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I Know why the cage bird sings. Three primary problems ?cage? Maya Angelou
in her autobiographical book I Know why the Caged Bird Sings. ...
... Know Why the Cage Bird Sings I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, a 1979 movie directed
by Fielder Cook, is a renowned autobiographical account of Maya Angelou?s ...
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. Three primary problems ?cage? Maya Angelou
in her autobiographical book I Know why the Caged Bird Sings. ...
... And the faint perfume from its chalice steals- I know what the caged bird feels ... how
the conditions of African Americans are similar to that of a cage bird. ...
... They didn't know why their parents sent them off ... A caged bird is meant to die in
the cage. The caged bird only outlet of freedom is to sing only to be startled ...
Submitted by girl954 on December 7, 2005
Category: Book Reports
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Three primary problems “cage” Maya Angelou in her autobiographical book I Know why the Caged Bird Sings. The most pressing of these issues was probably the fact that Maya lived in the highly segregated south. Another factor of her imprisonment was because Maya, also known as Marguerite, was a social outcast, with very few friends other then relatives. Finally, the main character was entrapped because of her unusual sexual exposure. Over all, the highly segregated life she led, her exclusion socially, and her sexual experience caught Ms. Angelou.
At the time, racism was predominate amongst southern citizens, this caused Maya’s displacement because she was a young black girl. Throughout the book Maya faces prejudice, and is constantly fighting this outrage, yet is not always winning. When Marguerite Johnson, nicknamed Ritie, was sixteen she became the first black streetcar operator in San Francisco, yet she had to fight incredibly hard to get her job. Even after she did her work schedule was impossible, and the free feeling she got from her job was turned against her at school, when she realized that her and her fellow classmates were, “on paths moving diametrically away from each other,” so even though Ritie had gotten the job she wanted, which she could have gotten easier had she been white, she was still an outcast. Furthermore, Marguerite, being Black, was denied certain necessities, such as not getting her toothache treated by the nearest dentist because he’d “rather stick my hand in a dog’s mouth then a nigger’s,” or have a white man imply that none of the black children were good enough to amount to anything on there graduation day. All in all, one reason Ms. Angelou locked up was because she was Black and lived in a time of segregation.
Although Marguerite loved what few friends she had, she was a misfit, the fact of which contributed to her confinement. On page four Johnson says, “If growing up is painful for a Southern...
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