The Odyssey of Struggle and Survival in Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman
Autobiography the most commonly used term for such life writing, thus described writing being produced at a particular historical juncture, the early modern period in the West with its concept of the self-interested individual intent on assessing the status of the soul or the meaning of public achievement.The interplay of different voices, the representation of the past as a complex terrain and the ability to distinguish the author from the people who surround him are some of the features of autobiographical writing. Successful autobiographers utilize all the devices of skilled narration such as accuracy and impartiality. It is worthwhile to note that although the character and the narrator share the same name, they do not share the same time and space. Earlier the defining feature of autobiography was the accord between the writer and the reader, whereby the reader was obliged to accept the writing as truth and not as fiction. In other words, the traditional conception of autobiography was founded on the humanist perception of narrative as a faithful reflection of unconditional ‘truth’ or ‘reality.’ However the contemporary critical perception of autobiography acknowledges the impossibility of documenting true facts pertaining to human life. It looks upon life and its writing as textual discourses, and subjectivity as a state of ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being.’ In this sense, autobiography, a subjective, interpretive fiction of life, comprises a ceaseless quest for self-knowledge.
The autobiographical text participates vertically in memory and horizontally in live experiences. John Paul Eakin in Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self Invention observes:
Adventurous twentieth century autobiographers have shifted the ground of our thinking about autobiographical truth because they readily accept the proposition that fiction and the fiction making process is a central constituent of the truth of any life as it is lived and of any act devoted to the presentation of that life. Thus memory ceases to be for them merely a convenient repository in which the past is preserved inviolate, ready for the inspection of retrospect at any future date. They no longer believe that autobiography can offer a faithful and unmediated reconstruction of a historically verifiable past; instead; it expresses the play of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness. (5)
Self-narration has been a longstanding practice in the history of mankind. As part of the humanist tradition, life narratives have served to centralize and subjectivize the individual, legitimizing the authority of the author to narrate lived experiences. Combining novelistic modes with vignettes of African American life, dashes of social historiography, travel writing and blues, Maya Angelou's oeuvre presents a formally variegated account of a woman's life in an attempt to restructure African American women's history. A close probe into the autobiography of Maya Angelou reveals that the distant land she refers to is the interior self and the journey becomes a motif of self-discovery. In conformity with the form of the bildungsroman, Maya Angelou has to undertake a voyage from early and innocent childhood experiences, an initiation into an underworld which threatens to blight her talent and alienate her from society, a subsequent re-evaluation of self and society and finally, a statement of her position on the world of people or of art. How Angelou maintains the inner core of her selfhood in the midst of the constantly changing circumstances of her life is noteworthy.
Maya Angelou’s contribution to the autobiographical form in America remains incomparable. Angelou’s exceptional exploratory of the inner self, her distinctive use of humour and self-mockery, her linguistic sensibility, as well as her ability to balance the quest for human individuality with the general condition of black Americans distinguish her as a master of the genre.The black women’s quest is for self-accepted black womanhood. Picturing how African Americans cope with racial obstacles, Angelou continues her narration while some withdraw defeated, others emerge powerful. The focus of her writing is not herself alone but the numerous dauntless black women and the archetypical self of a black woman, who for centuries were denied their existence. Angelou felt as an African American she had a history to respect and a duty to discharge. Angelou’s genius as a writer is her ability to recapture the texture of life and re-create the past in its own sounds. Like all of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies, the arrangement of The Heart of a Woman is based on an expedition. Angelou emphasizes the theme of movement through travel by opening her book with a spiritual. The book follows Angelou to several places in the US and Africa, but the most important journey she describes is a voyage into the inner self. The Heart of a Woman, published in 1981, is the fourth segment of Maya Angelou’s series of seven autobiographies.
The Heart of a Woman covers Maya’s life from 1957 to 1962. Like all of the previous autobiographies in the series, this volume begins by creating a mood or an atmosphere into which the changing narrator is re-introduced. Angelou's brief stay in a commune reveals her capacity for cooperation and anticipates her later group involvements with writers, actors and civil-rights workers. Within a year, Angelou, tired of sharing space, craves privacy. She attempts, without initial success, to rent a small house in a segregated white neighbourhood. In order to get the house, she had to seek the help of some white friends, who pretended that the house was for them and not for a black woman with a black child. In The Heart of a Woman, the texture of Angelou's life changes significantly. She travels a lot. She strengthens her public identity becoming a coordinator of the Civil Rights Movement and a professionally recognised dancer and actress. She also for the first time in the autobiographies begins her account of self as writer. She attends various writer’s workshops; publishes a short story and becomes life long friends with John Killens, Rosa Guy and other black novelists. Most important, writing forces her into a conscious maturity, Angelou said in The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou, “If I wanted to write, I had to be willing to develop a kind of concentration found mostly in people awaiting execution. I had to learn technique and surrender my ignorance.”(659) She did abandon her ‘ignorance’ for a conscious self-exploration.
