books were occasionally banned. The sweet language was common, it is when you speak slowly and dropped the g’s off the end of your words.
About 100 years ago most people were known to be illiterate or semi-illiterate now days everyone is brought up on technology and learn how to use the tool of language. Some of Maya Angelou’s great moments was when Joe Louis won the heavyweight championship and also when Barack Obama won the election in 2008. It bothers Maya when she hears things such as politicians stating that they do not care about the poor. Everybody has to be cautious, wise, careful and more wary. Not everybody is worth with courage and other things. Most people were brought up to be polite and there is not much people like that we are supposed to stand up for ourselves.
There are many lessons we can learn from the one of the powerful leader Maya Angelou. Angelou was a powerful leader who lived her life abundantly. She was very vulnerable and bold sharing her childhood story (sexual assault) through her book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” She has learned the lesson of forgiveness. A great leader needs to learn how to forgive. According to Angelou, “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them. Try to be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like. If you cannot make a change, change the way you have been thinking. You might find a new solution.” Attitude is another aspect that we can learn from Angelou. She did not complain about her childhood, racism, divorce, losing her friends, or rejection. She has overcome all the obstacles with courage; that is another lesson we can learn. In her poem, she says, “You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eye, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise!” Angelou knew who she was. She learned not to live according to people’s opinion. Angelou’s writings reflect who she was. We must learn who we
This literary critique was found on the Bryant Library database. It talks about how well Maya conveys her message to her readers as well as portraying vivid scenes in her reader’s minds’. Maya’s sense of story and her passionate desire to overcome obstacles and strive for greatness and self-appreciation is what makes Maya an outlier. Living in America, Angelou believed that African American as a whole must find emotional, intellectual, and spiritual sustenance through reverting back to their “home” of Africa. According to Maya, “Home” was the best place to capture a sense of family, past, and tradition. When it comes to Maya’s works of literature, her novels seems to be more critically acclaimed then her poetry. With that being said, Angelou pursues harsh social and political issues involving African American in her poems. Some of these themes are the struggle for civil rights in America and Africa, the feminist movement, Maya’s relationship with her son, and her awareness of the difficulties of living in America's struggling classes. Nevertheless, in all of Maya’s works of literature she is able to “harness the power of the word” through an extraordinary understanding of the language and events she uses and went through. Reading this critique made me have a better understanding of the process Maya went through in order to illustrate her life to her readers. It was not just sitting down with a pen and paper and just writing thoughts down. It was really, Maya being able to perfect something that she c...
Being a young black girl in the 1940’s was not the easiest thing to be. At that time, the two kinds of people who were believed to be of little or no importance were blacks and women. Throughout the book Maya never really accepted the fact that she was not going to get anywhere because of her status. She always tried to be the best in whatever she did, and always felt that she was just as good as or even better than many of the white people. It was not until she went to live with her mother that she really put action behind her feelings.
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 makes a phenomenal woman? A phenomenal woman she was, Mrs. Maya Angelou truly inspired and touched people all over the world with her art and wisdom. On April 24, 1928 in St. Louis Missouri Maya Angelou was born as Marguerite Ann Johnson, I know what your thinking how did she get her glorious name Maya Angelou; well she was given the name Maya Angelou in her early twenties, after her first performance as a dancer at the Purple Onion cabaret. Growing up Angelou had stable parents her mother was Vivian Johnson a nurse and realtor, her father was Bailey Johnson and he served as a naval dietician. In about 1931 her parents relationship would resort to a divorce leaving her younger brother and she to live with their grandmother in Stamps in
"Angelou, Maya (biography)." Her Heritage: A Biographical Encyclopedia of Famous American Women. 1.00 ed. 1995. eLibrary. Web. 19 May. 2014.
Maya Angelou was one of America’s greatest writers in history. She was known for her many writings and for her part in Civil Rights Movements. Maya Angelou went through many hardships during her childhood, the most prevalent of those, racism over her skin color. This racism affected where she grew up, where she went to school, even where she got a job. “My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drops s’s from plurals and suffixes from past tense verbs.” (Angelou 221) Maya Angelou was a strong believer in a good education and many of those beliefs were described in her
Maya Angelou is well known today for her poetry. She is a very inspirational woman that poems speak to many young women still today. Maya Angelou is one of those people that everyone loves and not many could ever have anything negative to say. She went through hard times as a child that later made her a better poet.
Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture. Dr. Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.
Throughout life graduation, or the advancement to the next distinct level of growth, is sometimes acknowledged with the pomp and circumstance of the grand commencement ceremony, but many times the graduation is as whisper soft and natural as taking a breath. In the moving autobiographical essay, "The Graduation," Maya Angelou effectively applies three rhetorical strategies - an expressive voice, illustrative comparison and contrast, and flowing sentences bursting with vivid simile and delightful imagery - to examine the personal growth of humans caught in the adversity of racial discrimination.
Maya Angelou is an author and poet who has risen to fame for her emotionally filled novels and her deep, heartfelt poetry. Her novels mainly focus on her life and humanity with special emphasis on her ideas of what it means to live. The way she utilizes many different styles to grab and keep readers’ attention through something as simple as an autobiography is astounding. This command of the English language and the grace with which she writes allows for a pleasant reading experience. Her style is especially prominent in "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings", where the early events of Angelou’s life are vividly described to the reader in the postmodern literary fashion.
The early 1930’s a time where segregation was still an issue in the United States it was especially hard for a young African American girl who is trying to grow and become an independent woman. At this time, many young girls like Maya Angelou grew up wishing they were a white woman with blond hair and blue eyes. That was just the start of Angelou's problems though. In the autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou goes into great depth about her tragic childhood, from moving around to different houses, and running away and having a child at the age of 16. This shows how Maya overcame many struggles as a young girl.
Maya Angelo’s "champion of the world" is much more than the chapter of the book. During 30 's people of the black ethnic group were not much worth. "Champion of the world a black boy. Some black mother 's son “defines the struggle of the black people at that time. The battle against white contender was not just an ordinary victory. It was a victory of the black defeating the system.
Throughout all works of literature, the daily events affecting the lives of the authors can be found in many different pieces of their work. Although it may not be a direct relation to what these authors experience, they often relate the themselves to their narrators through many different literary devices. However, these processes really stand out through the works of Maya Angelou. Through the use of metaphors and similes, Angelou relates her writings back to the harsh conditions of the socially unjustified period of the 1930’s onward; explaining the restraints placed upon both herself and her race by those who considered themselves to be her superiors.
While Maya is young, she notices white impudence but doesn’t always recognize it as racism, and it affected her attitude towards her life. She is taught to understand that white people don’t like black people; the white race is evil. Although she can comprehend that and understand to obey whites, but she doesn’t understand the reasoning behind it. For example, when the young white girls are mocking Momma in front of the Store, Maya is crying behind the door because she can’t understand why they’re being so mean, especially because Momma hasn’t done anything wrong to them. Maya says, “I wanted to throw a handful of black pepper in their faces, to throw lye on them, to scream that they were dirty, scummy peckerwoods, but I knew I was as clearly imprisoned behind the scene as the actors outside were confined to their roles” (Angelou, 25). Maya couldn’t understand why the girls were mocking Momma or why Momma made no attempt to get away from them. This event to her was an act of hate and jealousy, not one of racism and discrimination. Anothe...