Poem And Racism In Maya Angelou's Caged Bird

“Caged Bird” is a poem written by Maya Angelou where she juxtaposes between the free bird and the caged bird, portraying the immenseness of their differences; however, the poem is so much more than this comparison between two birds. When we dig deeper into the words which were used to craft this poem, we can identify the powerful hidden message behind it. The message behind this poem is actually about racism and the ugly truth of an era when the white race was superior to the black race. It seems that Maya Angelou is trying to bring racial issues to the light by using powerful metaphors and compares the white community, the “free bird”, versus the black community, the “caged bird”. The words that are used in this poem can help distinguish these

I will discuss this poem further with the help of the claims of two authors we have studied in class, from Stuart Hall’s “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defense of Poetry”.

The way that Maya Angelou describes the caged bird and the free bird creates a clear contrast between the two. The poem commences with a stanza about the free bird and how it “dares to claim the sky.” We can tell that the free bird is powerful as the fact that it can claim the sky, or in other words dominate the world, is within the free bird’s reach. This clearly signifies how the white community in the United States was superior to the black community, and therefore the white community was undoubtedly more powerful and, historically, it is known that the whites have reveled in social and economic privileges, whereas the blacks have not. White supremacy was demonstrated everywhere in that time and age, and Maya Angelou has very clearly depicted the struggles of the black community during that time from the point of view of the “caged bird”. Stuart Hall, in “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference” argues that “there are the great differences of