Leaving West for the East, Angelou became more confident in her lifestyle, her self-assurance deriving from the close relationships she is able to form with black singers, actors and writers. She also strives to balance the responsibility of motherhood and the demands of her career as a professional entertainer and writer. From a shy child in Stamps, Arkansas, who through emotional shock had lost the power of speech, Maya Angelou had the will and courage to become a uniquely dynamic, internationally known figure. Maya chooses this genre and describes the incidents of her life in a broad way to record present-day society and the subaltern’s assertiveness towards struggle and quench for autonomy. Angelou’s challenge of recovering the lost years, she went ahead with the challenge of the process of self-discovery and reconfirmed her assurance to life’s struggle through this volume. Angelou through her autobiography offers positive choices on life's various possibilities. In adversity she became a writer in Harlem Writers Guild along with other great writers like Sarah Wright and Lorraine Hansberry. She became a Civil Right Activist after listening to Reverend Martin Luther Jr. and Malcolm X. In the choices of life/death, discipline/chaos, compassion/pity, hope/despair, we find that Angelou is able to choose judiciously to emerge self-empowered. To survive and emerge victorious one has to revise one's choices if need be.
This book is about a journey of a black soul into the waves of adulthood. Her journey into junkyard, her work as a streetcar conductor and as a mother, matures her. Her stay in junkyard serves as a psychological maturity, her work as a social maturity and her giving birth to a baby as a physical maturity. In the end of the novel Maya Angelou becomes totally a matured woman. Her journey into maturity weakens her cycles of displacement. Her displacement was caused by her alienation from the society because of her colour and her motherlessness in the familial sphere. As Maya starts to discover herself and find out her place in the society, she gets rid of her sense of displacement.
Maya Angelou, true to the black autobiographical tradition, uses the literary mode to define her quest for human individuality, identifying her personal struggle with the general condition of black Americans and claiming a representative role not only in relation to black Americans, but also in relation to the idea of America. Her autobiographies, no doubt, recapture that confrontation, but portray at the same time the extraordinary life of a black woman who has survived and triumphed. Unlike the quest of expatriates which usually ends in frustrations, Maya Angelou rediscovers her real home in America. They are an extraordinary mixture of innocence and depravity, of elegy and celebration. As McPherson observes, Maya Angelou's autobiographies share the general concerns of black autobiography—political awareness, empathy for suffering, knowledge of oppression, a sense of shared life, shared triumph, and communal responsibility.
The Heart of a Woman, the most political segment of Angelou’s autobiographical statement, is set against the political upsurge of African Americans and Africans between 1957 and 1962. From being peripheral to the political life of her people, Angelou etches herself more centrally into the rising Civil Rights movement and the African liberation struggle. Defined as neither wife nor mother, Maya Angelou is simply herself at this moment. The Heart of a Woman follows Angelou’s established norm of ending her autobiographies on a strong note of hope. Maya Angelou and Guy have advanced to the point where each of them can move forward towards a divergent and independent path. Angelou can relish her sense of achievement as Guy looks forward eagerly to his future. She can anticipate a future for herself centered on herself. Again closure brings the cycle to a place that portends a new life for both Guy and Maya, a re-birth: a closing door and an opening door. Both characters are now citizens of a large world. Faithful to the ongoing themes of survival, sense of self, and continuing education, The Heart of a Woman moves its central figures to a point of full personhood. Its light humour and bantering carries a message of achievement.
Motherhood is one the most dominant themes in her autobiographies. Angelou fears for her son Guy’s safety throughout his youth. The guilt and inadequacy she often felt in her role as a mother continue to manifest itself in the form of tension between mothering and working. Angelou despite her earlier vow never to leave Guy alone could not resist the temptation of a performance in Chicago. She somehow feels that it is her fault and chastises herself for being an impulsive and too often inattentive mother. She feels she has not been responsible enough. This indeed is an all-too familiar scenario which occurs frequently in the series. Back in New York, she learns that her son has received a threat from a local gang because the leader's girlfriend has accused Guy of insulting her. As soon as she returns and has a chance to survey the circumstances, Angelou confronts the gang-leader directly and warns him against further contact with her son. She takes extreme measures to protect her son and threatens to shoot the gang leader's entire family and has a gun in her purse to prove it. This confrontation reveals Angelou as a strong, aggressive, perhaps too impulsive black mother who puts aside her guilt and self-doubt in order to defend her son. She has always been adventurous. She has courage to deal with life.
