After visiting Arnolfini’s latest exhibition Still I Rise (running until the 15th of December), I was predictably reminded of Angelou’s eponymous poem. Strangely it became one of those instances where once your consciousness is re-awakened to something you find it hard to stop seeing that same thing everywhere.
The exhibition itself is brilliant and affirming. Notably for me, it featured a wall of post-it notes, where fellow exhibition goers had written experiences of gendered discrimination, these were disturbingly monolithic. Simultaneously utterly hopelessly and universally, these stories morphed into the handwriting of children already able to recognise the disparity in how they were being treated. The frustration and anger of these younger women ebbed and flowed, tragically, into recognition of inevitability (but never acceptance) in the instances from older girls.
Then watching Still I Rise the documentary, and listening to Angelou’s friends and contemporaries talking about the profound effect of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings , it became apparent that it is unfortunately this shared mistreatment, no matter how personal and private it may seem which will empower. It goes without saying that her plight was also greatly informed by her position as a black american, and on living with the doubleness of racism and misogyny, I cannot comment. Angelou’s writing is precise and intimate, and personal, she is writing in the first person singular, about the third person plural, just the same as the post it notes on the noticeboard.
It struck me, watching the documentary, the extent to which Angelou impacted the lives of those she met. And what an incredibly textured and interesting life she lived, working with Malcolm X, living in Ghana, protesting, singing in strip clubs, dancing, acting and bringing Tupac Shakur to tears, I may have just been ignorant, but I think how little we know of her life is symptomatic of our continuous aversion to the successful woman, but also the ‘complex’ woman. Or in other words a normal person.
I think Maya Angelou is in every way the type of figurehead we may need: she undermines any ageist notions, working into her old age; she moved without hesitation from the stage of sex work to political activism. She undercut the stereotyping of women, in it’s entirety – and wrote this into literature. I would highly recommend both the documentary and exhibition, as well as her literature, for a moment of stillness and empowerment.