Freeing the Caged Bird: The Politics of Power in Maya Angelou’s Selected Poems:
Paper instructions:
2 pages introduction
Context of the Problem:
This paper will discuss the politics of power in Angelou’s poetry and her attempt to freeing the sexual and racial norms prisoners. How the struggle is depicted and the voice of these prisoners heard are questions to be answered in detail with a number of racial and sexual references prevailing in some of her poems like “Caged bird”, ” Equality”, ” Phenomenal Women”, and ” Still I Rise “.
Research Questions:
Based on the explanation above, the research questions are formulated as follows :
• How the Afro- American feminist marginalized experience is investigated in these selected poems?
• What are the figurative language and imagery related to the cage of gender and race appeared in Maya Angelou poems?
• How does Angelou manage to give the marginalized individual their voice and what they should do in order to resist the oppression?
Method & Procedures:
Maya Angelou’s poetry captures the phenomenon of resistance in the background of post colonialism. The poems are like an articulation of the process for national, racial, and feminine identity.
All her poetry is a kind of painful process of recalling the past broken and disengaged in fragments, and an effort to show the black women seeking to survive against masculine prejudice at social or psychological level in addition to white’s hatred of black and black’s lack of power. It is also about all women in the world, how they placed, how they are represented, and what their attitude should be.
In order to discuss these matters, a thoroughly analysis and explanation will be made to the poems ” “Caged bird”, ” Equality”, ” Phenomenal Women”, and ” Still I Rise “.