Rhetorical Analysis: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Thomas Carlyle expresses culture as: “the process by which a person becomes all that they were capable of being.” By unifying people, culture empowers us to be everything we can be. World-renowned author and activist, and possibly the most inspirational woman of all time, Maya Angelou, both explains and proves this idea in “Champion of the World,” an excerpt from her collection of memoirs: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Through the use of many types of rhetoric, she illustrates how cultural identities can unite us and bring out many emotions in us, bad and good. She demonstrates her purpose: how culture gives us an identity, and brings us together to grow in places we could not alone. She uses syntax, diction, tone, and other rhetorical

devices to create an inspiring story that makes readers understand cultural pride and the overall purpose of culture.

Maya Angelou begins by giving background knowledge and describing the scene for the upcoming event. She describes the crowded room, tenseness in the air, and builds suspense for the fight between the “Brown Bomber and the white contender. The main technique used in the introduction to the story is diction. She uses strong verbs and adjectives to set the scene for the story, as well as short phrases and dialogue that help familiarize the reader with the room. For example, Angelou says: “The apprehensive mood was shot through with shafts of gaiety, as a black sky is streaked with lightning” (2). While many techniques are used in this sentence, one of the strongest is diction; she uses picturesque and vivid diction to describe the mood in the room with a metaphor comparing it with a “black sky streaked with lightning” (2). Words that stand out to help develop the suspenseful mood in the room include: “apprehensive”, “streaked”, and even “lightning” (Angelou 2). This particular use of diction helps to develop her purpose by strongly describing the emotions shared in the room, and how the culture in the room strengthens these emotions. Another way Angelou uses diction is to help the reader

settle in to the story: “Joe’s gonna whip that cracker like it’s open season” (Angelou 3). She uses informal diction and slang to develop the dialect the character’s of a similar culture share. By using words and phrases like “cracker”, “whip”, “open season” (Angelou 3), and more, she develops her purpose further while acquainting the reader with the story. She demonstrates how cultures can unite people through their languages and slang, and how culture can rile people up about interests they share. She also makes the reader feel more comfortable and understand what is going on in the story. By using diction in the first part of the story, Angelou develops her purpose in showing how culture unifies us, demonstrates the importance of the fight to African-Americans all over, familiarizes the reader with the story, and begins to set a shifting tone for the story.

Throughout the story, Angelou creates a shifting tone that helps develop the events and purpose of the story. She uses different types of tone to convey important emotions and themes in the text. She achieves these tones through diction, syntax, and details. For example, toward the beginning, she creates a tense and anxious tone in order to build suspense for the fight. When describing the scene before the fight, she writes: “(P)eople continued to wedge themselves along the walls of the Store…Small children and babies perched on every lap available and men leaned on the shelves or on each other” (Angelou 1). By beginning the story like this, she creates a tone that prepares the reader for the fight to come. She uses words and phrases like “wedge”, “perched”, and “leaned…on each other” to create tone through diction (Angelou 1). By repeating strongly descriptive words and phrases that demonstrate how cramped and crowded the room is, Angelou uses diction to create her anxious and tense tone. In this paragraph, she also uses detail in a way that spares no information whatsoever, telling us that “babies perched on every lap available” (Angelou 1), or how “women sat on kitchen chairs, dining-room chairs, stools, and upturned wooden boxes” (Angelou 1). By creating intense detail in the first part of the story, Angelou also achieves a tone to match what is being described-a cramped, anxious, and tense setting, in which people of one culture are all coming together to listen to something that matters to all of them. The tone in the beginning of the story is not the same throughout, however, and it shifts drastically from tense and anxious, to suspenseful and nail-biting, to desperate and beat, and finally hopeful, celebratory, and ecstatic. After beginning the story on an anxious note, she creates suspense for the fight, building its importance to a point in which it appears as though the man they are all rooting for is going to lose. At this point, in paragraphs 15-17, it appears that Joe Louis, the man that represents the entire African-American race, is going down: “My race groaned. it was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A black boy whipped and maimed” (Angelou 16). Here, she develops her tone through syntax and figurative language. She uses short, dependent statements followed by punctuation in order to continuously describe the importance of the fight, and how a loss for Louis is a loss for the African-American race. She also uses an extended metaphor, comparing the fight of Joe Louis to the fight of African-Americans in the U.S. It was not just the Brown Bomber falling, “It was our people falling” (Angelou 16). By creating this image that shows the fight between Joe Louis and his white contender as the struggle for African-American rights and equality, and by using short, simple, and repetitive sentences, Angelou creates a desperate tone so strong that the reader feels it him/herself. Angelou does this throughout her story. In order to bring the reader into the story, she creates tons of different emotions for the reader throughout the story with her shifting tone. By doing so, she describes the events in even more detail, though almost indirectly, in a way that slips into the deeper parts of a reader’s mind. She develops her purposes and themes that demonstrate how culture strengthens our emotions by uniting us, and how smaller things can represent bigger ideas, as the fight represents a larger fight for her race in general. Tone creates messages in her story that could not be achieved through direct descriptions.

Through the use of many rhetorical devices, Maya Angelou tells a brilliant and true story with “Champion of the World”, that really proves that culture can unite us. By using the boxing match in her story as an extended metaphor for African-American rights, she makes us understand how culture can bring people together based on common interests and emotions. She shows us, through her use of tone, diction, syntax, details, and figurative language, how, through culture, we can thrive in ways in which we could not individually. This story educates us on how culture shapes our emotions, identities, and lives, and how it can be the strongest uniting force.