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ON a crisp January morning 21 years ago, Maya Angelou became the second poet to be invited to recite her verses at a presidential inauguration in the United States.
Her only predecessor was Robert Frost, who contributed to ushering in the brief Kennedy era in 1961. Angelou’s performance in 1993 helped to insinuate her into the national consciousness. She was already a bestselling writer, but literary accolades do not necessarily translate into popular awareness.
Angelou’s appearance at William Jefferson Clinton’s first inauguration reinforced the impression of a break from the past, not least the dozen years under Ronald Reagan and George Bush the elder. Her poem, On the Pulse of Morning, envisaged the evolution of a more inclusive, more responsible America.
When asked many years later by The Guardian’s Gary Younge whether the Clinton presidency had lived up to her expectations, Angelou responded: “No. But fortunately there is that about hope … it is met sometimes, but never satisfied. If it was satisfied, you’d be hopeless.”
Angelou chronicled the African-American experience.
One of the hopes Angelou did not expect to be fulfilled in her lifetime was the election of an African-American president, which partly explains why she campaigned for Hillary Clinton’s nomination in 2008 — but subsequently became one of Barack Obama’s staunchest supporters.
Back in the 1960s, when she had debated the matter with Martin Luther King Jr, he had predicted (rather accurately) that it would take something like 40 years.
She had thought it would be closer to a century.
Her association with Dr King sprang from her activism in the civil rights movement through much of the ’60s, including an encounter with Malcolm X in Ghana in 1964, when she had agreed to return to the US to help him with his Organisation of Afro-American Unity. But he was assassinated in 1965. Three years later, on the day Angelou turned 40, Dr King was shot dead. She could not bring herself to celebrate her birthday for several years thereafter.
It was roughly at that point that Angelou was persuaded to start writing her extraordinary life story. The first and best known volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recounting her childhood, was published in 1969. The six volumes that followed over the years took her lyrical reminiscences only up to the age of 40.
Angelou was 86 when she died last week, but long before she established herself as a writer, she had been a dancer and a singer, a sex worker and a madam, an activist and an editor. She later made her mark with her acting, too, but Angelou will chiefly be remembered and celebrated for generations to come as writer, both for her lyrical prose and her simple yet profound verse.
She chronicled the African-American experience with inimitable eloquence, unflinchingly describing the ugliness of racial segregation, yet peppering her accounts with a warm humour.
There’s cause to suspect her most unforgettable aspect will turn out to be her voice, in every sense of the word — not just the warm, mellow, authoritative cadences delivered by her vocal cords, but also her knack for writing in a manner that invited universal attention and empathy. And while her gift for arresting utterance held audiences spellbound, her smile could light up any room and no space was too big for her infectious laughter to fill.
To cite an instance of her perceptiveness, she points out early in her first memoir: “In Stamps [the Arkansas town where she spent several of her early years] the segregation was so complete that most black children didn’t really, absolutely know what whites looked like. Other than they were different, to be dreaded, and in that dread was included the hostility of the powerless against the powerful, the poor against the rich, the worker against the worked for and the ragged against the well-dressed.”
As Younge noted last week, “with her passing America has … lost a connection to its recent past that had helped it make sense of its present”. The loss is compounded by the fact that Angelou distinctly shares one particular attribute with other recently departed elders, from Nelson Mandela and Pete Seeger to Tony Benn and Gabriel Garcia Marquez: the chances that we’ll see their likes again are infinitesimally small.
And for an epitaph one could cite a couple of stanzas from one of Maya Angelou’s best-known poems: “You may write me down in history/ With your bitter, twisted lies,/ You may trod me in the very dirt/ But still, like dust, I’ll rise … You may shoot me with your words,/ You may cut me with your eyes,/ You may kill me with your hatefulness,/ But still, like air, I’ll rise.”
Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2014
