Yes, Susan Brownmiller’s seminal book, Against Our Will would tell us the history and statistical analysis of rape and that would be shattering on another level altogether, but what Angelou did was different. Maya Angelou was one of those women, those truth-tellers, those passionate, unwavering voices who knew the only thing that stood between us and freedom, us and equality, us and wholeness was our second-class status, the silencing of us because of our sex, the reinforcement of the social constructs of gender that were fake and dangerous and allowed men to treat us like we weren’t fully human.Īngelou was the first to shred the veil between euphemism and raw reality on the topic of rape. We were schooled by radical women like Angelou and Audre Lorde, Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich and Toni Morrison, Gerda Lerner and Julia Penelope, Jill Johnston and Pat Parker, Toni Cade Bambara and Alice Walker, Germaine Greer and Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone and Angela Davis.īlack and white, straight and lesbian, middle class and poor, educated and self-taught they were that army of brilliant, courageous women we had never had behind us as girls, voices whose breadth and depth, range and strength would bolster us and send us forward to storm the next round of patriarchal battlements.

Angelou was not Austen.Īngelou’s was one of the first of the Second Wave feminist memoir to open that secret door of telling that became the foundation for that first generation of lesbian activists of the late 70s and early 80s–myself among them. Nevertheless, with its open discussion of lesbianism and prostitution and depictions of explicit sexuality, it was a far cry from most of our other assignments. It had been published years earlier and was an international best-seller by then and Angelou’s was a well-established voice. I read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in college, in a Women’s Studies course when I was the same age she was when the memoir cuts off–17. We had thought it was our place alone and now we knew there were others, had been others all along. So when Angelou took us there–whether we’d been prepared or not–we were different at the end of it. That was, for many female readers and readers of color, a place we knew well, a place of secrets and lies, torments and too-little retribution. You feel bruised and torn after reading it, because it has taken you deep into another place, a hidden place.

Her early work is raw and uneven, but incredibly compelling. Angelou was prolific and her work was as varied as it was fervid. She wasn’t a complex writer, but her work had a realness and deceptive simplicity that made it highly accessible to a wide readership. Some writers have that ability to touch places in us that few are able to touch.

She was that vibrant, that rich, that fervent, that knowing. She staked that claim for many women, from her “adopted” daughter, Oprah Winfrey, to American high school students reading her for the first time. When I read the breaking news alert that she had died, I felt a frisson of loss as if she were my own family–she and her work had always been that much of a steady presence in my life, even if she was on its periphery. The world of second-class-ness that never leaves us, no matter how accomplished or famous or revered one is.Īnd she was all of those things, she was all of them. There was always that blurred dark edge to every tale that is the line most women walk between the world outside and the world inside.

Angelou had a deep voice and a big, easy laugh and those two things accompanied all her telling, soothing some of the truths she exposed. I rarely heard her speak or give an interview without tears coming to my eyes because she never spoke of easy things, even when she was telling a funny story, which was often, because humor and sadness were of a piece for her both in life and in her writing. Maya Angelou always made me feel just a bit cut open. She was 86.Īngelou wrote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou, poet, memoirist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, Calypso singer and dancer in gay clubs in 1950s San Francisco, part of a dance duo with Alvin Ailey, colleague and civil rights worker with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., best friend to James Baldwin, first black Inaugural poet, friend and supporter of lesbians and gay men before it was trendy or popular and when it most mattered–that Maya Angelou died Wednesday morning, May 28 at her home in Winston-Salem, NC. And Still I Rise: A Tribute to Maya Angelou

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