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I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Quotes

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“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” Essay

Imagine yourself on a train being sent to another state by your parents, at the age of 3 years old. You feel as if your parents simply don’t care about you anymore. Well, this is what happened to Maya Angelou. In her childhood, she dealt with problems such as parental abandonment, home displacement, sexual assault, trauma, and more. In “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou, she reveals moments of her life to show the impact trauma from sexual assault can have and how she relieved herself from that trauma as well as recovering from her abandonment throughout her childhood.

To show her issue with abandonment, the author shows how Maya felt when she got cut by Dolores and her father took her to take care of …show more content…

This quote shows how Maya’s father seems too “embarrassed” to take Maya to the hospital because he didn’t want to make a fool of himself or look bad in front of others. This shows Big Bailey’s selfishness and Maya’s unworthiness to him because he’d rather save himself from embarrassment rather than take his hurt daughter to get care of her wound. Maya was also ashamed of bringing shame on her father if people found out that she had been cut by her father’s girlfriend. How Big Bailey perceives his daughter is a lot different from how Daddy Clidell perceives Maya. Instead of being ashamed of Maya, Daddy Clidell is more “proud” of his daughter and Maya describes him as “the first father [she] would know”. Another piece of evidence from the book expressing how the author relieves her trauma of abandonment is when Maya ran away from her father’s house and found the junkyard when she said, “I was a loose kite in a gentle wind floating with only my will for an anchor” (Angelou 251). This quote uses a metaphor to describe Maya’s situation. This shows how Maya is always “floating” around in the “wind” because she never has one place to stay and call home.

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