To kill a caged bird

The caged bird sings because it must,

it must or die,

maybe it must and die

— Maya Angelou

On April 4, 1928, in St Louis, Missouri, a dead child is born — killed long before she is welcomed into the world, and long after. A foolish affair, really, to walk a path so graceful in a world where your pain is the currency.

So, as the order of the world commands, Maya Angelou is dead way before she is born. Killed by a world that sees her skin before her soul, her womanhood before her words.

Killed by history, by silence, by the weight of what she is never meant to be, and the weight of what she became anyway.

And yet, on April 4, 1928, she arrives — fragile, black, and foolishly full of breath.

The world told Maya what she needed to be happy, to churn the wheels of submission — a whisper, a shadow, a name not meant for books or stages. But something in her does not die. Something in her insists on a song.

She should have looked around and learnt the role the world demanded of the likes of her. Her father, Bailey Johnson, worked as a doorman alongside being a navy dietician, and her mother, Vivian Johnson, a nurse, dealt cards to make ends meet.

But Maya had different plans. In a world run by an underground economy of female rage, mothering your pain so divinely is the only rebellion.

How could the world not kill her more?

Before she was Maya Angelou, she was Marguerite Annie Johnson. Before she was a poet, she was a streetcar conductor (the first black woman to be one in San Francisco), a fry cook, a dancer, a singer, a prostitute, and a madam. Before she is celebrated, she is condemned.

Before she is free, she is bound.

But she sings, because she must.

“The caged bird sings because it must. It must, or die,” she tells Oprah Winfrey in an interview, talking about her poem Caged Bird. “Or maybe it must and die, I don’t know. But it must sing.”

She does not learn to hate. Not in the way she is supposed to. Instead, she commits the gravest sin of all — she extends compassion. She does not hoard her suffering, does not barter it for power. Instead, she spills it onto the page, into the air, offering it freely and naively, hoping the world will know what to do with such tenderness.

“Sometimes the melody arrived at in the cage is much more fetching, much more appealing, much more profound, much more poignant than the melody arrived at by the bird who’s on the loose,” she tells a sparkly-eyed Oprah. “For the caged bird sings of freedom, freedom, freedom — let me out of here!”

As the world preaches of leaving the past behind, she carries her cage with her.

So, who could blame the world for killing her one more time?

It would have been easy to believe that the world never tried to silence her. After all, history remembers Dr Angelou — the poet, writer, director, civil rights activist and journalist, who, despite not having a formal college education, was awarded over 50 honorary degrees.

The Dr Angelou who, even in the winter of her life, stood tall before the world as former US President Barack Obama draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around her shoulders. She did not flinch, did not bow.

But this is the story of Maya — who unabashedly sang of men, and God, and of the consequential suffering.

For all intents and purposes, she could have had a more ‘normal’ life. A single, black teenaged mother and a sex worker, she could have been what the world makes of women like Maya.

A stereotype, a statistic, a subject of pity.

She could have played dead, but she knew better.

“You may trod me in the very dirt; But still, like dust, I’ll rise,” says Maya in Still I Rise.

The world could not kill her. She re-birthed herself a woman every time. Not the woman you see in Women’s Day cards — the mother, the caretaker, the lover — whose praise is attributed solely to how useful she is to men.

Maya re-births herself a woman — all-encompassing and immaculate in herself. Her own ancestor, she sings war-cries in native tongues.

So she stands beside Malcolm X and beside Martin Luther King Jr — her voice an instrument of revolution. She moves to Cairo and joins The Arab Observer. She travels to Ghana and learns the languages of power, of protest, of belonging.

She often falls in love, and in loss — because what is love if not another lesson in foolishness?

On May 28, 2014, at the age of 86, Dr Angelou left the world, her body finally resting.

But Maya? She refused to be killed; refused to be made an example of what ‘good girls’ should do; refused to embrace catharsis in a world that ostracises victimisation.

Her words still walk among us, still rise.

Even the Bombay High Court has quoted the poet, in a ruling that allowed a Hindu woman to be in a live-in relationship with a Muslim man.

“‘Love recognises no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope,” the order read — Maya refuses to die.

Rest easy, Dr Angelou. Well-behaved women seldom make history.

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