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In her interview with Carol Neubaurer, Angelou says that there are some incidents in her life that she cannot narrate because she would become “too melodramatic” (288). Considering how open I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is about violence, racism, and sexual assault, what do you make of this comment? How do you think Angelou dealt with the desire to be truthful versus a desire to not be melodramatic? Why do you think she was concerned with not appearing melodramatic? Do you think this has anything to do with the issues of power that Heilbrun discusses, particularly the way in which women are accused of stridency when expressing strong emotions?
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An Interview with Maya Angelou
Author(s): Carol E. Neubauer and Maya Angelou
Source: The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 286-292
Published by: The Massachusetts Review, Inc.
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AN INTERVIEW WITH MAYA ANGELOU
Carol E. Neubauer
NEUBAUER: I see autobiography in general as a way for a writer to
go back to her past and try to present what is left in memory but
also to recover what has been lost through imagination and in
vention.
ANGELOU: Autobiography is for me a beloved which, like all
beloveds, one is not given by family. One happens upon. You
know, you turn the corner to the left instead of to the right. Stop in
the parking lot and meet a beloved, or someone who becomes a
beloved. And by the time I was half finished with Caged Bird I
knew I loved the form?that I wanted to try to see what I could do
with the form. Strangely enough, not as ? cathartic force, not
really; at any rate I never thought that really I was interested or am
interested in autobiography for its recuperative power. I liked the
form?the literary form?and by the time I started Gather To
gether I had gone back and reread Frederick Douglass’ slave narra
tive. Anyway, I love the idea of the slave narrative, using the first
person singular, really meaning always the third person plural. I
love that. And I see it all the time in the black literature, in the blues
and spirituals and the poetry, in essays James Baldwin uses it. But
I’ve tried in each book to let the new voice come through and that’s
what makes it very difficult for me not to impose the voice of 1980
onto the voice I’m writing from 1950, possibly.
NEUBAUER: And so when you say you look for a new voice you
don’t mean the voice of the present or the time of writing the
autobiographical account, but rather of that period of your past.
That must be difficult.
ANGELOU: Very. Very difficult, but I think that in writing autobi
ography that that’s what is necessary to really move it from almost
an “as told to” to an “as remembered” state. And really for it to be a
In February, Maya Angelou came to Bradley University to talk about
Black American literature as part of the celebration of Black History
Month. During her visit, I had the pleasure of discussing the art of
autobiography with her and her progress
on her new book.
286
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Interview with Angelou
creative and artistic literary art form. I believe I came close to
recreating the voice in Gather Together of that young girl?eratic,
sporadic, fractured. I think in each case I’ve come close. Rather a
sassy person in Singin’ and Swingin’.
NEUBAUER: It seemed that in The Heart of a Woman, either the
voice was more complex or else there was more than one voice at
work. There seemed to be the voice of that time in your life and yet
another voice commenting on that time.
ANGELOU: It seems so, but I looked at that quite carefully and at
the period I think it is the voice because I was really coming into a
security about who I was and what I was about, but the security
lasted sometimes for three or four days or maybe through a love
affair or into a love affair or into a job. I think it would be like
smoke in a room. It would just dissipate and I would suddenly be
edgewalking again. I would be one of those children in the rye,
playing very perilously close to the precipice and aware of it. I tried
very hard for the voice. I remember the woman very well.
NEUBAUER: What I saw in Heart of a Woman was not so much
that there were two voices talking against one another, but rather
that a voice from a more recent time commented ironically on the
predominant voice of that time in the past. The irony of you as the
writer and the autobiographical presence coming through.
ANGELOU: It is really one of the most difficult. First, well, I don’t
know what comes first in that case. Whether it is the insistence to
write well while trying to speak in a voice thirty years ago. I’m now
writing anew book and trying to speak in that voice?the voice of
1963 and what I know about writing in 1984. It really is difficult.
NEUBAUER: Does it become more difficult the closer you get to the
present?
ANGELOU: Yes, absolutely. Because by ’63 my command of Eng
lish was almost what it is today and I had been very much influ
enced by Vus Make. He had really influenced my thinking, and his
English was exquisite. My reading in other languages also by that
time had very much influenced my speaking and I was concerned
about eloquence by 1960. So this book is really the most difficult
and I’ve been ducking and dodging it too. I know this morning I
should call my editor and tell him I have not forgotten him. He’s
very much on my mind and the work is very much on my mind. I
don’t know what I’m going to do when I finish this book. I may try
to go back and pickup some of the incidents that I left out of maybe
287
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The Massachusetts Review
Caged Bird or Gather Together or any of the books. I don’t know
how to do that.
NEUBAUER: Are you thinking of autobiography?
ANGELOU: Yes.
NEUBAUER: That’s fascinating. One of the things I’m interested in
particularly is how the present influences the autobiographical
past. I think what you’re engaged in doing now and have been
since Caged Bird is something that’s never been done before in this
scope. Each volume of yours is a whole and has a unity that works
for that volume alone. If you were to go back to the period of Caged
Bird that would add another wrinkle in this question of time and
different voices.
