Maya Angelou's physical shifts from Stamps, Arkansas' Lafayette County Public School to the Village Gate's stage in Manhattan and from New York to a teaching podium at Cairo University in Egypt represent an intellectual and psychological voyage of considerable complexity—one of unpredictably erratic cyclic movement. She has chronicled some of this voyage in her three autobiographies: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,¹ a bestseller (in 1970), Gather Together in My Name (1974),² and Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976).³ Her final and most recent autobiography is The Heart of a Woman (1982).⁴ Additionally she has written three collections of poetry: Oh Pray My Wings are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975),⁵And Still I Rise (1978),⁶ and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie (1971).⁷

In addition to her full length creative writing there have been so many additional accomplishments characterized by so much variety one can only speak of them superficially in this limited space. After acting in “Cabaret for Freedom,” she wrote the original television screen play for “Georgia, Georgia.” Angelou performed on the stage in Genet's “The Blacks” and Sophocles’ “Ajax.” Additionally, she explored the parallels between American life and African tradition in a ten-part series she wrote for national television in the 1960's. She worked as a journalist for national newspapers in both Ghana and Cairo.

The public achievements have been many and yet the private motivation out of which her writing generates extends beyond the mere search for words as metaphors for purely private experience. Her poetry becomes both political and confessional. Significantly, one sees in her autobiographies a role-modeling process—one paradigmatic for other women—while not allowing the didactic to become paramount in either the poetry or the autobiographies.

Her autobiographies and poetry reveal a vital need to transform the elements of a stultifying and destructive personal, social, political and historical milieu into a sensual and physical refuge. Loneliness and human distantiation pervade both her love and political poetry, but are counterposed by a glorification of life and sensuality which produces a transcendence over all which could otherwise destroy and create her despair. This world of sensuality becomes a fortress against potentially alienating forces, i.e., men, war, oppression of any kind, in the real world. This essay examines the outlines of this transcendence in selected examples from her love and political poetry with additional thought and experience where relevant, from her autobiographical narratives.

Drawing upon her scholarly and gifted understanding of poetic technique and rhetorical structure in modern Black poetry, Ruth Sheffey explains:

Genuine rhetoric, indeed all verbal art, coexists with reason, truth, justice. All of the traditions of rational and moral speech are allied to the primitive idea of goodness, to the force of utterance. Because the past is functional in our lives when we neither forget it nor try to return to it, the new Black voices must reach the masses in increasingly communal ways, must penetrate those hidden crevices of our beings only recognizable and reachable by poetry.⁸

Professor Sheffey speaks here to the fundamental meaning and significance Black poetry holds for its private community. Sheffey's remarks could not more appropriately describe Maya Angelou's poetic voice in terms of motive, content and audience. By way of example consider:

“No No No No”

No
the two legg'd beasts
that walk like men
play stink finger in their crusty asses
while crackling babies
in napalm coats
stretch mouths to receive
burning tears
on splitting tongues
JUST GIVE ME A COOL DRINK OF WATER ’FORE I DIE
No
the gap legg'd whore
of the eastern shore
enticing Europe to COME
in her
and turns her pigeon shit back to me
to me
Who stoked coal that drove the ships
which brought her over the sinnous cemetery
Of my many brothers
No
the cocktailed afternoons
of what can I do.
In my white layed pink world.
I've let your men cram my mouth
with their black throbbing hate
and I swallowed after
I've let your mammies
steal from my kitchens
(I was always half-amused)
I've chuckled the chins of
your topsy-haired pickaninnies.
What more can I do?
I'll never be black like you.
(Hallelujah)
No
the red-shoed priests riding
palanquined
in barefoot children country.
the plastered saints gazing down
beneficently
on kneeling mothers
picking undigested beans
from yesterday's shit.
I have waited
toes curled, hat rolled
heart and genitals
in hand
on the back porches
of forever
in the kitchens and fields
of rejections
on the cold marble steps
of America's White Out-House
in the drop seats of buses
and the open flies of war
No More
The hope that
the razored insults
which mercury slide over your tongue
will be forgotten
and you will learn the words of love
Mother Brother Father Sister Lover Friend
My hopes
dying slowly
rose petals falling
beneath an autumn red moon
will not adorn your unmarked graves
My dreams
lying quietly
a dark pool under the trees
will not carry your name
to a forgetful shore
And what a pity
What a pity
that pity has folded in upon itself
an old man's mouth
whose teeth are gone
and I have no pity

[7, pp. 38–41].

