Showing posts with label Maya Angelou. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maya Angelou. Show all posts
Friday, September 24, 2021
Thursday, September 14, 2017
Maya Angelou and Still I Rise review / Perceptive portrait of legendary writer
Maya Angelou and Still I Rise review - perceptive portrait of legendary writer
SUNDACE 2016
Wednesday 27 January 2016 21.10 GMT
First published on Wednesday 27 January 2016 21.08 GMT
I
n the opening moments of Maya Angelou And Still I Rise, Hillary Clinton says it would be sad if the poet, thinker, and performer were only to be remembered for one thing, alluding to her classic work I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. But this documentary – put together by Bob Hercules and first-time film-maker Rita Coburn Whack, shows the varied, creative and often brutal back story that created one of America’s finest writers.
Starting with her upbringing in Stamps, Arkansas, the directors use Angelou’s unmistakably raspy narration to weave a story of abuse and neglect. Her mother leaves home, and a seven-year-old Angelou is raped by her mother’s new boyfriend when they are reunited in St Louis. After she tells people about the rape, her attacker is arrested and released before his corpse is found: seemingly, he has been beaten to death. It’s a moment that profoundly affects Angelou, who not only has to recover from the assault but also the fact that she now believes her words were responsible for his death. She decides not to speak for five years. The thought of Angelou being mute is shocking, not least because the film is so much better thanks to her voice. She could read a shopping list and make it thrilling.
Angelou finds her voice again when learning poetry – she reads every book in the black library. It’s from here we learn about her developing into a performer. She moves to San Francisco and begins a career onstage; she also gives birth to her son Guy Johnson (there’s an amazing moment when she describes losing her virginity and how underwhelming she found the whole process). Johnson steals the show. His accounts of their life together (and apart) are heartbreaking and tinged with anger. He talks about the time American entertainer Pearl Baileystopped his mother from being her understudy because she considered her too ugly. It was a decision that meant they’d be separated again because Angelou would have to go back on the road in a touring company. There’s a mix of fury and pride as he tells the story of Bailey getting a lifetime achievement award and choosing Angelou as the person who should give it to her. His mother did it happily, without mentioning the pain she had caused.
It’s their relationship that drives the action again as Angelou becomes involved in the civil rights movement, spending time with James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, as well as operating on the front lines of protest despite the dangers. Throughout everything she is outspoken and defiant, refusing to be cowed by past mistakes or indiscretions. The only times she is withdrawn is when discussing her son’s accident in Ghana, during which he broke his neck and almost died.
What Coburn Whack and Hercules do so well is capture Angelou’s power and elegance, which seems to have increased as she got older. An important figure throughout the 60s, in the 70s and 80s she developed into a maternal figure for black America, ushering in the period of Oprah and black female empowerment. It’s that longevity and creative drive that the film celebrates. No hagiography, it paints a portrait of a life lived to the full and dedicated to being true to oneself.
I was an overnight guest of Maya Angelou
| Maya Angelou |
I was an overnight guest
of Maya Angelou
Aaron Hicklin, editor-in-chief of Out magazine, recalls the time he drank whisky and talked Rabbie Burns with the great American poet and author
Aaron Hicklin
Sunday 10 January 2016 10.30 GMT
First came the instructions. It was recommended that I call her by her honorific, Doctor.
Also: she would typically retire to her bedroom no later than 10pm. I would be wise to follow suit. I can’t recall exactly why I – a mere journalist writing a profile for a Sunday paper – was invited overnight as a guest of Maya Angelou, but you don’t turn down such offers. So there I was, late in the summer of 2003, on a guided tour of her garden in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, hoping that my spotty research (I’d had to speed-read her autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, on the flight from New York) did not give me away as a dilettante.
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Maya Angelou quotes / 15 of the best
| Maya Angelou |
Maya Angelou quotes: 15 of the best
With the death of Maya Angelou, we lose the immense wisdom of the celebrated African American author, poet and civil activist. These quotes say a lot about who she was and what she stood for. Which other inspiring sayings would you like to share?
The Guardian
Trursday 29 May 2014
Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, 'I love you.' There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.
Try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
The love of the family, the love of the person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.
Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.
Nothing will work unless you do.
It's one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself, to forgive. Forgive everybody.
I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.
THE GUARDIAN
Biography of Maya Angelou
Saturday, May 31, 2014
Maya Angelou / I'm fine as wine in the summertime
'I'm fine as wine in the summertime'
She's 81 and growing frail, but revered author and poet Maya Angelou has lost none of her legendary wisdom and humour. In a rare interview, she explains why she's not about to retire
The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009
Maya Angelou: 'I plan to keep working as long as I can.' Photograph: Chris Buck
During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. "I had known a woman in Egypt who would not allow her servants to walk on her rugs, saying that only she, her family and friends were going to wear out her expensive carpets. Samia plummeted in my estimation."
Keen to challenge her host's hauteur, she walked back and forth across the carpet. "The guests who were bunched up on the sidelines smiled at me weakly." Soon afterwards, servants came, rolled up the rug, took it away and brought in a fresh one. Samia then came in and announced that they would be serving one of Senegal's most popular dishes in honour of Angelou: "Yassah, for our sister from America… Shall we sit?" And as the guests went to the floor where glasses, plates, cutlery and napkins were laid out on the carpet, Angelou realised the full extent of her faux pas and was "on fire with shame".
"Clever and so proper Maya Angelou, I had walked up and down over the tablecloth… In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity." Such is an example of the 28 short epistles that comprise Letter To My Daughter, Angelou's latest book.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Maya Angelou / Quotes I
QUOTES I
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; however, if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
"Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with deeper meaning."