ANGELOU: I don’t know how I will do it, and I don’t know if I’ll be
able to do it. But I think there are facets. When I look at a stained
glass window, it’s very much like this book. I have an idea that the
books are very much like the Everyman stories so that there is greed
and kindness and generosity and cruelty, oppression, and sloth.
And I think of the period I’m going to write about and I try to see
which of the incidents in which greed, say it’s green, which of these
that happened to me during that period will most demonstrate that
particular condition. Now some are
more rich, but I refuse them. I
do not select them because it’s very hard to write drama without
falling into melodrama. So the incidents I reject, I find myself
unable to write about without becoming melodramatic. I just can’t
see how to write it. In Gather Together there is an incident in
which a man almost killed me?tried to, in fact?and kept me for
three days and he was a mad man, literally. My escape was so
incredible, literally incredible, that there was no way to write it,
absolutely, to make it credible and not melodramatic.
NEUBAUER: Have you ever chosen to take another incident in that
case, perhaps one that might not have even happened, and use that
as a substitute?
ANGELOU: No, because there are others which worked, which did
happen, and which showed either cruelty or the irony of escape. So
I was able to write that rather than the other.
NEUBAUER: I see, So you didn’t have to sacrifice the core of the
ex
perience.
ANGELOU: No, I never sacrificed. It’s just choosing which of those
greens or which of those reds to make that kind of feeling.
288
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Interview with Angelou
NEUBAUER: It’s a beautiful metaphor, the greens, the reds and the
light coming through the window. Because in a sense, memory
works that way; it filters out past work. And yet an autobiographer
has a double task?at least double, probably triple or quadruple?
in some ways the filtering has been done beyond your control on
an unconscious level. But as a writer working in the present you,
too, are making selections or choices, which complicate the ex
perience.
ANGELOU: There is so much to talk to you about on this subject. I
have, I think, due to all those years of not talking, which again, I
chose to minimize in Caged Bird because it’s hard to write that
without, again, the melodramas leaking in. But because of those
years of muteness, I think my memory was developed in queer
ways, because I remember?I have total recall?or I have none at
all. None. And there is no pattern to the memory, so that I would
forget all the good and the bad of a certain time, or I will remember
only the bad of a certain time, or I will remember only the good.
But when I remember it, I will remember everything about it.
Everything. The outside noises, the odors in the room, the way my
clothes were feeling?everything. I just have it, or I remember
nothing. I am sure that is a part of the sort of psychological
problems I was having and how the memory went about its
business knitting itself.
NEUBAUER: Almost as a treasure chest or a defense.
ANGELOU: Yes, both, I guess. But in a sense, not really a defense,
because some of the marvelous things I’ve not remembered. For
instance, one of the promises I’ve exacted from every lover or
husband who promised to be a permanent fixture was that if I die
in the house, if something happened, get me outside. Please don’t
let me die in the room, or open the window and let me see some
rolling hills. Let me see, please. Now, my memory of Stamps,
Arkansas, is flat, dirt, the trees around the pond. But everything
just flat and mean. When I agreed to go to join Bill Moyers for his
creativity program, I flew to Dallas and decided to drive to Stamps
because I wanted to sneak up on Stamps. It’s, I guess, 200 miles or
more. When I drove out of Texas into Arkansas, Stamps is 30 miles
from Texas. I began to see the undulating hills. I couldn’t believe
it! I couldn’t believe it! It’s beautiful! It’s what I love. But the
memory had completely gone.
289
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The Massachusetts Review
NEUBAUER: When you’re working, for example, on your present
book, are there things that help you remember that period or any
period in the past^better?
ANGELOU: Well, a curious thing has happened to me with every
book. When I start to work?start to plan it?I encounter people
whom I have known in that time, which is really queer. I’ve
wondered if I would encounter them anyway, or if it’s a case of
“when the student is ready the teacher appears.” If I simply
wouldn’t see their value if I would encounter them and wouldn’t
see their value for what I’m working on, because I wouldn’t be
working on that. That is one of the very interesting things. I’m
woking on Ghana now and this summer I went to London to write
a play. I saw a sister friend there from Ghana and suddenly about
fifteen Ghanaians; soon I was speaking Fanti again and they were
reminding me, “Do you remember that time when?” and suddenly
it all carne right up my nostrils. But what I do is just pull myself
away from everything and everybody and then begin the most
frightening of the work. And that is going back. I’m always afraid
I’ll never come out. Every morning I wake up, usually about 5:30
and try to get to my work room. I keep a little room in a hotel.
Nothing on the walls, nothing belonging to me, nothing. I go in
and I try to be in by 6:30 and try to get back, get back. Always, for
the first half hour is spent wondering if anybody cares for me
enough to come and pull me out. Suppose I can’t get out?