Once having recited the horrors of capitalistic wars, Angelou continues her narrative focusing then on Black people who were forced, for economic reasons, to “stoke” America's coals. (Her money hungry “gapped legg'd whore” has never beckoned to Blacks as she did to Europe's ethnics promising them her materialistic fruits.) From the beginning, slavery defined a Black involuntary coming, one far alienated from an American dream. Rather than enjoy the dream, Black people were relegated to the drudgery of its death and destruction. Despite the fact that Black men stoked the coals that drew the ships which helped make the “gapped legg'd whore” possible, Black historical victimization cannot be undone “assures” the quasi-liberalized persona's voice in the third stanza. This voice echoes values dramatically different from any we have heard up to this point. For this reason its callousness toward the conditions of Black people dramatizes, all the more, its particular irony: the white liberal voice—whose consolation extends compassion only to the point at which it is convenient—no further.

Her metonymic body imagery functions as poetic referent further chronicling and transporting her prophetic message: stop the assault on Black people and recognize their humanness. As prophecy, her succinct assertions for change beginning with napalmed babies, epitomized in hopeful dreams as the poem progresses—disintegrate ironically into the decayed emptiness of an old man's “gaping mouth.”

Again Ruth Sheffey seems relevant to the reading of this poem when she explains:

The audience must read with the poet's passion and reason, must relish his poignant metaphors, his sensitive ironies, his percussive and passionate repetitions, his urgent suppressions, deletions, the wry humor of his syllables and understatements, his paradoxes—“Have you ever said ‘Thank you, sir’ for an umbrella full of holes?”

[8, p. 107]

The audience, a Black one, cannot help but understand the universal message this poem imports. It is a collectively oriented statement (the persona's “I” operating synecdochically for the group), and one of hope, although a hope which ironically collapses at poem's end.

A similar transcendence becomes the ironically complicated prophetic message in:

“The Calling of Names”

He went to being called a Colored man
after answering to “hey nigger,”
Now that's a big jump,
anyway you figger,
                    Hey, Baby, Watch my smoke.
From colored man to Negro.
With the “N” in caps
was like saying Japanese
instead of saying Japs.
                    I mean, during the war.
The next big step
was change for true
From Negro in caps
to being a Jew.
                    Now, Sing Yiddish Mama.
Light, Yello, Brown
and Dark brown skin,
were o.k. colors to
describe him then,
                    He was a bouquet of Roses.
He changed his seasons
like an almanac,
Now you'll get hurt
if you don't call him “Black”
                    Nigguh, I ain't playin' this time

[7, p. 43].

As significant referents, words are used to recreate a personal reality, but as verbal discourse they remain very close to the writer's understanding of truth. Maya Angelou brings to the audience her own perceptions of historical change and their relationship to a new reality. With the exception of a long ago Phyllis Wheatley, whose poems speak almost exclusively of God, nature and man, few Black artists have focused their poetic gifts outside history, politics and their changing effects upon Black life. Here Maya Angelou engages in this lifelong tradition of speaking to the concerns of a historical and political Black presence in World War II, Voter and Civil Rights legislation of the fifties; finally the Black Power Movement of the sixties—these events name only a few of the historical and political meanings the synecdochic imagery of naming has signalled for Blacks in America.

From the ancient African rituals which gave a child a name harmonious with his or her chi to the derogatory epithets coming out of slavery's master-servant relationships—naming has always held a reality redefining importance for black people. It has reached the level contemporarily with the recreation of one's destiny, an incantation signalling control over one's life. Hence the proliferation of African names with significant meanings.

But as the incantation and the structure of the poem's ideas have evolved out of historical and political event, one hears the old degrading epithets merging into new and more positive meanings.

Her title with its article “the” and preposition “of” signal, perhaps, the only formalizing or distancing aesthetic techniques in the poem. Her emphasis is primarily upon the concrete, the substantive movement back to a derogatory black history and a clearly assertive statement about a more positive future. Like many of the poems in this collection this one also works toward the notion of a positive identity, a positive assertion of what and who Black people have decided they will be. Her formal rhyme scheme here is one in which the initial stanzas rhyme the second and fourth lines, a rhyming pattern more constricted than in much of her other political poetry. Less metaphorical transformation and less abstraction appear in this poem, however, and while that makes it aesthetically less pleasing, its meaning speaks more directly to the concrete issues of evolving importance to Afro-American history and politics. The abstractions of metaphor perhaps then do not apply here.

