Racial protest, identity, words, and form in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The fact that the fantasy passage is an act of imagination is also significant, since it hints that imagination and storytelling can be forms of resisting racism. It is natural to read the fantasy passage in this way because of its placement immediately after the apostrophe to "Black known and unknown poets" at the end of the graduation chapter (156). Because of this passage praising black poets, we are all the more inclined to see the imagined, italicized, fantasy passage five pages later as itself an instance of poetry. For one, the apostrophe includes in the category of "poets" anyone who uses the power of the word--"include preachers, musicians and blues singers" (156). Thus, anyone who uses language to describe pain and suffering and their causes (i. e., blues singers) belongs in the category of poets. According to this definition, the author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a blues singer, and therefore a poet, too, since telling why the caged bird sings is an instance of describing pain and suffering and their causes, an instance of the blues. Loosely defined, poetry is also an act of imagination, and thus the italicized fantasy passage in the dentist chapter is poetic, since it is an act of imagination. In fact, it is the first instance of Maya being a poet, and thus the first step towards the far more monumental act of writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings itself. Poetry, in all its forms, can be an act of resistance. The graduation chapter has already made that clear, but the dentist chapter makes it clear that the victim of racial oppression can herself become a poet and use her poetry as a form of resistance. Maya had begun to learn the positive power of poetry and of words in the Mrs. Flowers chapter. Now she begins the process of harnessing the power of words to positive effect, a process that concludes with the composition almost thirty years later of the very book in hand.

The final instance of not-quite-outright resistance is the scam Red Leg tells (in chapter twenty-nine) of pulling on a white con man. This episode is not the open, active protest of Maya's integration of the street-cars, since it does not involve a direct confrontation with the white racist, but it is closer to it than any of the previous examples of resistance because the white person ends up knowing that he has been had at his own game. The inclusion of the episode is at first glance irrelevant to the heroine's personal development, but Angelou's comments at the end of the chapter make clear how the passage fits with the rest of the book. For one, Angelou remarks that, "It wasn't possible for me to regard

Red Leg and his accomplice

as criminals or be anything but proud of their achievements" (190). The reason for her pride is that these black con artists are achieving revenge for wrongs incurred against the entire race: "We are the victims of the world's most comprehensive robbery. Life demands a balance. It's all right if we do a little robbing now" (190-91). The scam is, therefore, another example of fighting back against white domination and racist oppression, an example that, like the others, meets with the author's approval.