Angelou and Cisneros Gender and Power

Sandra Cisneros's short story "Woman Hollering Creek," and "Still I Rise," a poem by Maya Angelou both make statements about race, power, and gender in America.

Cisneros is a Chicano author and Maya Angelou is an African-American author and poet.

Brief Text Summaries: "Woman Hollering Creek" touches on issues like domestic violence and the subjugation of women. "Still I Rise" celebrates black female identity in a culture that is both racist and sexist.

Although different in both form and intent, Cisneros's "Woman Hollering Creek" and Angelou's "Still I Rise" both reveal the intersections between race, power, and gender in American society.

Topic Sentence 1: The intersection between gender, race, and power is one of the most salient themes in both Cisneros and Angelou, as both write from the perspective of minority females.

Focus on Cisneros

Example 1: " ... there isn't very much to do except ... to watch the latest telenovela episode and try to copy the way the women comb their hair, wear their makeup," (p. 220).

Here, the author shows how women have few strong role models and thus only learn their position in society from male-dominated discourse.

Example 2: "Maximiliano who was said to have killed his wife ... when she came at him with a mop. I had to shoot, he had said -- she was armed," (p. 225).

Cisneros is uniquely concerned with the way patriarchy and sexism can lead to domestic violence.

Focus on Angelou

Example 1: "Does my sassiness upset you?"

For Angelou, it is important for women to be unafraid of being "sassy," confident, and sure of themselves.

Example 2: "Do you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes?"

Here, the poet uses the question form to antagonize those who would believe that women should be subservient, especially women of color.

Topic Sentence 2: Angelou capitalizes on the form of poetry to convey empowerment, using rhythm and rhyme schemes, whereas Cisneros employs the short story to encapsulate the systemic problem of misogyny.

Focus on Angelou

Example 1: "Does my sexiness upset you? / Does it come as a surprise / That I dance like I've got diamonds / At the meeting of my thighs?"

The rhyming here presents a powerful musicality that parallels the content of the lines about dancing.

Example 2: As Higashida (2011) points out, Angelou's popular success is based on her ability to use the universal form of poetry to show how patriarchy and colonialism share much in common in terms of abuse of power and systematic oppression.

Focus on Cisneros

Example 1: The form of story is integral to the culture of indigenous people, which is why Cisneros's chosen form is significant in establishing the main themes of the story (Garcia, 2014).

It is significant that Cisneros chooses the storytelling format, which traditionally had allowed women to have positions of power in their community as repositories of cultural knowledge and transmitters of that knowledge.

Example 2: "Was Cleofilas just exaggerating as her husband always said? It seemed the newspapers were full of such stories," (p. 225).

The author ironically juxtaposes the traditional art of storytelling to preserve cultural identity with the "stories" in the news about domestic violence.

Topic Sentence 3: The intent of both "Woman Hollering Creek" and "Still I Rise" is to encourage women of color to empower themselves and resist succumbing to patriarchal social norms.

On Cisneros:

Example 1: "Maintaining native cultures and traditions ... is a form of political as well as personal resistance to continuing oppression," (Garcia, 2014, p. 4).

The form and content of Cisneros's work is important for promoting the core goal of encouraging resistance and feminist critique.