Maya Angelou (34 page)

There is yet another strong undercurrent in the final autobiography, one that has been virtually ignored by reviewers: the theme of
sexuality
. From her first to her final autobiography, Angelou had been open about her sexual relationships. One will recall the rape and the pregnancy in
Caged Bird
, and her hesitations in the second volume when she revealed to her family that she had been a prostitute. She introduces the sexual motif in the early pages of
Song
when she compares her lover to a hurricane: “He was a powerful West African who had swept into my life with the urgency of a Southern hurricane” (6). She feels “uprooted” in the presence of “the African,” who “blew down all of my firmly held beliefs about decorum” (
Song
, 6). A similar metaphor of being swept off her feet recurs in her description of Jimmy Baldwin, who was “a whirlwind who stirred everything and everybody. He lived at a dizzying pace and I loved spinning with him” (145).

Other sexual moments spin, percolate, and spill over. After Maya and Dolly regret their attempt to get even with their cheating lover, Angelou describes their misgivings in two sexually charged passages. Noticing the African's embarrassment, she confesses: “I had meant to prick him, not pierce him.” Switching verbs, she continues: “Well, sister, we couldn't swallow the big cat easily. He seems to have stuck in our throats” (171).
Prick
,
pierce
,
swallow
,
throats
: these words have sexual innuendos.

In a more philosophical section of
Song
Angelou presents a serious discussion of sexuality (157–60), developing her concept of “frictional electricity.” She explains “frictional electricity” as a source of sexual energy that runs between people, sending “luscious thoughts” from one body to another by way of the hands, the mouth, and the eyes. Although she does not identify her source for this concept, she is possibly referring to the theories of Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian psychoanalyst (1897–1957) who had argued that sexual experience was a “bioelectric” phenomenon, a type of energy that “moved through and outside the organism” (Bakhtunin, “The Art of Making Love,” January 15, 2014. Web. February 5, 2015). Angelou claims that her quotient of “frictional electricity” is low. The evidence in
Song
suggests otherwise.

Near the end of
Song
, on her way to Harlem after Martin Luther King's assassination, she “turned [her] thoughts over as one turns pages in a book.” Suddenly, her writer-thoughts are interrupted by a rather sexual moment, when she hears an eruption of noise, “followed by thuds like the sound of buffaloes running into each other at rutting time” (188–89). Her comparison of African American protesters to rutting beasts baffles the mind.
Buffalo bulls usually “rut” or “herd” or attack another bull when they are in pursuit of a female (“Yellowstone National Park: Bison in August,” Web. February, 3, 2015). Yet there is no sexual competition implied in this simile; the raucous rutting seems to exist only in the ears of the narrator.

Putting Angelou's life in perspective, she wrote
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
at the age of seventy-four to describe a woman who had just celebrated her fortieth birthday and was experiencing a new burst of sexual freedom. She had said farewell to her son, who was no longer her major responsibility. She had left Ghana and its restrictions on women to reestablish her roots in America, where she was able to immerse herself in a new freedom of self-expression. She never mentions female orgasm or contraception or the menopause, topics being widely explored during the late 1960s, during what has been called the Sexual Revolution. Yet
Song
makes it clear that Angelou and her good friend Dolly McPherson enjoyed sex, joked about their shared African lover, and were able, as liberated women, to challenge his arrogance and his duplicity.

Possibly Maya Angelou had read several of the influential articles and books being published in the 1960s by Masters and Johnson, Anne Koedt, Mary Jane Sherfey, and other theorists. However, rarely did chroniclers of the so-called Sexual Revolution address the particular needs of the black female. Betty Friedan, for example, virtually ignored black women in her book,
The Feminine Mystique
(1963), directing her arguments toward the bored white housewives of the American middle and upper classes (see Ashley Fetters, “4 Big Problems with ‘The Feminine Mystique,” 2013. Web. February 13, 2015). In an article published in the black-oriented magazine
Ebony
in August 1966, Kermit Mehlinger observed that the civil rights chant, “Freedom Now,” also signaled “more freedom for the Negro woman to enjoy and understand the sexual aspects of her being” (rpt. Escoffier 2003, 45). It seems that several factors contributed to Angelou's confident sexuality: first, the emotional and financial support she received from her family when she was pregnant teenager; second, her open relationships with men of different classes and ethnicities; third, her enormous range of independent work and life experiences in America, Europe, and Africa; and finally, her keen sense of self, as articulated in the six autobiographies.

Of the many stylistic techniques that recur in
Song
, the dynamic portrait or vignette has received the most positive response from the critics. According to Margaret Busby,
Song
is “a series of beautifully crafted vignettes”
(2002, 2). Angelou had used the technique of portraiture in all of the volumes, from the nurturing Mrs. Flowers of
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
to the endearing houseboy, Kojo, in
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes
. In the sixth autobiography the technique of portraiture occasionally dominates the action, three major exceptions being the depictions of Dolly McPherson, of their African lover, and of James Baldwin.

A few of Angelou's vignettes in
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
are mini-studies of famous African Americans, characters who appear offstage but who give the illusion of being fully realized participants in the action. Thus the reader meets Malcolm X, but mainly in a phone call and in a fully quoted letter. The reader briefly encounters Martin Luther King Jr. but only for a fleeting instant following a speech he had given in New York City. The reader becomes acquainted with the Black Panthers, but only in Maya's conversations with James Baldwin.

Angelou's genuine gifts for characterization and for heightened dramatic effects are at times overshadowed by her tendency to philosophize. It must be remembered that
Song
was written in 2002, a number of years after the publication of her highly successful books of musings,
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now
(1993) and
Even the Stars Look Lonesome
(1997). Both of these books combine autobiographical recollections and moral observations, a mixture that works well enough in a collection of essays but that does not provide the more direct emotional contact of customary autobiographical form.

