"Life doesn't frighten me," she says. "Shadows on the wall, noises down the hall, life doesn't frighten me at all. Tough guys fight, all alone at night, life doesn't frighten me at all."
Maya Angelou's voice is warm not like the summers of adulthood, but those of my childhood when we'd run out to play unmindful of the heat, sweaty and happy. The summers when we’d wait for small things like watching a snail cross a patch of grass — living in a city and finding a snail was in itself magical. The summers when we’d get yelled at for spending too much time outside and we’d run inside to the best refuge after running around screaming “Catch him” — books.
It was late one night at work a couple of years ago that I discovered her spoken word albums. In a moment of frustration over what I was writing, I looked outside for inspiration and was pleasantly surprised when I found that Angelou had spoken word albums. Ever since then her voice has been my support. When she read Phenomenal Woman , I’d get an immediate boost of confidence, a feeling that even the greatest of odds can be conquered with almost nothing.
It is rare that a famous person's passing brings out extreme emotions in one, but ever so often comes a person like Angelou who can stir your emotions and lift you from any low that you are pushed to. When such an icon dies it is like losing a beloved family member, one who has held your hand through ups and downs.
Poetry never held my fancy, even though for the longest part of my short life so far I have tried to read everything I could lay my hands on. Poetry escaped me, more so because I associated it with the pretentiousness of the poet, talking down to the reader. I came across Angelou’s prose in the form of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, when I was 16, an angst-filled adolescent who believed and disbelieved in everything in the haste and effervescence that belongs to youth alone and rarely after.
Angelou, unlike other writers that I’d read at the time, had a voice that I felt spoke to me, as many other readers surely felt. When she said, “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude,” it was easy to connect it with teenage and the apprehension with which I approached life at the time, but the beauty of her writing is that it stays with you, grows as you grow, changes as you change.
Her poetry was different. When she read them, to me it was like a song — a song filled with the music of her words, her voice and the remarkable certainty of her delivery that she knew what she wanted. For a young woman, a better role model would be hard to find. Her poem I Rise was one that I held close every time something went wrong. “Out of the huts of history's shame, I rise. Up from a past that's rooted in pain, I rise.” I’d long held her writing up as the standard I want to reach, someday, but still find myself struggling to get there.
But what she wrote about expectations in Caged Bird will, I believe drive me to get there at some point: “Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.”