Beneath the hectic life she wants to settle down. Maya is seeking marriage as the answer to her own sense of dislocation and fully envisions a perfect future with various prospective husbands. For her security and to support her financially, Maya’s only choice is - marriage. While in New York, she meets Vusumzi Make, a black South African freedom fighter, and imagines that he will provide her with the same domestic security she had hoped would develop his relationships with him, but presumably, the desire for love, warmth or even sexual pleasure leads women to be caught in the trap of male diabolical power. These kinds of desire mentally and physically weaken them so they have no strong defense to protect themselves from victimization. Angelou is a clear example of those who have been victimized. It is her loneliness and her desire for fulfilment that pulls Angelou down to the trap. Because for a long time she has been living with empty arms and rocks in her bed, her loneliness needs to be replaced by love and warmth. Angelou is just an ordinary person, who always longs for love, care, and understanding from the opposite sex. Though she is successful in working and being a mother, Angelou cannot fulfill her lonely heart with love. Many times her loneliness weakens her and makes her reach a rough conclusion about men that attract her. Men always cling to the notion that they are superior and have to be the first to make decisions.
Vus Make is able to awaken in African Americans an awareness of the self-declamatory role they had to take. He makes Maya Angelou realize that blacks are like whites, but due to their backgrounds they react differently. When the whites refuse to treat African Americans as humans, it results in racism. Make speaks of African Americans, who were only a tenth of the United States population, standing up and fighting for their rights. He tells her that the spirit of Africa lives most in the coloured Americans. In Maya, Make found, “the flesh of his youthful dream. I would bring to him the vitality of jazz and the endurance of a people who had survived three hundred and fifty years of slavery. With me in his bed he would challenge the loneliness of exile. With my courage added to his own, he would succeed in bringing the ignominious white rule in South Africa to an end.” (737) But all end in illusion. Angelou writes, “The decision to marry me automatically gave him authority to plan all our lives.” (718)
In Accra, Ghana where Angelou and Guy go after her marriage with Vus Make deteriorates, she receives another shocking intrusion from ‘real life.’ The difference between this warning of danger and all others in the pattern is that this threat brings fantasy to the level of reality. The threat is neither speculative nor alleged, but real. Just a few days after their arrival in Ghana, some friends invite Angelou and Guy to a picnic. Although his mother declines, Guy immediately accepts the invitation in a show of independence. On the way home from the day's outing, her son is seriously injured in an automobile accident. Even though he has had very little experience driving, Guy is asked to drive, because his host is too intoxicated to operate the car himself. At the time of the collision, the car is at a standstill. Angelou's nightmare concerning Guy's safety became true. This time, however, the fantasy becomes reality. Although Angelou has never been to Korle Bu Hospital, Ghana the emergency ward is painfully familiar. The crisis becomes all the more urgent because they are as yet unaccustomed to the language and have very little available money. In this sequence of fantasy moving to the level of reality, the autobiographer suggests the vulnerability she felt in her role as a mother with full responsibility for the well-being of her only child. In a new place, separated from her husband with no immediate prospects for employment, Angelou possesses very little control over her life or her son’s safety. After the accident in Ghana, Guy is not only striving for independence from his mother but for life itself. The complex nature of her relationship with her son is at the heart of this most recent of Angelou's autobiographical volumes. At the end, Guy is seventeen and has just passed the matriculation exams at the University of Ghana. The last scene pictures Guy driving off to his new dormitory room with several fellow university students.
