“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”–Maya Angelou
When Maya Angelou died on May 28th, the praise for her life was broad. She influenced many through her work, from prose to poetry, acting to activism. If you notice the alliteration in that sentence, thank her.
The awards are too many to mention. After serving on committees for two US presidents, Ford and Carter, Angelou was the first poet since Robert Frost selected to deliver an inaugural poem, in 1993 for then president-elect Bill Clinton. That poem, On the Pulse of Morning, is among the more inspirational you’ll ever hear or read. Just a few lines make the point:
…You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Facedown in ignorance
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter…
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes,
And into your brother’s face,
Your country,
And say simply
Very simply
With hope–
Good morning.
Clinton later awarded her the National Medal of Arts and in 2010, President Obama honored her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in the same ceremony in which he honored President George H.W. Bush.
Angelou is perhaps best known for her series of seven autobiographical books, which began with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
But as I read and listened to the honors being mentioned, the speeches being made by everyone from President Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Michelle Obama, I thought there was something missing. A few things actually.
It wasn’t until I read a small story by someone less well known that I remembered what it was. There was no mention of her experience as a teenage prostitute.
Shocking? Perhaps. And perhaps those public figures honoring Angelou think that they are doing her memory a favor, speaking only of the positive, only of those parts of her life that are uncontroversial, that everyone will understand and react to with admiration.
I suspect Maya Angelou would disagree.
We don’t live in a sanitized world where people only have good, clear choices to make and good people always make the right ones. Sometimes, the choice is between walking into a burning building and falling down a hole. And sometimes, good people, with good intentions, make poor decisions they’ll regret later due to lack of information, circumstances, or emotional distress.
Maya Angelou was human. She made bad choices and lived with the consequences. Horrific things happened to her that affected her deeply. She was raped as a child and her rapist murdered, likely by her relatives. As a result of the trauma, she remained largely silent, speaking only to her brother, for close to five years.
Angelou wrote about these events, unflinchingly, exposing her deepest fears, tragedies, and mistakes onto the page for us all to see and learn from. It’s likely she just didn’t know any other way to write; perhaps she had no way of knowing how to cover things up, to write obliquely, to hide behind parable and metaphor. And, we’re all the better for it.
I don’t know the extent to which I, or most of us, can or have learned this lesson. In my column, my short story, or the novel I am working on, I don’t know how much of it I’ve absorbed. It seems so simple: expose yourself. Put yourself out there in whatever way works for you and let the world learn from it.
It sounds easier than it is. We all have personal and professional lives that make it difficult to want to reveal to others the most intimate and embarrassing aspects of our personal histories. We worry about how these things will come across to our friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. If we reveal too much, will we not get that next job or that next relationship? It’s all too common to exaggerate the risk.
But this is the value of literature, and indeed all art forms. The artist puts a part of herself on display for the world to see. The world reacts, empathizes, and learns. As a society, we grow and develop.
Indeed, this is how empathy develops, in a person as well as in a culture. We can learn facts in various disciplines, skills in many, but it is through literature and art that we develop empathy and learn the value and meaning of life and its many interconnections.
So, expose yourself; put a part of you out there for the world to see. What do you have to lose?
— This piece first appeared in the Porterville Recorder on July 9th, 2014.
Photo: Tony Fischer/Flickr