• 4 months ago
Transcript
00:00Man, that guy sure likes to sing.
00:07Dear Tim and Moby,
00:10Who was Maya Angelou?
00:12Thanks, Kimmy.
00:14Maya Angelou was a famous American author and poet.
00:18She was also, well, a lot of things.
00:21An activist, a singer, a dancer, a journalist, an actor, and a director.
00:27She was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri on April 4th, 1928.
00:33Her childhood was rough.
00:35As a young girl, she was abused by her mother's boyfriend.
00:38And for about four years, she wouldn't speak to anyone except her brother.
00:43She moved back and forth between homes, and sometimes she didn't even have a home.
00:48For a while, she lived with other homeless children in abandoned cars at a junkyard.
00:54I know, she went through some really hard times.
00:57But Angelou turned those struggles into great literature.
01:01Her poems, plays, and books explore oppression in lots of different forms.
01:06Oppression of black people by white people, of women by men, and of the poor by the rich.
01:13Her most famous work is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which was published in 1969.
01:19In it, she tells the story of a young girl named Maya growing up in Arkansas in the 1930s.
01:25At that time, the South was segregated.
01:28African Americans had to shop in different stores, live in different parts of town, and even go to different schools.
01:35They were treated like second-class citizens in pretty much every way.
01:40Yeah, it's hard to believe that this wasn't even that long ago.
01:44In the book, racism isn't Maya's only problem.
01:47She goes through some rough events, just like the author did as a child.
01:51Her mother's boyfriend abuses her, and her mother abandons her.
01:55Maya feels trapped by her poverty, her skin color, and her gender.
02:00She thinks that she is totally powerless over her body and her destiny.
02:05But over the course of the book, she learns to assert herself and take control of her life.
02:11Well, the character Maya isn't exactly a younger version of Maya Angelou.
02:17The book is based on her childhood, but it's not a strict autobiography.
02:21That's a book where someone writes their own life history.
02:24Instead, Angelou combined fact and fiction in order to make her story more powerful.
02:30The book also has shifting perspective.
02:33Sometimes the character speaks as an adult, and sometimes as a child.
02:37When you read it, you get two different perspectives on the events of Maya's life.
02:42Both versions of the narrator switch in and out of dialect,
02:45a way of speaking specific to a certain time and place.
02:49Angelou uses the language to evoke the rural south of the 1930s.
02:54Yep, it was praised by critics and became a huge bestseller.
02:59She followed it up with five more autobiographical novels that cover the rest of her life,
03:03as well as several volumes of poetry.
03:06One, called Give Me a Cool Drink of Water Before I Die,
03:09was nominated for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize.
03:12Angelou also had a career in film and television,
03:15writing screenplays, directing films, and appearing in TV programs.
03:19She's even been nominated for Tony and Emmy Awards for acting.
03:23In 1993, she read her poem On the Pulse of Mourning at President Bill Clinton's inauguration.
03:29She became the first African American, and the first woman, to receive this honor.
03:35In 2010, she accepted the Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama,
03:39the country's first African American president.
03:43Even toward the end of her life, Angelou never slowed down.
03:47She was finishing a new book when she passed away in 2014.
03:51She was 86.
03:55Hey, Moby, why don't we open that cage?
04:05Thank you.