Going Against the Grain about an Icon
I expect this post will make some people angry. Sorry.
Yesterday Maya Angelou died at her home in North Carolina. I heard an interview with her by Terri Gross, whom I always liked to hear even though her world view rubs me the wrong way (and she really is sycophantic about some celebs she talks to). It was an old interview, from 1986. I was driving in the car to do my mother's grocery shopping, after having taken her to the doctor.
Maya Angelou was 86. My mother is 86, and dying; perhaps not soon, but she is going down hill from cancer. The contrast could not be more startling in my mind
I heard Maya Angelou speak back around 2000 at, as I recall, a SACS conference, and that was a pleasure, although I would have rather SACS charged less for its conferences (which are out of sight) than get high end speakers like Angelou to speak at them. At any rate, she did show a wisdom of age. I have taught her poem "My Arkansas" in Intro to lit and read part of her first book in an anthology. I have seen her on Oprah, who also fawned rather a bit. I guess Oprah will take her place as whatever it was she represented.
So, Angelou has been an extremely marginal figure in my life, and there's a reason: I found her more fiction than fact. Some of the things she claims to have done just don't entirely add up, and to support my argument, I refer to John McWhorter's article in the New Republic. I have read other of McWhorter's work on language, so I am not randomly picking out writers. And he is black. The article is well worth reading as a literary analysis, or more, an analysis of a literary figure.
Angelou (not her real name, by the way) always happened to be in the absolutely right place at the absolutely right time. However, I will not deny she was a powerful wordsmith and sometimes storyteller; I am just not sure why she was given such credence other than, culturally, she was in the absolutely right place at the absolutely right time to hit the pop literary scene as a black feminist. But she hardly seems a moral authority (especially having been a pimp and a hooker herself in her younger years). But I digress, before this sounds like a racist rant, which it is not.
Anyway, I can't help but compare her to my mother, who lived her 86 years quite differently, in service to people she loved rather than in service to an image she created. And if anyone would accuse me of racism, I could compare her to the millions of loving African American women who have "held up the sky" of our culture. And I can't help but think of my "friends" on Facebook who posted sweet things about her, having little knowledge of her and none personal. (I did, too, so I'm being hypocritical here). And I can't help but think that the world sometimes (often) honors the wrong people, if by the world we say the media, which seems to be the greatest servant of the "world" in the Biblical sense, and the primary purveyor of its messages.
Yesterday Maya Angelou died at her home in North Carolina. I heard an interview with her by Terri Gross, whom I always liked to hear even though her world view rubs me the wrong way (and she really is sycophantic about some celebs she talks to). It was an old interview, from 1986. I was driving in the car to do my mother's grocery shopping, after having taken her to the doctor.
Maya Angelou was 86. My mother is 86, and dying; perhaps not soon, but she is going down hill from cancer. The contrast could not be more startling in my mind
I heard Maya Angelou speak back around 2000 at, as I recall, a SACS conference, and that was a pleasure, although I would have rather SACS charged less for its conferences (which are out of sight) than get high end speakers like Angelou to speak at them. At any rate, she did show a wisdom of age. I have taught her poem "My Arkansas" in Intro to lit and read part of her first book in an anthology. I have seen her on Oprah, who also fawned rather a bit. I guess Oprah will take her place as whatever it was she represented.
So, Angelou has been an extremely marginal figure in my life, and there's a reason: I found her more fiction than fact. Some of the things she claims to have done just don't entirely add up, and to support my argument, I refer to John McWhorter's article in the New Republic. I have read other of McWhorter's work on language, so I am not randomly picking out writers. And he is black. The article is well worth reading as a literary analysis, or more, an analysis of a literary figure.
Angelou (not her real name, by the way) always happened to be in the absolutely right place at the absolutely right time. However, I will not deny she was a powerful wordsmith and sometimes storyteller; I am just not sure why she was given such credence other than, culturally, she was in the absolutely right place at the absolutely right time to hit the pop literary scene as a black feminist. But she hardly seems a moral authority (especially having been a pimp and a hooker herself in her younger years). But I digress, before this sounds like a racist rant, which it is not.
Anyway, I can't help but compare her to my mother, who lived her 86 years quite differently, in service to people she loved rather than in service to an image she created. And if anyone would accuse me of racism, I could compare her to the millions of loving African American women who have "held up the sky" of our culture. And I can't help but think of my "friends" on Facebook who posted sweet things about her, having little knowledge of her and none personal. (I did, too, so I'm being hypocritical here). And I can't help but think that the world sometimes (often) honors the wrong people, if by the world we say the media, which seems to be the greatest servant of the "world" in the Biblical sense, and the primary purveyor of its messages.
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