![]() Only a little higher than the apes.Īs Lyn Innes writes in her obituary for the Guardian: It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It was another lynching,yet another Black man hanging on a tree. In a passage that conjures black pride in the face of oppression, she writes: In one scene that she describes, Maya is among a crowd gathered around a store radio with the rest of her community to listen to Joe Louis, ‘the Brown Bomber’, defend his world heavyweight boxing title. But above all, their wealth that allowed them to waste was the most enviable. Like Mandela, Maya Angelou did rise – above the hatefulness and suffering, the violence and prejudice directed against herself and her people, to write inspirational texts such as ‘Human Family’:Īnd lovers think quite different thoughtsĪt the same time, in memoirs such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou wrote with brutal directness of the racism she had endured: of ‘the rust on the razor that threatens the throat’:Ī light shade had been pulled down between the Black community and all things white, but one could see through it enough to develop a fear-admiration-contempt for the white “things”-white folks’ cars and white glistening houses and their children and their women. I am the dream and the hope of the slave. But the shared history of her people has also yielded so much pride and beauty:īringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, ![]() It’s the same spirit that burns through her wonderful poem ‘Still I Rise’ – the determination to rise above ‘history’s shame’, the past of pain, terror and fear, of terrible suffering. Yet that volume opens with the words quoted at the top of this post: ‘What you looking at me for? I didn’t come to stay’ – a suggestion of her fierce determination to transcend her circumstances. Growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. The opening section of her 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an indictment of the racial discrimination she experienced during her childhood, closes with this vivid assertion: Born into poverty in the depression and the racist, segregated American south, she survived a childhood rape, gave birth as a teenager, and was, at one time, a prostitute. Maya Angelou’s life was a s remarkable as Nelson Mandela’s: born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1928, she survived the trials of a terrible childhood. ![]() She was a warrior for equality, tolerance and peace’. Confirming her death today, Maya Angelou’s son said: ‘She lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. So, in the space of six months two beacons of justice and equality have flickered out. Continue reading “In the dark times will there also be singing?” → In the spirit that some solace may be found in poetry in these dark times, I offer a selection of poems or brief extracts – some have which have appeared in posts here before – which seem to offer meaning and hope they may reflect Berger’s stance of undefeated despair, offering not ‘a promise, or a consolation, or an oath of vengeance (forms of rhetoric he states are are for ‘the small or large leaders who make History’), but rather insists that ‘One was born into this life to share the time that repeatedly exists between moments, the time of Becoming.’. In an essay called ‘Undefeated Despair’, John Berger wrote of ‘Despair without fear, without resignation, without a sense of defeat.’ ‘However you look at it’, the Guardian editorialised a few days ago, ‘2017 offers a fearful prospect for America and the world.’ In the words of Paul Simon’s ‘American Tune’, I don’t have a friend who feels at ease when weighing the prospects for the year ahead. – Bertolt Brecht, motto to Svendborg Poems, 1939
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