In 1998, a school district in Maryland removed one of the most acclaimed works of American literature from its curriculum. Parents pushing for the ban said the book was both "sexually explicit" and "anti-white". After an outcry from other parents and teachers, the decision was eventually reversed.
But this was neither the first nor the last attack on Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." Few books have been challenged more often than Angelo's memoir.
And while decisions to ban a book aren't usually made at the state or national level,
most schools and libraries that have banned Angelo's book have given similar reasons.
In general, they argue that the memoir's account of sexual assault and the violence of American racism is inappropriate for young readers. But these concerns miss the point of Angelo's story, which uses the same themes to explore the danger of censorship and silence in the lives of young people.
Published in 1969, "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" traces the author's childhood growing up poor, black and female in South America. Central to the narrative is Angelo's experience of sexual abuse when she was seven and a half years old.
Surrounded by adults who consider the subject too taboo to discuss, Angelo decides he is guilty. And when she finally identifies her abuser in court, she is murdered by the guards. Angelo believes her voice is responsible for her death, and by six years, she stops speaking almost entirely.
The book chronicles Angelou's journey to rediscover her voice,
all while exploring the pain and misplaced shame that emerges from avoiding painful realities.
The memoir's narrative voice expertly blends her childhood confusion with her mature understanding, offering readers the insights Angelo lacked as a child. She relates her early experiences of being silenced and shamed to her experience of being poor and black in a segregated United States.
"The black woman," she writes, "is caught in a three-way collision course of male prejudice, white irrational hatred, and black powerlessness."
Her autobiography was one of the first books to openly discuss child sexual abuse, and is particularly important for doing so from the perspective of an abused child.
For centuries, black women writers were limited by stereotypes that characterized them as hypersexual. Fearful of reinforcing these stereotypes, few were willing to write about their sexuality at all.
But Angelo refused to be forced.
He publicly explored his most personal experience without apology or shame. This spirit of defiance charges her writing with a sense of hope that counters the often painful subject of memory.
Recalling how a fellow student defied instructions not to sing the black national anthem in the presence of white guests, she writes, “The tears that fell from many faces were not wiped away by shame. "We were on top again...we survived.
Angelo's memoir was published amid the civil rights and black power movements, when activists were demanding school curricula that reflected the diversity of experiences in America.
But as the book appeared in schools,
it was challenged. In the 1970s and '80s, campaigns to control lesson plans grew across the United States. The American Library Association's most frequently banned or challenged books. On the . became the most-studied non-fiction text
When asked about writing one of the most banned books, On how she felt, Angelou said, "I realized that the people who want my book banned have never read a paragraph of my writing, but have heard that I write about rap. I am They act as if their children do not face the same risks.
And that's scary." He believed that children who are old enough to be victims of sexual exploitation and racism are old enough to read about these subjects. Because listening and learning are necessary to overcome it. is, and the unspeakable is far more dangerous than the unsaid.
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