Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel: ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” deals with her childhood and youth and her experiences as a woman of colour in the United States. The novel itself deals with religion, sexuality and the discovery of specific modes of African American artistic expression. One of the most formative experiences in this her rape at the hands of Mr. Freeman and his subsequent death. This paper will explore this the effect of this rape on Maya by examining her character before and after it and by considering how it comes to inform her own aesthetic project as particular form of African American suffering.
The opening sections of the novel deal with the narrator’s childhood, and feature several references to religious experiences that clear create the idea of a displacement in Maya’s life. In the first pages it is clear that the narrator is in no way in control of her own social identity and that this lack of control is played out within a religious setting. While witnessing an Easter service, the narrator recalls that as a young child she was firmly convinced that she was not originally white, but that; ‘a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my beauty, had turned me into a too big negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her teeth that would hold a number two pencil’ (2007, 5). Immediately at the start of the novel it is clear that a space exists between the mental liveliness and spirit of the narrator and the world in which she lives. This is made especially clear when she approaches the wife of a minister and becomes immediately quiet and nervous and aware of her own racial identity.
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"Maya’s Experience of Rape in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".
Maya’s experience of rape is clearly deeply traumatic, and it can be seen, in some way to stem from her feelings of being out of place and unsure in the world. In particular here initial descriptions of Mr. Freeman as a big brown bear suggest both a naivety and a danger in the way that she looked at him and thought about him before the rape. The metaphor works both to express something child-like in her view of the character, but to imbue him with a reals sense of danger and potentially aggressive force. Both of these are combined in the rape that he commits and his actions can therefore be seen to be something of a culmination of Maya’s earlier descriptions of him. After his death, most like at the hands of her uncle and her protector’s then it is clear that she feels both guilt and anguish, however it is nonetheless the case that is potentially transfigured as Maya discovers aesthetics in the novel’s final sections.
The maturation of Maya’s character can be seen to extend from the trauma of the rape in to an artistic quality by which she transforms her own suffering and that of those around her. Mrs. Flowers tells Maya, in a way which speaks to the disconnect which she feels as a child surrounded by racism and religious institutions, that; ‘language is man’s way of communicating with his fellow man and it is language alone that separates him from the lower animals…Words mean more than what we set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning’ (106). This conversation with Mrs. Flowers acts as a precursor for the explorations of poetry and aesthetics which take pace later in the novel and which come to form Maya’s acceptance and valorisation of her racial heritage, together with her increased understanding of her own artistic capabilities. These positions are combined memorably in the passage towards the end of the novel in which Maya begins to understand fully the nature of artistic expression, its role in the history of black people and its relationship to revelation and religion.
In this section, Maya asks asks, immediately after having understood the words of the poem she hears, ‘for the first time,’ the question: ‘Oh black and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or the empty pots made less tragic by your tales?’ (198). This affirmative question comes immediately after a declaration by the narrator in which she articulates the fact that she has reconciled her previous mistrust of her own African American identity and allowed herself to understand her entire character as following from her upbringing. This realisation necessarily involves her being able to relate to the history of African Americans as part of her own history and as one of which she can be intensely proud.
She writes, with reference to the history of African Americans that; ‘The depths had been icy and dark, but now a bright sun spoke to our souls. I was no longer simply a member of the proud graduating class of 1940; I was a proud member of the wonderful, beautiful Negro race’ (198). The moment in the reconciliation of Maya’s personality with her history is the affirmation of the link between preaching and poetry; between revealed religion and authentic aesthetic expression. In this sense, the suffering she has experienced earlier, begins to be redeemed. In this way, her rape earlier is potentially transfigured through art to be able to express the suffering of all African American individuals.
This moment represents the fulfilment of Maya’s personality through a recognition of a shared historical community and in doing so it sublates the previous descriptions of the stifling nature of institutional religion. This recognition is only made possible by poetry; that is by words which are spoken with a voice that is attentive to and is attempting to express human suffering in the world. This statement forms the climax of the novel’s thinking about aesthetics and it forms a direct contrast with the descriptions of religious ceremonies and institutions that precede it. In the same way, the suffering that she herself undergoes at the hands of Mr. Freeman, and that he himself under went at the hands of society is potentially transfigured. It would be fair to say, therefore, that while Maya’s naivety perhaps allows her to be raped, it is this same disjunction from the world that opens her aesthetic ability and the potential to have it transfigured into art.
