Maya Angelou Oppression

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In Maya Angelou’s “And Still I Rise”, Maya Angelou presents herself as a soulful African-American woman that will not be oppressed. She writes herself as a person that is above all the racial discrimination. Maya Angelou weaves a beautiful poem that embodies the resilience that is held by all the African-American people, and she even adds remarks about her sexuality. During this time period, African-American people were greatly oppressed, and they fought back for equal treatment. However, women were treated just as badly, and if someone happened to be both African-American and female, they were viewed as the lowest of the low. Even though Maya Angelou was an African-American woman, she was proud of her race and her gender, and she made that …show more content…

Throughout “And Still I Rise”, Maya Angelou shows that she is not afraid to stand up to society’s oppression. She shows that she is in high spirits even though all white people around her want to put her down. In the opening lines, she starts by addressing the reader as the enemy. According to an analysis done by eNotes.com, “Much of its energy derives from its bold and cheeky self-assertiveness. Clearly addressed to the white oppressors of black persons, the poem presents us with a black woman willing to speak up for herself, for other living blacks, and even for her black ancestors.” (Locklear). Throughout the entire poem, she is making this fight personal. She keeps saying “you” or “your” in powerful and enraged tenses to put the blame on the addressed white people, more specifically white men. In the second stanza, she asks, “Does my sassiness upset you?” (5). She asks this because she is a strong-willed woman and she knows that white men believe her sass to be a form of disrespect- and that they earned that respect because they were born of a higher 'breed'. She continues her blunt speech throughout the work to show her determination against the white men that rule society and to make her message that much stronger. From the get-go, Maya Angelou says, “You may trod me in the very dirt, But …show more content…

Stanzas one through seven, with a minor break at stanza three. The stanzas are four lines each, with the second and forth rhyming. The second and forth lines also carry seven syllables. Within these stanzas, she verbally assaults the reader with questions and a variety of similes which are used to bring more fire to her attack. However, these stanzas can also represent her being chained down. She is fighting back and breaks form once in the third stanza, and then finally completely breaks from the form in the eighth and ninth stanza. In those stanzas, Angelou uses metaphors, and switches the structures of the stanzas. Stanzas eight and nine have six lines, with the first and third line rhyming, the second and forth lines being the same, and the fifth and sixth lines rhyming. The two stanzas have very similar styles except for the differences in syllables in the rhyming lines and stanza nine has three repeated lines at the very end. Stanzas eight and nine also carry the strongest images and meaning. In stanza eight, lines 29 and 31, “Out of the huts of history’s shame […] Up from the past that’s rooted in pain […]” (29 and 31), Maya Angelou shows images of huts, which can be represented as African tribal huts, put into “history’s shame” (29), which is the enslavement of the African race. Their past is deeply covered in pain and misery due to the oppression of the

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