The narrative is frequently interrupted by her ruminations on motherhood; by her lengthy discourse on “curiosity” (69–70); and by the speculations on “frictional electricity.” Nowhere is this problem more evident than in the concluding chapter of
Song
, where almost every sentence is prefaced by the clause “I thought about.” She thinks about black women, about the history of “human beings,” about “naturally bellicose creatures,” about “the singing of angels,” about the “music of the spheres,” and finally about writing a book. This almost-endless series of abstractions closely resembles the airplane-thoughts with which S
ong
begins.

Surpassing her inclination toward moralizing is Angelou's questionable use of metaphor, a literary technique that has brought her praise as well as severe criticism. Shortly after the publication of
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
, black poet Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) wrote a book review for the
Los Angeles Times
, accusing Angelou of “dead metaphors,” “sweeping generalities,” “empty phrases,” and “clumsy similes.” The review was vitriolic, with no kind words for the famous autobiographer. Coleman, winner of a 1984 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, claimed that “extravagant
statements come without explication, and schmooze substitutes for action”; retold disasters—the car accidents, the rape—are “milked for residual drama” (rpt.
Salon
, 3, October 21, 2002.

The review was so controversial that Eso Won, a black-operated bookstore in Los Angeles, canceled Coleman from its lineup of speakers. Although many Angelou fans were infuriated by Coleman's attack, other found her criticism to be justified. Thulani Davis of the
Village Voice
, for example, defended Coleman's position, regretting that there was no suitable outlet for black reviewers to express negative responses to other black writers (September 4–10, 2002, 1–6). Coleman sheepishly admitted that “to this date I have received more attention for my review of Maya Angelou's
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
than anything else I have ever written” (“Black on Black,” 2002, 12).

Reader-response critics may have different approaches to literature (feminist, psychological, deconstructive), but they share the conviction that a literary text has no definitive meaning in itself and that the presence of a reader is a necessary aspect of any literary evaluation (Peter J. Rabinowitz, in
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism
, 1994, 606–9). Reader-response criticism, which attained the height of its popularity in the 1970s and the 1980s, presumes that a literary text cannot exist as a separate entity. This form of inquiry marks the disappearance of “the expert,” the one who promises the only possible interpretation. Each person makes his or her own judgments based on his or her experience as the “reader.” According to Jane Tompkins, “Reader-response critics argue against locating meaning in the text, against seeing the text as a fixed object, and in favor of a criticism that recognizes the reader's role in making meaning” (1980, 225).

Stanley Fish (1938–), the author of
Is There a Text in This Class?
(1980), helped to establish reader-response as a pedagogical tool in the classroom. Other practitioners who incorporated students into their theoretical assumptions include David Bleich (“Motives and Truth in Classroom Communication,” 1975) and John Clifford (“Transactional Teaching and the Literary Experience,” 1979). In practicing and illustrating their theories, reader-response critics have relied heavily on a student audience. While students have traditionally been limited to the classroom in expressing their responses to a designated piece of literature, an increasing number are trying to change this teacher-student dynamic by self-publishing their opinions on the Internet, in the form of blogs or essays or chats or mini-books.

The Internet can also be a refuge for retired professors who no longer have classrooms but who believe in the democratic assumptions of reader-oriented criticism. By examining readers' comments from three different websites accessed in January 2015 (
amazon.com
,
goodreads.com
, and
barnesandnoble.com
), it is possible to measure readers' responses to
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
, with no professor present to react in disfavor on matters of spelling, grammar, or other lapses. The readers who comment on their reading experience are all volunteers, free agents who operate outside of the classroom and beyond the authority of judgmental academic communities. All readers—ordinary, informed, or otherwise—have at their disposal brief customer reviews, overall ratings, a statistical overview, and, in the case of Good Reads, occasional photographs of the reviewers.

The fifty-one readers who wrote reviews for
Amazon.com
gave
Song
4.3 out of 5 stars. Only two of the reviews were negative. The ones voted “most helpful” applauded Maya's “strength to rise again” or admired
Song
as the “continuation of a rich and full life.” One reviewer, responding negatively, found the sixth autobiography to be “disappointingly thin.” The Amazon site allows the reader to closely examine all fifty-one reviews and to write a customer review, if so desired.

Twenty readers responded to
Song
on the Barnes and Noble site, awarding it a rating of 4.5 out of 5—a slightly higher percentage than Amazon readers but based on a fewer number of responders. Three gave the book 3 stars or below, while fourteen loved it. Reviewers had the options of creating a pen name or of submitting their evaluations anonymously. Opinions were mainly positive: “
excellent
,” “
great
,” “
incredible
,” “
outstanding
.” Because there was no classroom, there was no need to receive a grade, as would the reader who wrote in Angelou's favor: “People who criticise Maya for her endever obviosuly are the reason why the quakity of humans continues to decline.”

The “Community Reviews” section of Good Reads boasted a total of 1,041 ratings, with eighty-four full reviews. The overall approval for the sixth autobiography earned the lowest percentage of the three sites: 4. 13 out of 5. Evaluations such as “
beautiful
,” “
a page-turner
,” “
easy reading
,” and “
refreshing in its beauty
” were typical. Natalie thought that
A Song Flung Up to Heaven
would be “more meaningful and enjoyable for people if they've read all of her previous autobiographies in the series.” Another reviewer particularly appreciated the “social commentary.” Still another confused Angelou's
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
with Harper Lee's 1960 novel,
To Kill a Mockingbird
. It is interesting that at least three readers preferred the audio version of
Song
to the written version.