Maya Angelou :: essays research papers

when Maya Angelou was a young woman -- "in the crisp days of my youth," she says -- she carried with her a secret conviction that she wouldnt live past the age of 28. Raped by her mothers boyfriend at 8 and a mother herself since she graduated from soaring school, she supported herself and her son, Guy, through a series of careers and buoyed by an implacable intake to escape what might have been a half-lived, ground-down life of poverty and despair. "For it is hateful to be young, bright, ambitious and curt," Angelou observes. "The added insult is to be aware of ones poverty." In " dismantle the Stars Look Lonesome," her new collection of reflective autobiographical essays, Angelou gives no yet explanation for her "profound belief" that she would die young. "I was thirty-six originally I realized that I had lived years beyond my deadline and needed to rewrite my thinking about an early death," she recalls. "With that realizat ion life waxed sweeter. of age(predicate) acquaintances became friendships, and new clever acquaintances showed themselves more interesting. Old loves burdened with memories of disappointments and betrayals packed up and left town, leaving no forwarding address, and new loves came calling." Now 69, Angelou is the warm thing America has to a sacred institution, a high priestess of horticulture and love in the tradition of such distaff luminaries (all of them, hitherto, fresh) as Isadora Duncan and driblet S. Buck, with a bit of Eleanor Roosevelt and Aime Semple MacPherson thrown into the mix. "She was born poor and powerless in a land where/power is property and money is adored," the poet Angelou writes in tribute to another astonishing black woman of our time, Oprah Winfrey. " born(p) black in a land where might is white/and white is adored./Born female in a land where decisions are masculine/and masculinity controls." Angelous lifelong effort to escape and expose the "national, racial and diachronic hallucinations" that have burdened black women in America and replace them with a shining exemplar of power, achievement and generosity of spirit is as grand as she says it is, even if one suspects that in "real life" Angelou mustiness be a little hard to take. "I would have my ears modify with the worlds music," she writes, "the grunts of hewers of wood, the cackle of old folks sitting in the last cheer and the whir of busy bees in the early morning .