A self-defining function continues in “When I Think about Myself.” We hear the definitions through a narrative she frequently uses in her poetry: Angelou's persona assumes an ironic distance toward the world. As a result, her relationship to the world loses its direct, i.e., literal quality. She steps back into this distance and can laugh at its characteristics no matter how politically and socially devastating:

“When I Think About Myself”

When I think about myself
I almost laugh myself to death.
My life has been one big joke.
A dance that's walked
A song that's spoke,
I laugh so hard I almost choke
When I think about myself.
Sixty years in these folks' world
The child I works for calls me girl.
I say “Yes Ma'am” for working's sake
Too proud to break,
I laugh until my stomach ache,
When I think about myself.
My folks can make me split my sides,
I laughed so hard I nearly died,
The tales they tell, sound just like lying,
They grow the fruit,
But eat the rind,
I laugh until I start to crying,
When I think about my folks

[7, p. 25].

Out of the emotional distance comes the paradox upon which the persona's insights rest. Dances are walked and songs are spoken reinforcing the dialectical nature of this paradox: an illusion which keeps sacrosanct a much more complicated racial reality.

Both Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry and Ruth Sheffey argue that the “I” of Black poetry is not a singular or individualistic referent but a symbol for the ideas of a Black collective. With that point in mind, it becomes clear she is ultimately talking about the ironies of economic oppression which trap Black people provided they allow them, i.e., the ironies to define them rather than their gaining the distance from the oppression to define themselves. An unending tension exists between haves and have-nots—one which the have-nots cannot allow to erupt into open violence and conflict (excluding certain mass exceptions like Watts, New York and Washington in the 1960's). Having once gained an understanding of the absurdity, the have-nots gain superiority in that ironic distance which creates freedom and a partial definition of one's superiority over the oppressor's blind myopia. Perhaps as a further illumination of the ideas generating this poem, Maya Angelou told an illustrative story to George Goodman, Jr. who was reviewing her autobiography, Caged Bird for the New York Times ⁹. He remarked that Angelou consistently expressed the sickness of racism like a thread running throughout all her work. Her reply took an illustrative form as she told him about an elderly Black domestic worker in Montgomery, Alabama during Martin Luther King's 1955 Montgomery bus boycotts. The worker solemnly assured her white employer that in spite of the boycotts, she had instructed her husband and children to ride the daily busses. Afterwards, behind the closed, protective doors of the kitchen the employer's liberal, more realistic daughter asked the Black woman why she needed to hide the truth (the Black woman had, in reality, told her family to absolutely stay away from public transportation busses in Montgomery.) The elderly maid (a prototype not divorced from this poem's persona by any flight of the imagination) told her, “Honey when you have your head in a lion's mouth, you don't jerk it out. You scratch him behind the ears and draw it out gradually.” Like the conclusion of the woman's story, this persona speaks a similarly paradigmatic truth in all its ironic and varied implications. Psychological distance becomes the persona's mightiest weapon, a distance born of years of slowly drawing one's head out of the proverbial lion's mouth.

While Maya Angelou's political poetry suggests the irony of emotional distantiation by using bodily imagery as her objective correlative, her love poetry almost equally as often employs this series of patterns to capture an image, an instant, an emotional attitude. Moreover, fantasy often rounds out the missing parts of the human whole when reality fails to explain fully what she sees. Here in the following poem, “To a Man” she explores this mystery, this distantiation from the understanding of a man:

“To a Man”

My man is
Black Golden Amber
Changing.
Warm mouths of Brandy Fine
Cautious sunlight on a patterned rug
Coughing laughter, rocked on a whirl of French tobacco
Graceful turns on wollen stilts
Secretive?
A cat's eye.
Southern, Plump and tender with navy bean sullenness
And did I say “Tender?”
The gentleness
A big cat stalks through stubborn bush
And did I mention “Amber”?
The heatless fire consuming itself.
Again. Anew. Into ever neverlessness.
My man is Amber
Changing
Always into itself
New. Now New.
Still itself.
Still

[7, p. 6]

