I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

“I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings liberates the reader into life simply because Maya Angelou confronts her own life with such moving wonder, such a luminous dignity”. With these words, James Baldwin, who mentored and motivated Maya Angelou to write her autobiographical novel, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, describes the hope that Maya Angelou harboured for a better world, strongly supported by her love of literature and frequent retreats into the depths of literary worlds. The ever-religious Angelou resorted to the teachings of the Holy Bible to comprehend her tumultuous life and find her identity, she depended on Shakespeare’s Medieval plays to free herself from the burning coals of racial prejudice, and finally she found the means to make sense of her own sexuality and gender peculiarities through Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Jane Eyre’s Wuthering Heights. Throughout her novel, Maya has used these various literary works of literature to understand and cope with her challenges, to overcome these major pain points in her life and to emerge as one of the greatest female inspirations in the modern world. An adamant Christian, Angelou took comfort from the Bible to cope with the uncertainties in her life, to determine her identity, an important theme of this novel. ‘Of all the needs a lonely child has, the one that must be satisfied, if there is going to be hope, and a hope of wholeness, is the unshaking need for an unshakable God. My pretty black brother was my Kingdom Come’ (Angelou 4:19). Here Maya uses repetition to stress the importance of a staunch need for religion to keep oneself grounded, and metaphorical allusion to refer to her brother as the Savior from the Lord’s Speech who would deliver her from her life of misery. In Maya’s family, the Ten Commandments were certainly followed and provided some structure to their lives. In a humorous twist, Maya’s grandmother changes some of the Commandments with her own. “‘Thou shall not be dirty’ and