My three-year-old daughter knows about "Auntie Maya" – asks about the thick tones of her generous voice, the alarming gash of her deep, wide smile. "The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned." "If the heart of Africa remained elusive, my search for it had brought me closer to understanding myself and other human beings," she wrote, words that spoke vividly to me as a recent returnee to Ghana myself. She didn't just live it, she wrote about it, warts and all. While her gifts with storytelling and language have forever cemented her place in American culture and the canon of literature at large Angelou’s remarkable legacy extends beyond the page. In Ghana she was part of a community of African Americans – a returnee movement that gathers strength to this day – but her travels stand out as an act of defiance against the view perpetrated by many then, and to this day, that Africans and people of African descent in countries like the US have nothing in common. But Maya Angelou an author, poet and civil rights activist is so much more than just her body of iconic works. Initially married to an ANC member, her immersion in the struggle of black people reads like a who's who of other greats, her relationships with James Baldwin, WEB du Bois, the Ghanaian poet Efua Sutherland, Malcolm X and later Martin Luther King. The book that had the most impact on my life was All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes – the fifth instalment in her series autobiographies – about the time she spent in Africa during the civil rights movement. She gave me a language of identity and purpose that radiated as much from her very existence as it did from her work. She was not a historical relic, but a living, breathing one-woman phenomenon. Here was a woman who talked about lesbians, teenage pregnancy, feminism and womanism, smoking, drinking and cursing (when she realised it was her destiny to be a great woman, she told Oprah Winfrey she thought: "Maybe I should stop smoking, and stop drinking, and stop cursing. Her comment on 9/11? "Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years." Here was a woman – alive during my lifetime – who had been raised in the America of "Chitlin' Switch, Georgia, Hang 'Em High, Alabama Don't Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi."Īs the structural injustice of race has became more subtle and sophisticated during her lifetime, she called it like it is. Although I loved and admired Angelou as a writer – her novels and poems all languishing playfully somewhere on her rich southern spectrum between poetry and prose – it was the content of her writing that had most power over me.
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