If indeed this poem talks about a man and not some more hidden and abstract object we cannot define, then “To a Man” explores the mysteries of a baffling and emotionally distant human being through a persona's fantasy, her worshipping recreation of an artifice rather than of any more luminous understanding of his many selves. And while she does not name him in the poem and he could be reminiscent of any of the men she knew, her description of him evokes a picture of Make, a South African freedom fighter and the man who became her second husband. She recounts this marriage and its end in her final autobiography, The Heart of a Woman. Whether a husband or not, his mystery constitutes her poem's ostensible statement, through her persona's particular visual gestalt, i.e., approach. The persona's failure to (penetrate) her subject's overpreoccupation with his own personal style as a wall against intimacy becomes a source of the poem's interesting aesthetic and emotional tension. Her subject cannot be captured, i.e., “understood” and he is cut off from the persona's concentrated engagement by this barrier that she creates—his personal style. The word choices she selects to describe or rather, guess at what she comprehends about him are words suggesting the altering and varying nature of his physical and psychic characteristics. She looks at him seeing only the qualities of an ambiance he creates around himself through the deliberateness of his studied poses. He moves “Cat like.” She images his moving dynamism concretely in “woolen stilts” which both regalize and thrust him backward spatially and temporally to a time when he could have been a royal African chieftain dancing on tall stilts.

She magnificently combines the auditory, tactile and visual into the imagery of his “… coughing laughter rocked on a whirl of French tobacco” graphically capturing what we take to be—given all she has said before—still, his moving and elegant dynamism. His sight, sound, smell—even his smoke concretized in French rather than in some ordinary domestic. This is no:

“Country Lover”

Funky blues
Keen toed shoes
High water pants
Saddy night dance
Red soda water
and anybody's daughter

[6, p. 4]

A man of expediency, the “Country Lover,” clearly he is not the sophisticated and subtle, previous “amber” man.

Like a musical recitative, she repeats in the earlier “To a Man,” descriptions framed in rhetorical questions drawing attention all the more to his stolid mystery. In using the repeated rhetorical questions, she counterposes her technique against the traditional way in which modern Black poets use repetition. Modern Black poets use repetitious phrasing for emphasis, clarity and to signal an end to complexity. In Angelou's work the rhetorical questions increase tension and complexity and build upon his opaque mystery. Why?

Some of the explanation might lie in the fact that writers often repeat the issues and conflicts of their own lives throughout much of their art until either concrete conditions or the art brings insight and resolution. Witness Richard Wright's unending preoccupation with the Communist Party's orthodoxy and demanding control over his work, or Gwendolyn Brooks' mid-career, philosophical redirection after attending the Fisk University Black Writer's Conference. The seeds for a similar obsession lie in her autobiographies and project into Angelou's poetry. She berates herself for her overly romantic ability to place men on pedestals, to create a rose-colored fantasy around them at a distance only to later discover her cognitive error. Her relationships with men in Caged Bird and Gather Together have this fantasy quality where she overelaborates their personalities in her own mind confusing their concrete behaviors with her day-dream. She does this, sometimes out of her own unconscious desire for their unconditional love—wanting almost a symbiotic object-subject attachment to them. In the final analysis, each of these men exploits her because all are morally and characterologically flawed in ways her own emotional neediness causes her to miss as her fantasy life recreates their personalities. One lover, temporarily stationed close to her home in San Diego, uses her companionship while his naval assignment lasts then leaves her. He returns to his wife. A fast living “sugar daddy” cons her into prostitution to “help” him with a non-existent gambling debt. Again concrete conditions force her into looking beneath the surface he presents. She finds that her “giving” provided pretty dresses for his wife. Nothing more! Finally, when at last she marries, and her fantasies tell her she has found nirvana in the white-picket-fenced cottage she has dreamed of she learns its hidden price: she will become prisoner rather than mistress of the house and husband.

