Letter to My Daughter, by Maya Angelou
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Letter to My Daughter
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This book consists of twenty-eight chapters consisting of short essays and poems that extract thoughts, memories, and opinions of Maya Angelou. Most of the narrative is autobiographic and includes an intimate account of her upbringing. The book is dedicated to the many women who view the author as a mother figure. Angelou had one son but no biological daughter of her own.
Her stories from her childhood portray a rough and unsettling series of happenings. Raised from an early age by her grandmother, she lived with her mother in SanFrancisco beginning at age thirteen. There was one particularly harrowing encounter with a violent man who nearly killed her. Thanks to the rescuing tenancy of her mother she was saved from a worse outcome. She also describes an unplanned teenage pregnancy which her family accepted with equanimity.
One story I found painfully private and personal was a story about seeking mental health assistance caused by suicidal thoughts that include compulsive thoughts of harming her son. I hope this story combined with the fact that she went on to a later successful life as writer, poet and academic can be a story of hope for readers experiencing similar feelings.
Another story from later in her life I found interesting was a conversation with other faculty of the English Department at Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They had grown up in the past in an environment of segregation so Maya Angelou asked them how "they accepted the idea of segregation? Did they really believe that black people were inferior to white? Did they think that black people were born with a contagious ailment, which made it dangerous to sit next to us on buses while allowing us to cook their meals and even breast-feet their babies?" The best answer seemed to be "Truly, I didn't think about it. It had always been and it seemed it would always be." There were other answers, but all were candid and thoughtful.
Retorical Question:
In order to be an artistic poet, is it first necessary to have a trauma filled life?
Her stories from her childhood portray a rough and unsettling series of happenings. Raised from an early age by her grandmother, she lived with her mother in SanFrancisco beginning at age thirteen. There was one particularly harrowing encounter with a violent man who nearly killed her. Thanks to the rescuing tenancy of her mother she was saved from a worse outcome. She also describes an unplanned teenage pregnancy which her family accepted with equanimity.
One story I found painfully private and personal was a story about seeking mental health assistance caused by suicidal thoughts that include compulsive thoughts of harming her son. I hope this story combined with the fact that she went on to a later successful life as writer, poet and academic can be a story of hope for readers experiencing similar feelings.
Another story from later in her life I found interesting was a conversation with other faculty of the English Department at Winston-Salem, North Carolina. They had grown up in the past in an environment of segregation so Maya Angelou asked them how "they accepted the idea of segregation? Did they really believe that black people were inferior to white? Did they think that black people were born with a contagious ailment, which made it dangerous to sit next to us on buses while allowing us to cook their meals and even breast-feet their babies?" The best answer seemed to be "Truly, I didn't think about it. It had always been and it seemed it would always be." There were other answers, but all were candid and thoughtful.
Retorical Question:
In order to be an artistic poet, is it first necessary to have a trauma filled life?
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