Know Why the Caged Bird

¶ … Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the autobiography of Maya Angelou, and tells the story of how she and her brother grew up largely in the rural South. While living with "Momma" (their grandmother) after their parents basically abandon them, both Maya and Bailey experience a great deal of racism. The book also recounts many other notable events both positive and negative in Angelou's life, including her rape at the age of eight years old and her relative success at high school (and street car conducting -- a first for an African-American female) in San Francisco. More than simply recounting the details of her life, however, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is Maya Angelou's expression of herself during the period of her childhood and adolescence; it describes not only how she grew up in an external essence, but also what she grew into internally, and why she grew into it.

The story is essentially about the fragility and, paradoxically, the endurance of the human spirit. Angelou is able to transmit a real feeling of the pain and damage that was caused by many incidents and the overall system of racism in Stamps, Arkansas, and at times in the book it appears as though she will not make it through intact, or perhaps even alive. At the same time, Angelou is quite clearly trying to communicate that despite the immense hardship she faced, through proper guidance from herself and at key moments form other individuals, she was able not to escape the bounds of her race and her gender, but to embrace these things for what they are to her and reject the outside world's low opinion of African-Americans, women, and of herself specifically. Ultimately, she is trying to communicate the sense of beauty and genius that exists in everyone, no matter how denigrated.

Maya Angelou has several points in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Her primary point involves both the strength and the beauty in inherent to the human spirit. Despite all adversity, her book and life story stresses, greatness can still be accomplished. It is impossible to read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings without a sense of what the girl in the book would become; not only does the public already have knowledge of the name emblazoned on the front of the book, but the book was also necessarily written from the perspective of greatness having already been achieved. In this way, Angelou is also making a point about what telling a life story means, and the effect it has on the truth and on one's self-image. In some ways, the book appears to be a sort of healing process for Angelou, while at the same time the book appears to be primarily directed towards others -- Angelou is teaching a lesson about how meaningful a life can be, despite -- or even because of -- the level of pain so many lives (especially for minorities and women) entail.