Evaluation paper

Bhutia Lobsang

Professor Medsker

Eng 102

1/26/12

                Maya Angelou, one of the most respected modern American poets and authors has always inspired and intrigued me. Despite her miserable and prejudiced life, she resurrected herself among the rubbles and ashes of her cursed life like a phoenix and never looked back again. Her undying spirit of relentless fight and resistance against unjust system is the main reason I adulated her so much as my own country man (Tibetan) has been fighting for justice and human rights under the harsh and unreasonable occupation of Red Communist China Regime since 1959. Ironically the then chairman and founder of China’ s Communist Party, Mao Tse tung, himself has said, “where there is oppression there is resistance’. And the whole writing of Maya Angelou, especially her two poems, “ I Know Why The Caged Bird Sing” and “Still I Rise” are about her  struggle and ultimate victory against tyranny and inhuman treatment.

                Angelou composed her first and world –wide famous poem “ I Know Why the Caged Bird Sing” in 1969 which was a year after the end of Black American Civil Rights Movement. In this poem, she metaphor the free bird as white people enjoying the limitless freedom and opportunity and caged bird as black people who were deprived of all these freedom because of racial discrimination. In her poem,

                                                                The free bird leaps

                                                                On the back of wing

                                                                And float downstream

                                                                Till the current ends

                                                                And dips his wings

                                                                In the orange sun rays

                                                                And dares to claim the sky.

                               

                                                                But the birds that stalk

                                                                Down his narrow cage

                                                                Can seldom see through

                                                                His bar of rage

                                                                His wings are clipped and

                                                                His feet are tied

                                                                So he opens his throat to sing.

Angelou was an active member of civil rights movement and had struggled arm to arm with the great personality like Dr. Martin Lurther King and Malcom X. Years later, when they both are assassinated she went through a traumatic life for several years and give birth to this poem.

                 In the year 1993, she wrote yet another scintillating poem called “Still I rise” on the request of the then president Clinton request on his inauguration event. Even though she still  advocated  the rights of black people, the tones are not the same as with her first  poem. At the last stanza she wrote,

                                                                Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

                                                                I rise

                                                                Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

                                                                I rise

                                                                Bringing the gifts that my ancestor gave

                                                                I am the dream and hope of the slave

                                                                I rise

                                                                I rise

                                                                I rise

                She was trying to convey the message of the sense of victory and success of the black people after a dark tunnel of tumultuous years in their struggle for justice.