The conclusion of Heart of a Woman announces a new beginning for Angelou and hope for her future relationship with Guy. In this sense, the newest volume in the series follows the pattern established by the conclusions of the earlier volumes. Caged Bird ends with the birth of Guy, Gather Together with the return to her mother’s home in San Francisco after regaining her innocence through the lessons of a drug addict, and Singin' and Swingin' with the reunion of mother and son in a paradisiacal setting of a Hawaiian resort. The final scene of Heart of a Woman suggests that the future will bring more balance between dependence and independence in their relationship and that both will have significant personal successes as their lives begin to take different courses. Although Guy has assumed that he has been fully ‘grown up’ for years, they have at last reached a point where they can treat each other as adults and allow one another the chance to live independently. Many of Angelou’s victories are reflected in Guy in the last scene, for, although Guy is the same age she is at the end of Caged Bird, his young life promises many more opportunities and rewards as a result of his mother’s perseverance and her belief that life loved the person who dared to live it fully with hope and belief. Moreover, Angelou shares Guy’s fresh sense of liberation; she too is embarking on a new period of strength and independence as she begins her life yet again-on her own and in a new land. It is from this position of security that Maya Angelou looks back to record her life story and to compensate for the years of distance and displacement through the autobiographical act.
The Heart of a Woman suggests that the future will bring more balance between dependence and independence in their relationship and that both will have significant personal successes as their lives begin to take different courses. Although Guy has assumed that he has been fully “grown up” for years, they have at last reached a point where they can treat each other as adults and allow one another the chance to live independently. Many of Angelou’s victories are reflected in Guy in the last scene, for although Guy is the same age as she is at the end of Caged Bird, his young life promises many more opportunities and rewards as a result of his mother's perseverance and her belief that life loved the person who dared to live it. Moreover Angelou shares Guy’s fresh sense of liberation. She too is embarking on a new period of strength and independence as she begins her life yet again - on her own and in a new land. She presents herself as a role model for African-American women by reconstructing the Black woman's image throughout her autobiographies, and has used her many roles, incarnations, and identities to connect the layers of oppression with her personal history.
She is no longer a threatened Southern child or a fledgling dancer, is now in the position to offer direction to black women and men younger than herself, to be a model like many autobiographers before her. She differs from most male narrators, though; she is a woman with a woman’s heart. As such, Angelou is able to offer a woman’s perspective as she reveals her concerns about her self-image and her conflicting feelings about her lovers and her son.
In this novel, Maya continues her account of her son’s youth and, in the process, repeatedly returns to the story of her childhood. The references to her childhood serve partly to create a textual link for readers who might be unfamiliar with the earlier volumes and partly to emphasize the suggestive similarities between her childhood and her son’s burden too. The Heart of a Woman with other autobiographies, and states that for the first time in Angelou's series, she is able to present herself as a model for successful living. However, Angelou’s ‘woman’s heart’—her perspective as a woman with concerns about her self-esteem and the conflicts with her lovers and her son—is what makes her autobiography different. Many years of experience as a mother, and her success as a writer, actress, and activist, enables Angelou to behave more competently and with more maturity, professionally and as a mother. Her self-assurance becomes a major part of her personality. Angelou's works portray how this imaginative self has been the product of a long struggle for survival that reflects both the pain and suffering on the way to self-hood as also the vitality and power to endure the vicissitudes of Black existence. What comes out loud and clear is the indomitable will of the human spirit. Angelou sums up:
We, the black people, the most displaced, the poorest, the most maligned and scourged, we had the glorious task of reclaiming the soul and saving the honor of the country. We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love. We, the most feared and apprehensive, must take fear and by love, change it into hope. We, who die daily in large and small ways, must take the demon death and turn it into life. (673-674)
The autobiographies of Maya Angelou shows us that African American women today are no longer the midnight caged birds, but phoenixes singing joyfully the song of their true self. In fact, they have transcended the geometric oppression of gender, class and race displaying the radiant black female self in an unprecedented manner. Angelou breaks ground for new representations of the African American female self-illustrating wonderfully the contours of its evolutionary movement. The Heart of a Woman covers one of the most exciting periods in African and Afro-American history – the beginning of a new awareness of Africa on the part of Negroes. As with all her books, The Heart of a Woman can be mined for its riches: instruction, insight, humour, wry wit, lore, and fine writing. From this casebook on successful single parenting, we can see the perils a single mother, in this case a black one, faces in bringing up a black male child in the African-American society, where so many things seem bent on preventing him from reaching adulthood. Maya Angelou shows how one woman succeeds in skirting these dangers and comes out safely on the other side. As befits a master storyteller, Maya Angelou’s book is rich with the tight sketch, the apt portrait, the pithy line. Like Thoreau, she builds from the sentence. Throughout her account of her many experiences, she uses just the right sentence to share some insight or fix some conclusion. While Maya Angelou does many things in The Heart of a Woman, what she keeps constant throughout the book is that it is the account of a black W-O-M-A-N’s life. Her experiences with women, her love and respect for them and theirs for her, her delicacy in dealing with them; from her mother to her friends, even to mere acquaintances, these could provide a model of conduct for any woman to follow.
