Maya Angelou
Jun 26th, 2014 by admin
WITH the death the other day of world’s acclaimed African-American poet, essayist, civil activist, journalist, film producer and teacher, Maya Angelou, the world has lost one of its most articulate voices of compassion and humanism.
Maya Angelou was a lady of remarkable intellect and immense literary skills, who published seven autobiographies, three books of essays and several books of poetry. She is also credited with a list of plays, movies, television production spanning more than 50 years. In all of these, she addressed the world through the medium of her own life, reflecting on social issues, the woman, humanity and existential problems. A bridge-builder, who viewed life beyond the partisanship created by difference, Maya counselled that, in spite of differences based on the facts of experience, in the long run it is our commonness that enables us solve existential problems.
Though faintly captured in the evanescent minds of today’s generation as a great poet of sagely candour, Maya was also a phenomenal woman of incredible tenacity. She survived sexual abuse at age seven to become an apostle of forgiveness and compassion; endured the socio-economic edginess of single motherhood to become a philanthropist and promoter of women empowerment; overcame speech defect to become a global voice of humanism and freedom.
Born Marguerite Annie Johnson on April 4, 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri, Maya, like every African American of her time, experienced the legally enforced life of racial discrimination in the American South. Sexually molested at age seven, Maya had her early education at Mission High School and earned a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labour School, “where she was exposed to the progressive ideals that animated her later political activism”. Dropping out of school in her early teens, she worked as cable car conductor, later returned to high school, became pregnant in her senior year and graduated a few weeks before giving birth to her son, Guy. At 16, she left home and took on the difficult life of a single mother, supporting herself and her son by working as a waitress and cook, night-club strip dancer, while at the same time nurturing her talents for music, performance and poetry.
In her multifarious role as a renaissance woman, artist and culturist per excellence, she made the world her stage traversing continents and engaging in occupational multi-tasking that saw her being a film producer in Europe, an editor of the English language weekly The Arab Observer in Egypt; instructor and administrator at the University of Ghana’s School of Music and Drama, editor for The African Review and writer for The Ghanaian Times and the Ghanaian Broadcasting Company.
For over five decades, she was one of the shapers of the history of the United States of America. Returning from Ghana to the United States in 1964, she found another calling in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with the integrationist Malcolm X. At the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she became the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Thereafter, she flourished as actor, writer, director and producer of plays, movies and television programmes. Since 1982 she taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she held the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies.
A toast of many U.S. presidents, Maya Angelou was invited by successive Presidents of the United States to serve in various capacities. President Ford appointed her to the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission and President Carter invited her to serve on the Presidential Commission for the International Year of the Woman. President Clinton requested that she compose a poem to read at his inauguration in 1993. Since she recited that poem “On the Pulse of the Morning”, at President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration in 1993, she composed and read another poem, “Amazing Peace” for President George W. Bush in 2005.
Apart from being the first African American woman to be nominated for the Pulitzer prize for her screenplay, Georgia, Angelou was among the first African-American women to hit the bestsellers lists with her controversial but delightful book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, published in 1969. True to the medium of her works, her life exemplified in concrete reality the lurid metaphor of the caged bird that sings. In a world that confines minorities to marginality, she, in more ways than one, prodigiously empowered herself to break the barriers of women subjugation fashioned out by race, religion, sex and politics. By this feat, she was able to impress upon humanity the possibility of taking a leap from hopeless obscurity to kaleidoscopic fame.
Maya was a recipient of many laurels, amongst which was the 1975 Ladies Home Journal Woman of the Year Award in communications. She was also honoured with the National Medal of Arts in 2000, Theatre Lincoln Medal in 2008, while President Barack Obama awarded her in 2011 with the U.S. highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Last year she received an honorary National Book Award.
For Nigeria and indeed all of Africa, Angelou’s life of liberation of the woman is a strong message to the Chibok debacle. In voice and stature, words and deeds, Maya was the emblem of the truly liberated woman. Tall and regal, with a deep majestic voice that spelt confidence, Maya, in her poem “ Phenomenal Woman” (apparently in reference to herself) celebrates femininity as confident womanliness, and denounced the social biases that recreate women as commodities.
In a message that should reverberate in Nigeria, Maya once said: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practise any other virtue consistently. You can practise any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” Her life of courage is also instructive to Nigerian political leaders, who, at this trying moment are toeing the easy path of convenience and expediency to address problems that demand courage.
For Maya, a woman, whose fragmented formal education did not go beyond the secondary level, her remarkable life from school drop-out to a Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, should be both a challenge and an inspiration to the many disillusioned youth who value academic certification above the value-endowing and transformational potential in proper education. In a world where professors, academics and the schooled tie the importance of their long years of formal educational training to laurels and titles, Maya, who had in her kitty 71 honorary degrees, led a life that challenges all to the see the value of education in the number of lives positively changed.
Culled from the Guardian Newspapers