I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Analysis Paper

Taysha Pulliam

Mr.Dearing 

English

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Analysis Paper

Published in 1969, I Know why The Caged Bird Sings is an autobiography about the early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. Angelou was born as Marguerite Annie Johnson was born in Saint Louis, Missouri on April 4, 1928 to Vivian Baxter Johnson and Bailey Johnson.  Her parents divorced when she was three years old. Later, her mother sent Maya and her brother to the small town of Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother.  This is probably where Maya first experienced the racial discrimination & oppression that was the way of life in the south.  Seven years young, while visiting her mother in Chicago, Maya was sexually molested by her mother's boyfriend.  Instead of telling her mother, she told her brother.  Later, she found out that an uncle had killed her attacker.  She felt that her telling had caused his death.  As a result, she did not speak for five years.  She began to speak again at thirteen years old, when she and her brother moved to San Francisco to live with their mother.  She enrolled at Mission High School, where she received a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco's Labor School.  That is where she probably picked up her progressive political views.   She dropped out of school to become the first Black female cable car conductor.  Later on, she returned to high school, but ended up pregnant during her senior year.  She named her son Guy.  She left home at sixteen years old to work as a waitress and a cook to support herself and her son.  In 1952, she married a Greek sailor named Anastasios Angelopulos and began her career as a nightclub singer. She changed her name to "Maya Angelou," a combination of her childhood nickname and a form of her husband's surname.  Even though her marriage ended, her singing career and beginning poetry enterprise began to takeoff.  

 Maya Angelou became one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time.  Angelou's autobiography is a relevant and straightforward look at racial prejudice in the United States during the 1930s and '40s. The caged bird set out as Angelou’s signature image, associating her most famous, autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1979). The image is not hers originally: it’s taken from Paul Laurence Dunbar, a popular early-20th-century African American writer and another one of Angelou’s influences. This poem can be read in relation to “Sympathy,” in which Dunbar describes the caged bird, a representation for a chained slave, bashing his bruised and bloody wings. Angelou revises “Sympathy” by interpreting a free bird beside a caged bird. Angelou’s use of elements within prison narrative, like the caged bird represents Angelou's confinement resulting from racism and oppression.  The following passage is the last stanza from the poem "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," written by Maya Angelou:

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

"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. It is an unnecessary insult."(Caged Bird and Manora 196)  What grabbed my attention was that Angelou is expressing that it is difficult to be a southern black girl, it is like a razor that threatens the throat; in other words self assassination. Then, if a southern black girl is aware of the difficulties of her life, it adds to the pain, it adds rust to the razor threatening the throat. Growing up in the south during segregation had to be hard, one would have to have tough skin especially young adolescents including Angelou herself.