It is in this context that Maya Angelou assumes importance as she explores the time tested diversity of ideas, culture and aesthetics in African American women's intellectual tradition. She provides new ways of understanding the multiple dimensions of collective African American experience and its dialogic relationship to racism and sexism. She reveals the coloured woman’s sense of identity through her own narrative. Hers is the critical voice which speaks of and outlines identity constituted in the experience of slavery, exile, pilgrimage and struggle. Maya Angelou has reconstructed and reshaped social reality that helped her to survive in a system bent on denying freedom, equality and beingness. It is an exploration into her life and experiences that illuminates the African American woman’s identity as both black and female. The act of writing, for her, was an act of resistance which proclaimed her intellectual abilities and asserted her humaneness. Writing is a symbolic act of redefining in contrast to the dehumanizing images of black women.
It was also the culmination of her varied experiences of different professions, as also an emancipatory act from the confines of both blackness and womanhood. Sometimes it is the celebration of the human will not just to survive in the face of adversity but to conquer a space both for oneself and for her black sisters as well. It also proves that Angelou through her writing shows what it means to be human, to dream and to struggle for an identity in a doubly hostile world. Defiant, protective of Guy and his welfare, Angelou becomes in this episode a representation of maternal power. Powerful, protective of her son, Angelou here becomes a reincarnation of Momma Henderson. Unfortunately, no mother, no matter how strong, can keep children forever from danger. Near the end of The Heart of a Woman, Guy is seriously injured in a car accident. In a condensed tormented autobiographical passage, Angelou gazes at the face of her unconscious son and summarises their life together:
He was born to me when I was seventeen. I had taken him away from my mother's house when he was two years old, and except for a year I spent in Europe without him, and a month he was stolen by a deranged woman, we had spent our lives together. My grown life lay stretched before me, stiff as a pine board. In a strange country, blood caked on his face and clotted on his clothes. (870)
Guy gradually recovers, moving during the process of healing, towards a position of greater independence from his mother. Towards the end of The Heart of a Woman a mature Maya Angelou finds herself increasingly alone. The relationship with Vus Make is over. Vivian is in California. Guy, gradually recovering from his physical injuries, moves toward greater autonomy. As the volume ends, he has moved into a university dormitory and she is alone. In the last two paragraphs, Angelou is by herself, testing her independence from Vus Make. Despite Guy’s absence or perhaps because of it, she recognizes an emerging new self, a woman liberated in heart and being.
The narrator’s singular aloneness in this final scene is superficially concerned with what she is eating. No longer needing to compete with her son over who gets the best part of the chicken, she has the breast all to herself without having to share it. There is significant irony here. As Angelou has so often resorted to humor when faced with a disturbing problem, in the conclusion of the fourth volume she offers the reader the half-serious picture of a greedy mother getting what she has always wanted. Her keeping the breast represents both the nurturing aspect of the mother as well as a weaning herself from Guy’s demands. Life for Angelou, whether she wants it to or not, is about to offer a new freedom, a new character, a new “myself.” No longer the mother saved from drugs at the close of Gather Together or the mother prone to making false promises in Singin’ and Swingin’, the character at the end of The Heart of a Woman is, as the title states, a woman:
I closed the door and held my breath. Waiting for the wave of emotion to surge over me, knock me down, take my breath away. Nothing happened. I didn't feel bereft or desolate. I didn't feel lonely or abandoned. I sat down, still waiting. The first thought that came to me, perfectly formed and promising, was “At last, I'll be able to eat the whole breast of a roast chicken by myself.”(878-879)
Life for Angelou, whether she wants it not, is about to offer a new freedom, a new character, a new ‘myself’. She is no longer the mother saved from drugs at the close of Gather Together or the mother prone to make false promises in Singin’ and Swingin’, the character at the end of The Heart of a Woman is as the title states a ‘Woman.’ Defined as neither mother nor wife, Maya Angelou is at this moment simply herself. Despite Guy's absence or perhaps because of it, she recognizes an emerging new Self, a woman liberated in heart. The autobiographical narrative was an escape to freedom; very often the physical journey was able to provide a concrete image of selfhood which became a model for later African American writers. All marginalized people have to carve out, invent and imagine new expressive forms - forms that evolve from their particular experiences, historical struggles and victories as they negotiate their place in this world.
Works Cited