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Analysis Of I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings By Maya Angelou

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In her autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou portrays the struggles as a young Black girl, growing up in the South. Through difficult and scaring experiences, Maya Angelou writes her autobiography to deliver her message. Angelou embodies a “caged bird” in her autobiography to describe the hardships of racism and oppression she faces as a young Black girl.
As the title of the autobiography reads, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sing is the metaphor Maya Angelou utilizes to get her message across. Maya Angelou and her brother Bailey, ages three and four respectively, are turned over to the care of their grandmother in the segregated Stamps, Arkansas. From a very young age, Angelou and Bailey observe their parents’ marriage fall apart and are sent away after their divorce. Both Angelou and Bailey feel rejected and worthless after moving to a segregated southern town such as Stamps. In her autobiography, Angelou also struggles with self-image. In the beginning of the autobiography, the text, “...when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten? My light blue eyes…” (2) expresses the idea that to Angelou, beauty meant physically looking like a typical young white girl.
After moving to Stamps, Angelou enjoys reading and communicates that “[she] met and fell in love with William Shakespeare. He was my first white

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