Maya Angelou Literary Elements

Maya Angelou uses literary elements to explore political, social, and personal issues by describing her childhood and events that affected that way she saw the world, and comparing different social and physical standards that she endured. From the beginning, Angelou and her brother were very young when they were sent away to their grandmother’s home. They grew up in Stamps, a small town in Arkansas. Segregation and racism as at its peak in this period, somewhere between the 1930’s or 1940’s. Since she grew up with her grandmother, whom which she called Momma, she recalled several momentstimes of black people picking cotton across Momma’s store and the many times white people would hunt for black men. She also mentions of how she always thought

At a young age, she always felt an emptiness within her, an orphan. The negligence of Angelou and her brother took a hard toll, especially Maya herself. “Then the possibility of being compared to with him occurred to me, and I didn’t want anyone to see him. Maybe he wasn’t my real father Baile was his son, true enough, but I was an orphan that they picked up to provide Bailey with company” (Angelou, 55). She wasn’t very happy, describing of how she would compare herself to her father, and how he and Bailey were more belonging than she would ever be. She uses somber tones while she explains feeling left out from the family. The setting changes drastically to the reader and main character, for they eventually move to St.Louis with their birth mother. Another interesting that is shown in the novel is the use of words the author chose to differentiate her grandmother, Momma, the woman who raised her and looked up to her as her real mother, and her birth mother, Mother, the stranger and the person she was longing to meet ever since she was