In her autobiographies, Angelou presents her flaws head-on not once rationalizing away her own complicity or the details of her own mistakes. The irony and wisdom typical of autobiographies written retrospectively bare the exposed nerves, the humiliating flaws of her experience. But this brutal honesty seems part and parcel for Black female autobiography. A Black psychological self gets created who for all its painful error and insight reveals an enduring depth and strength—one at which readers marvel. Mary Burgher confirms the idea when she says:

Doubtless Maya Angelou … and other Black women autobiographers write about experiences more varied, much harsher, and at times more beautiful than most others encounter. They create incisive and sensitive images of womanhood that remain meaningful to all Black women who struggle to come to terms with the hardships and violence just beneath the surface in the Black experience. The Caged Bird, like other autobiographies of Black women, is a valuable resource to the understanding of Black women because it reveals and symbolizes the Black woman's daring act of remaking her lost innocence into invisible dignity, her never-practiced delicacy into quiet grace, and her forced responsibility into unshouted courage.¹⁰

Throughout Stephen Butterfield's study of Black autobiography he repeatedly voices statements paralleling Mary Burgher's observation on the important role Black autobiographers play as explorers and purveyors of the Black feminine self and its community.¹¹ Even Maya Angelou herself reinforced this idea in a newspaper interview when she said:

“Now I'm going to do what I can to help clear the air in Black America, because as I see it, that's what needs to be done. I'm going to write … Caged Bird …

[Goodman, p. 28]

Maya Angelou did in her autobiography just what she promised, she did what “needed to be done,” in all its complexity. Given the nature of autobiographical rationalization which critics like Roy Pascal and Stephen Butterfield have pointed out in their work, one which demands a certain tendency to under or overemphasize certain elements for the sake of a unified work of art—despite her compelling honesty—still her autobiographies cannot help but suggest parallels—speculative at best between her poetic themes and her autobiographical. These themes, nevertheless, parallel the pattern of fantasy motivated attachment to men as saviors then the inevitable consequent disillusioning disappointment which one finds both in the autobiographical stories of her life and in the themes of her confessional love poetry.

Erik Erikson provides another possible explanation, and while not an infallible one, it might contribute to further understanding the sources of her romanticism. His discussion of the intricate psychoanalytic dynamics of ego experience sheds some light on Angelou's yearning for undifferentiated attachment to men. First he must ascertain the social nature of our worlds—worlds which include the egos of those most significant to us when he explains:

They (the egos of others) are significant because on many levels of crude or subtle communication my whole being perceives in them a hospitability to the way in which they order their world and include me—a mutual affirmation, which can be depended upon to activate my being as I can be to activate theirs.¹²

Unfortunately for Angelou, her fantasy of this ego interaction or mutuality is often inaccurate where her perception of men is concerned. She perceives them as the complement of her ego dynamic but far too overwhelmingly so. In other words, she becomes too attached to them too quickly before giving them space and time to prove that, indeed, they are her complements. She is repeatedly hurt by men who are far more experienced than she, who are far more able to see her neediness and exploit it before she is able to see it in herself.

The narcissistic male is always the one most attractive to her and the one most mysterious—ultimately he will always turn out to be the man most destructive to her and her capacity to invest too much of her dependency and need in him too quickly. The wonder which underlies her perceptions in “To a Man” are not surprising provided one has read her autobiographies and identified this common psychic pattern she recurringly illustrates. What she identifies as mystery—and wonder are part of the guardedness and distance he sustains—keeping her always at a safe length away from himself. One would expect anger from her rather than wonder.

Anger would have been more appropriate toward his self-protection and yet she does not express anger. Perhaps also the absence of anger affirms the passivity Lillian Arensberg has seen in Angelou's writing.¹³ We must, however, not overlook another important factor which accounts for what may be occurring here from an aesthetic and artistic rather than a purely psychic point of view. Her persona's opportunity to draw attention to it—rather than to her male subject. Thus, in doing this, she can draw upon her female audience's alleged universal bafflement with the mysterious male psyche. The poem would be better called “To a Woman” in that case, if one accepts this less direct reading of the poem.

Again fantasy subsumes reality in the distance-keeping strategy which provides space for her imaginative elaborations:

“Remembrance”

Your hands easy
weight, teasing the bees
hived in my hair, your smile at the
slope of my cheek. On the
occasion, you press
above me, glowing, spouting
readiness, mystery rapes
my reason.
When you have withdrawn
yourself and the magic, when
only the spell of your
love lingers between
my breasts, then, only
then, can I greedily consume
your presence

[7]

She infuses bodily imagery with the poem's primary work as vehicle of expression concluding finally with the notion that her subject's residual, i.e., his memory (her fantasized version of him) is far preferable to his actual presence. Again full physical and psychological mutuality are missing, and she can only experience him within her own grasp of what she rounds but he is in her mind rather than in his physical reality after “the occasion” as she so euphemistically alludes to sex. The bees hived in her hair where mystery rapes her signals her chaos, her madness and anxiety toward his impending physical engulfment.

