Girlfriend Laurie and I scooped up a couple of tickets to see Maya Angelou at the University of Western Ontario this week. The 83 year old poet, author and brilliant lecturer was a guest of the University’s Arts and Humanities program. At 83, she still goes on the road – literally – to share her remarkable story and her wisdom.
She was a lot funnier than I expected her to be. I had forgotten she did a movie with Tupac Shakur, Poetic Justice. She is a leader by example to the black community and well respected by everyone else. She performed a little rap for us, saying that she felt a kinship with good rappers because she always heard poetry in her head with a rap-like rhythm as she read it, so much so that she becomes impatient when she hears someone reading poetry in the monotone, overly-dramatic way we associate with poetry readings. In a nutshell, she’s a cool ol’ lady.
She spoke at UWO for exactly one hour about her upbringing and her life. She told us to make our lives bigger. “Whatever you’re doing, whatever type of life you’re living, make it bigger. This is all you get.” She told us to be a rainbow for somebody, to encourage them, to give them confidence.
Maya Angelou has written a few dozen books including six autobiographies. I purchased her first one at the show, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. “Fascinating” doesn’t quite cover it. When she was very young she and her little brother were sent away to relatives. At the ages of 5 and 3 they were put on a train with tags tied to their wrists and it was up to the ticket takers to read the tags and make sure they got to their destination, switching trains, waiting on platforms in strange cities. They lived with their Grandmother whose friends would often remark about how beautiful Maya’s brother Bailey was but how ugly Maya had turned out. Bailey would risk getting whipped with a switch by standing up for Maya and telling Grandma’s friends that their children were much uglier. Bailey would hug Maya later and tell her that they were wrong, she was beautiful too. That’s being a rainbow!
They had a “crippled” Uncle who taught them their times tables and how to read. While other little black children in Arkansas were basically left to fend for themselves, Maya and Bailey had family who insisted that they not grow up “ignorant”. The stories of racial inequality as told in her first autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, are so painful to witness including her Grandmother enduring the taunts of local white children because an illiterate white child still had more standing in the community than the black woman who ran the community store.
The essence of Maya Angelou’s talk at Western was to drive home the message that it’s up to all of us to help each other become all that we can be. We all have capabilities that need nurturing and sometimes a positive word from someone can make all of the difference. She talked about what she would have become if her Uncle hadn’t nurtured a love of learning and if her Grandmother hadn’t so willingly taken her and her brother in when her parents split up and decided they couldn’t cope with two small children. She was a poor, black, unwed pregnant girl at 16, looking fondly upon the powerful people entering the UN building in San Franscisco. She was also the world renowned poet who was invited by the UN to write and deliver a 50th anniversary poem to them. “How did I get here?”, she says she wondered, but she already knows.