Maya Angelou: learned words

You’ve probably heard about Maya Angelou.  She’s on a lot of reading lists, she’s been on TV and in movies.  She’s an outspoken activist for the rights of grrls everywhere.  If you can cast your mind back a few years, she even wrote a poem that she then read at Bill Clinton’s inauguration.  She’s famous these days for her books, her poems, her plays, her movies, her acting, her activism...in short, she’s famous for her words.

She wasn’t always famous, and people didn’t always listen to her.  Maya Angelou walked a long and round about path to her mastery of words.

As a young girl Maya was raped by her mother’s boyfriend and as a result, she refused to talk for almost five years.  Instead of talking, Maya sat with her grandmother learning stories and watching how people interacted.  She learned that when you are small and quiet, people soon forget that you are there and they talk freely in front of you.  She watched and she listened and she learned.  When Maya was raped, she didn’t have the words to explain her feelings or her needs.  Instead of letting these feelings destroy her though, she simply stopped and waited until she could find the words to shape her pain.

Maya found the words to recover her life in her grandmother’s love, and Maya made up for those silent years with a vengeance!  She became the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco, an editor for what was the only English language newspaper published in the Middle East, an editor of a journal published in Ghana, and at the request of Martin Luther King Jr., she became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  Gerald Ford named her to the Bicentennial Commission, Jimmy Carter named her International woman of the year, and as we’ve already seen, Bill Clinton was pretty fond of her poetry.  Maya took pain, and fear, and hatred, and ignorance, and she rolled those feelings up in words that could be touched and rolled about and shared.  This grrl took her dreams and her feelings and used them to reach out to others.

In 1970 Maya published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an autobiography about her childhood and the world as she knew it.  She shared her vision and her words by writing screenplays and television programs.  She became the first African American woman director in Hollywood, and she acted in front of the camera in television mini-series like “Roots”.  Maya used any and all mediums of communication from poems to novels,  from Broadway to TV, from rallies in the street to hymns sung before the eyes of the nation.

Maya has been, and continues to be, a force to be reckoned with.  As she said herself, she has five years of silence to make up for, and if her recent past is any indication, Maya will go on shouting for many more years to come!  Follow Maya’s example and turn the events of your life into opportunities to share.  Use your words to build bridges, and don’t forget to sing!
 

 

Leslie Clay grrl-e-grrl.com contributor