"Someone was hurt before you, beaten before you, humiliated before you, raped before you; yet someone survived."
"I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver."
"Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style."
"The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry."
"Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns all clean."
"Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable."
"If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded."
"Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone."
"We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders."
"Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure."
"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go.""
"If you don't like somehting, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain."
"Nothing will work unless you do."
"You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it."
"Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it."
"Being a woman is hard work."
"Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway."
"I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass."
"A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."
"Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong."
"The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change."
"The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach."
"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
"No one wants to travel the dark road of pain alone. We all look to those who went before us for inspiration and hope."
Maya Angelou / No surrender
No surrender
Maya Angelou, poet, epigrammist and philosopher, has completed the final part of her autobiography - it covers the darkest hours of the civil rights movement. For someone in the inspiration and uplift business, it was a hard task. But she managed, as she always does
by Gary YoungeThe Guardian, Saturday 25 May 2002
Maya Angelou does not like to fly. So she made it to the West Coast from her home in North Carolina by bus. It is 2,152 miles as the crow flies. But she more than trebled the distance, coming via Toronto and the Rockies, on her five-week book and lecture tour. It's not a Greyhound, she quickly explains, but a serious tour bus, complete with a double bed, spare rooms, shower, cooking facilities and satellite television.
The first one she had, which she rented from Prince, had a washer-dryer, too. She herself designed the interior for the next one, which will be delivered before the end of the year. It will be decked out in kente cloth - the hand-woven fabric of Ghana's Ashanti region that has become an aesthetic signifier of black America's African heritage. In the thousands of miles that they have travelled around the country in this bus, she has bumped into Lauryn Hill and passed BB King.
Angelou gave up flying, unless it is really vital, about three years ago. Not because she was afraid, but because she was fed up with the hassle of celebrity. One of the last times she flew, her feet had not made it to the kerbside at the airport before an excitable woman started shouting her name. "It's Maya Angelou, Maya Angelou," she screamed incessantly.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
My hero / Maya Angelou by her publisher Lennie Goodings
My hero: Maya Angelou by her publisher Lennie Goodings
The late author's UK editor remembers a funny, gracious, kind, demanding, delightful and wise human being – and writer of one of the world's great autobiographies
by Lenni GoodingsThe Guardian, Thursday 29 May 2014
Maya Angelou and Lennie Goodings at Maya's 70th birthday party
Maya Angelou was one of the world's most important writers and activists. She lived and chronicled an extraordinary life: rising from poverty, violence and racism, she became a renowned author, poet, playwright, civil rights' activist – working with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – and memoirist. She wrote and performed a poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", for President Clinton on his inauguration; she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and was honoured by more than 70 universities throughout the world.
Maya Angelou / American titan who lived as though there were no tomorrow
| Maya Angelou, 1957 |
Maya Angelou: American titan who lived as though there were no tomorrow
America has not just lost a talented Renaissance woman and a gifted raconteur– it has lost a connection to its recent past
by Gary Younge in Chicago
The Guardian, Wednesday 28 2014
The first time I interviewed Maya Angelou, in 2002, I got hammered. What was supposed to have been a 45-minute interview in a hotel room near Los Angeles had turned into a 16-hour day, much of it spent in her stretch limo, during which we'd been to lunch, and she had performed. On the way back from Pasadena she asked her assistant, Lydia Stuckey, to get out the whisky.
“Do you want ice and stuff?” Stuckey asked.
“I want some ice, but mostly I want stuff,” said Angelou with a smile, and invited me to join her.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Classics corner 193 / I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou / Review
CLASSICS CORNER No 196
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou – review
The first volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography is proof of her inner strength and a testament to the power of words
Anita Sethi
Sunday 18 August 2013 00.03 BST
T
he caged bird "sings of freedom", writes Maya Angelou in her poem "Caged Bird" – a poignant recurring image throughout her work, as she eloquently explores the struggle to become liberated from the shackles of racism and misogyny. This evocative first volume of her six books of autobiography, originally published in 1969 (1984 in the UK), vividly depicts Angelou's "tender years" from the ages of three to 16, partly in the American south during the depression-wracked 1930s, while also offering timeless insights into the empowering quality of books.
The painful sense of being unwanted haunts her early childhood, for when Maya (then known as Marguerite) is three and her brother Bailey four they are sent to the "musty little town" of segregated Stamps, Arkansas wearing tags on their wrists addressed to "To whom it may concern", dispatched by their parents in California who had decided to end their "calamitous marriage". Living with their grandmother, "Momma", who owns a general merchandise store, and Uncle Willie, they suffer racist incidents both in the store and on the streets – nowhere feels safe. Sent to live with her mother, Maya endures the trauma of rape by her mother's lover Mr Freeman ("a breaking and entering when even the senses are torn apart"). After Freeman is murdered, she stops speaking, frightened of words.
Angelou finds her voice and a love of language and books through the help of Mrs Bertha Flowers who, writes Angelou, "has remained throughout my life the measure of what a human being can be". The memoir's absorbing emotional arc traces Angelou's growth from inferiority complex to confidence, finding the strength to tackle "the puzzle of inequality and hate" and be hired as the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco thanks to her "honeycomb of determination".
Challenging societal structures, Angelou also succeeds in altering literary structures, experimenting with the capabilities of memoir – indeed, her editor had dared her to "write an autobiography as literature". Told with a winning combination of wit and wisdom, this is a paean to the powers of storytelling to build bridges across divides, and heal what has been damaged.
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