Events RIP Maya Angelou, 86: Author, Poet, Activist, Educator

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

Maya Angelou, whose landmark book of 1969, ?I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? ? a lyrical, unsparing account of her childhood in the Jim Crow South ? was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C. She was 86.

Her death was confirmed by her literary agent, Helen Brann. The cause was not immediately known, but Ms. Brann said Ms. Angelou had been frail for some time and had heart problems.

In a statement, President Obama said, ?Today, Michelle and I join millions around the world in remembering one of the brightest lights of our time ? a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,? adding, ?She inspired my own mother to name my sister Maya.?

Though her memoirs, which eventually filled six volumes, garnered more critical praise than her poetry did, Ms. Angelou (pronounced AHN-zhe-low) very likely received her widest exposure on a chilly January day in 1993, when she delivered her inaugural poem, ?On the Pulse of Morning,? at the swearing-in of Bill Clinton, the nation?s 42nd president. He, like Ms. Angelou, had grown up in Arkansas.

It began:

A Rock, A River, A Tree

Hosts to species long since departed,

Marked the mastodon,

The dinosaur, who left dried tokens

Of their sojourn here

On our planet floor,

Any broad alarm of their hastening doom

Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,

Come, you may stand upon my

Back and face your distant destiny,

But seek no haven in my shadow,

I will give you no hiding place down here.

Long before that day, as she recounted in ?Caged Bird? and its sequels, she had already been a dancer, calypso singer, streetcar conductor, single mother, magazine editor in Cairo, administrative assistant in Ghana, official of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and friend or associate of some of the most eminent black Americans of the mid-20th century, including James Baldwin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Afterward (her six-volume memoir takes her only to age 40), Ms. Angelou was a Tony-nominated stage actress; college professor (she was for many years the Reynolds professor of American studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem); ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit; frequent guest on television shows from ?Oprah? to ?Sesame Street?; and subject of a string of scholarly studies.

In February 2011, Mr. Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country?s highest civilian honor.

Throughout her writing, Ms. Angelou explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. As a whole, her work offered a cleareyed examination of the ways in which the socially marginalizing forces of racism and sexism played out at the level of the individual.

?If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat,? Ms. Angelou wrote in ?I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.?

Hallmarks of Ms. Angelou?s prose style included a directness of voice that recalls African-American oral tradition and gives her work the quality of testimony. She was also intimately concerned with sensation, describing the world around her ? be it Arkansas, San Francisco or the foreign cities in which she lived ? with palpable feeling for its sights, sounds and smells.

?I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,? published when Ms. Angelou was in her early 40s, spans only her first 17 years. But what powerfully formative years they were.

Marguerite Johnson was born in St. Louis on April 4, 1928. For years after Dr. King?s assassination, on April 4, 1968, Ms. Angelou did not celebrate her birthday. Her dashing, defeated father, Bailey Johnson Sr., a Navy dietitian, ?was a lonely person, searching relentlessly in bottles, under women?s skirts, in church work and lofty job titles for his ?personal niche,? lost before birth and unrecovered since,? Ms. Angelou wrote. ?How maddening it was to have been born in a cotton field with aspirations of grandeur.?

Her beautiful, volatile mother, Vivian Baxter, was variously a nurse, hotel owner and card dealer. (Ms. Angelou?s 2013 account of life with her mother, ?Mom & Me & Mom,? became a best seller.) As a girl, Ms. Angelou was known as Rita, Ritie or Maya, her older brother?s childhood nickname for her.

After her parents? marriage ended, 3-year-old Maya was sent with her 4-year-old brother, Bailey, to live with their father?s mother in the tiny town of Stamps, Ark., which, she later wrote, ?with its dust and hate and narrowness was as South as it was possible to get.?

Their grandmother, Annie Henderson, owned a general store ?in the heart of the Negro area,? Ms. Angelou wrote. An upright woman known as Momma, ?with her solid air packed around her like cotton,? she is a warm, stabilizing presence throughout ?I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.?

The children returned periodically to St. Louis to live with their mother. On one such occasion, when Maya was 7 or 8 (her age varies slightly across her memoirs, which employ techniques of fiction to recount actual events), she was raped by her mother?s boyfriend.

She told her brother, who alerted the family, and the man was tried and convicted. Before he could begin serving his sentence, he was murdered ? probably, Ms. Angelou wrote, by her uncles.

Believing that her words had brought about the death, Maya did not speak for the next five years. Her love of literature, as she later wrote, helped restore language to her.

As a teenager, living with her mother in San Francisco, she studied dance and drama at the California Labor School and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar conductor there. At 16, after a casual liaison with a neighborhood youth, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. There the first book ends.

Reviewing ?I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? in The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it ?a carefully wrought, simultaneously touching and comic memoir.?

The book ? its title is a line from ?Sympathy,? by the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar ? became a best seller, confounding the stereotype, pervasive in the publishing world, that black women?s lives were rarely worthy of autobiography.

Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/ar...t-86.html?_r=0



RIP Maya Angelou...



ADG

[brassmonkey]

yeah made me cry felt bad all day

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

Originally Posted by brassmonkey

yeah made me cry felt bad all day

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou, 1928 - 2014

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I?ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
?Cause I walk like I?ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I?ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don?t you take it awful hard
?Cause I laugh like I?ve got gold mines
Diggin? in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I?ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I?ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history?s shame
I rise
Up from a past that?s rooted in pain
I rise
I?m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that?s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

ADG

[Nydahl]

Originally Posted by AsianDivaGirlsWebDude

ADG

strong and powerful words indeed. RIP

[OneHungLo]

[michael.kickass]

R.i.p......

[romeo22]

RIP Maya Angelou

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

Originally Posted by Nydahl

strong and powerful words indeed. RIP

ADG

[JennaFame]

RIP, she was a beautiful person.

[EngineCash]

Rip...

[_Richard_]

rip to her!

[SekobA]

RIP Maya Angelou

[djroof]

Rip.....

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

A Brave and Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

ADG