NEUBAUER: That’s a difficult road to retrace?to find.
ANGELOU: Like an enchanted… I know that sounds romatic, but
you know how I mean. But I do get back and I remember one thing
and I think, “Yes, and what are the other things like that that
happened?” And maybe a second
one will come. It’s all there. A11 of
it is there.
NEUBAUER: Even down to the finest details and the dialogues,
what you said to the people you were with.
ANGELOU: The sound of the voices. And I write wurrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
NEUBAUER: How long do you write if you go in at 6:30?
ANGELOU: Well, I’m out by 12:30, unless it’s really happening. If
it’s really happening I’ll stay till 2:00, but
no longer. No longer.
And then get out and go home and shower and make a lovely
lunch and drink a lot of wine and try to come down. Get back. Stop
in a shop, “Hi, how are you? Fine_” So I
can ascertain that I do
live and people remember me.
290
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Interview with Angelou
NEUBAUER: Doyou leave it in the middle of an incident so that you
have a way back, or do you write to the end of each one?
ANGELOU: No, I can’t write to the end of the incident. I will write
to a place that’s safe. Nothing will leak away now; I’ve got it. Then
at night I’ll read it and try to edit it.
NEUBAUER: The same night?
ANGELOU: The same night. Try to edit it for writing, a little of it.
And then begin again the next day. Lordy.
NEUBAUER: Is it a frightening journey because of the deep roots
from that time to the present? Do you feel a kind of vulnerability?
ANGELOU: I am not afraid of the ties. I cherish them, rather. It’s the
vulnerability. It’s like using drugs or something. It’s allowing
oneself to be hypnotized. That’s frightening, because then we have
no defenses, nothing. We’ve slipped down the well and every side is
slippery. And how on earth are you going to come out? That’s
scary. But I’ve chosen it, and I’ve chosen this mode as my mode.
NEUBAUER: How far will the fifth volume go?
ANGELOU: Actually, it’s a new kind. It’s really quite a new voice.
I’m looking at the black American resident, me and the other black
American residents in Ghana, and trying to see all the magic of the
eternal quest of human beings to go home again. That is maybe
what life is anyway. To return to the Creator. All of that naivete,
the innocence of trying to. That awful rowing towards God,
whatever it is. Whether it’s to return to your village or the lover you
lost or the youth that some people want to return to or the beauty
that some want to return to.
NEUBAUER: Writing autobiography frequently involves this quest
to return to the past, to the home. Sometimes, if the home can’t be
found, if it can’t be located again, then that home or that love or
that family, whatever has been lost, is recreated or invented.
ANGELOU: Yes, of course. That’s it! That’s what I’m seeing in this
trek back to Africa. That in so many cases that idealized home of
course is non-existent. In so many cases some black Americans
created it on the spot. On the spot. And I did too. Created some
thing, looked, seemed like what we have idealized very far from
reality. It’s going to be a painful, hard book to write, in that not
only all the stuff that it cost me to write it, but there will be a
number of people who will be disappointed. So I have to deal with
that once the book is out. The main thing is getting it out.
291
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The Massachusetts Review
NEUBAUER: Are their opinions becoming more and more of a
consideration as you move closer to the present in your autobiog
raphies?
ANGELOU: Yes, indeed, because in some cases I can’t use names.
When I use names I have to get permission from people who are
alive. I called Vus Make just when I was about half way through
Heart of a Woman and I told him. He lives in Darsalan now. And I
said I’m writing a book in the time which you featured. So he said,
“I will sign any permission. I will give any rights to you, for I know
you will not lie. However, I am sure I shall disagree with your
interpretation of
the truth.”
NEUBAUER: I know I speak for many in saying how much I am
looking forward to your next book or your next “interpretation of
the truth.”
292
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- Article Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 286
p. 287
p. 288
p. 289
p. 290
p. 291
p. 292
The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 185-352
Front Matter
Le Sacre du Printemps [pp. 193-196]
Demagogy in the “Musée” [pp. 197-220]
Vermeers [pp. 221-228]
The Visualizers [pp. 229-241]
Courts as Readers [pp. 242-266]
The Beyond [pp. 267-268]
To Deify [pp. 269-270]
I Said [pp. 271-272]
An Interview with Chinua Achebe [pp. 273-285]
An Interview with Maya Angelou [pp. 286-292]
The Hurt [pp. 293-297]
The Re-Birth of the Nation [pp. 298-312]
Rain [pp. 313-324]
Observer
Louis Sullivan Woke up Here [pp. 325-330]
Close to the Vein [p. 331-331]
Something to Love [p. 332-332]
We Who Have Found Wisdom [p. 333-333]
Disciple Pigeons [pp. 334-342]
Approaching the Millenium [pp. 343-349]
Leda [p. 350-350]
Lost in the Shine [p. 351-351]
October [p. 352-352]
Back Matter
