Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an eye-opening autobiography detailing Maya Angelou’s childhood battles with racism and segregation. In the text, she recounts struggles such as going to sleep every night wishing she could wake up with Aryan features and also about her mistreatment as an African American girl. As a black writer during the Civil Rights Movement, her writings help readers shine a light on life under segregation; there is no one more qualified to speak on the subject rather than she who has lived through it. Maya Angelou writes to spread awareness of inequality in America and to show the privileged how tough life was under the hand of racism. Writing for a white audience, she utilizes rhetoric tools such as narration, allegory, and anthesis in order to use her experiences to deploy a feeling of empathy among readers to ultimately argue against segregation. In essence, the ‘caged bird’ that Angelou uses in the title is a parallel for herself; she is trapped in the cage known as prejudice, yet her strength prevails and she continues writing and demanding for equality among all Americans, thus the caged bird singing. Angelou doesn’t flat-out tell the reader what the cage bird symbolizes, rather she uses the symbol to represent an abstraction in addition to the literal meaning. In addition to allegory, Angelou also uses narration to show the audience how black lives have suffered enough racial inequality from whites and that it is time for a change. For example, an eye-opening experience for her is when she helplessly witnessed a group of entitled white kids harassing her grandmother. This experience also shows how different black and white lives were. The difference lies in the fact that white communities were basking in their own privilege, never having to worry about physical and verbal slander, yet black communities constantly had to endure slander and prejudice. By pointing out the injustice done on a daily, Maya Angelou achieves her purpose of enlightening her readers on the true colors of segregation.

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