Exploring Maya Angelou's Autobiographical Fiction

III.Genre and Form Many of Angelou's writings are autobiographical, her life has not been a great one and she uses this to convey a great story. The word autobiography means self/life/story with the narrative of the events, however Angelou uses devices commonly found in fiction (Lupton 29-30). The type of autobiography that Angelou writes is called serial autobiographies because it is many books about her life( Lupton 32). “Many African American texts were written to create a particular impact, and she brings up many important topics in her writings. Angelou writes to show the terror and isolation a young girl experiences when dealing with sexual abuse (Henke 243). She shares the crushing emotional betrayal that she has had to carry. In fact, her first autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, mainly focuses around her childhood sexual trauma. The narrative within it is “rich, humorous, intense, and engaging” (Lupton 68). In the poem Caged Bird Angelou hopes that the bird can be released from its cage and fly free of the oppression and limitations pushed onto

In her book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is about a young Maya Angelou who finds the strength to say “I can” in a world built on the oppression and suffering of her ancestors (Moore 49). Motherhood is a continuing theme throughout nearly all of Angelou’s biographies as well as the reclaim of her body and sexuality (Lupton 159). In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings angelou shows a clear progression “from rage and indignation to subtle resistance to active protest” in order to not only give it a thematic unity but also to “contrast the otherwise episodic quality of the narrative” (Walker 80). In order for a woman to write of her own rape she must first overcome both the racism and sexism she will encounter and take her body back as her own rather than an oversexualised object (Vermillion