Her persona's fear of physical overwhelming and her wish for estrangement from him counterpoints her earlier “To a Man.” What seemed the male's distance keeping desire in the former poem becomes what the female persona wants in the second. In either case, the issue in both is the mistrust of intimacy because men are perceived as engulfing rather than mutual. She desires to maintain psychic boundaries fearing her own vulnerability while paradoxically wanting trusting attachment to men.

Finally, she again raises the recurring psychic remoteness idea, the ambiguity which here defines her only possible conception of love's nature within a changing and undecipherable world:

“On Diverse Deviations”

When love is a shimmering curtain
Before a door of chance
That leads to a world in question
Wherein the macabrous dance
Of bones that rattle in silence
Of blinded eyes and rolls
Of thick lips thin, denying
A thousand powdered moles,
Where touch to touch is feel
And life a weary whore
          I would be carried off, not gently
          To a shore,
          Where love is the scream of anguish.
          And no curtain drapes the door

[7, p. 18].

The hyperbolic thousand moles further disguising the already cloaked ambiguous nature of things and the door with its drapes torn away all evoke a naked death. Angelou well could be allusively playing here with the Neo-Classical synonymous relationship between death and consummation.

Furthermore, love as intellectual labyrinth becomes the poem's underlying motif, pervading its progressive movement of ideas. Only at poem's end does the resolution come to this Medea-headed series of ambiguous images synecdochically representing love. In the last line, love as the scream of anguish—although terrible in itself—at least becomes something more distinct than all of the varying forms it has taken up to this point.

While Maya Angelou's poetry may not have taken us into every nook and cranny of her long and complex life starting with the Lafayette County Training School—its various movements and insights have nonetheless helped us understand the themes, the issues even some of the conflicts which have pervaded her inner life. Thus, while we could not share the objective events in all their entirety (the autobiographies have helped to partially illuminate these), her various poetic stances have given us some lead into parts of that subjective voyage.

Her autobiographies, the clues they give suggest a self image which as Sidonia Smith points out in her essay, “The Song of the Caged Bird: Maya Angelou's Quest after Self-Acceptance,” provides Angelou a strategy for attempting to answer her fundamental and basic questions about the self.¹⁴ Moreover, that self determines the pattern of her writing as Smith also summarily points out. Her autobiographies do indeed present a dislocated self image. But that self image becomes a new and assertive one as she transcends the singular self through a wide and compassionate direct assertion of her statements against political injustice. Her love poetry—on the other hand—suggests her relationship to a world which can be stultifying, mystifying and oppressive, but one she will not allow to become these things and overwhelm her. The voyage through her life has not been filled with soft and pliable steps each opening into another opportunity for self acceptance. Her voyage has instead been anything but that and yet she has filled those voids with fantasy, song, hope and the redefinition of her world's view through art.

Notes

1. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Random House, New York, 1970.

2. ———. Gather Together in My Name, Bantam Books, New York, 1974.

3. ———. Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Harper and Row, New York, 1976.

4. ———. The Heart of a Woman, Random House, New York, 1982.

5. ———. Oh Pray My Wings are Gonna Fit Me Well, Bantam Books, New York, 1975.

6. ———. And Still I Rise, Random House, New York, 1978.

7. ———. Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Diiie, Random House, New York, 1971.

8. R. Sheffey. “Rhetorical Structure in Contemporary Afro-American Literature,” College Language Association Journal, XXIV:1, p. 97, 1980.

9. G. Goodman, Jr. “Maya Angelou's Lonely Black Out-Look,” The New York Times, p. 28, March 24, 1972.

10. M. Burgher. “Images of Self and Race in Autobiographies of Black Women,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, R. P. Bell, B. J. Parker, and B. Guy-Shefftall (eds.), Anchor Books, New York, 1979.

11. S. Butterfield. Black Autobiography in America, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1974.

12. E. Erikson. Identity, Youth and Crisis, W. W. Norton, New York, p. 219, 1968.

13. L. Arensberg. “Death as Metaphor of Self, in ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’” Journal of the College Language Association, 20, pp. 273–291, December 1976.

14. S. Smith. “The Song of the Caged Bird: Maya Angelou's Quest after Self-Acceptance,” Southern Humanities Review, 7, pp. 365–375, Fall 1973.