How to Read Maya Angelou?!

Maya Angelou (public domain)

I have acquired some allergies.  They make me quite miserable--and I seem to be under some stress because of these miseries.  One night recently, I found myself flinching at every sudden noise, ready to cry or explode or both.  I decided to decamp to the bedroom and my reading chair, in hope of some relief.  I found it in reading Maya Angelou's Even the Stars Seem Lonesome.  That calmed me considerably.  I enjoyed her essays on sensuality, on aging, on art and poetry.  I appreciated her use of African proverbs and references to social organization and customs in Africa.  I wept at her description of a "rural museum" in Louisiana and her descriptions of the horrors of slavery.  

As I did so, I wondered at my reactions.  I read half of the volume that night as a means of relaxing.  I read the remainder the following morning with some puzzlement.  Both reading sessions were pleasurable on several levels.  Angelou's writing is smooth and flowing, and it's easy--and pleasurable--to go with her flow.  My puzzlement came from external sources that made me try to understand exactly how I am expected to read her writing.  

Maya Angelou was Black, writing as a Black woman.  She was famous.  She was wealthy.  She was so many things I am not that it is silly to try to list them all.  Nonetheless, her writing resonates with me on several levels.  Age.  Sex and gender.  Living in the South but not actually feeling part of the South.  Love of  words.  Short term residence in Africa.  It also resonates when she talks about slavery and the history that is largely unacknowledged in this country.  It resonates when our experiences and desires take different pathways.  I am not a mother, although I have done some mothering (I am a greater success as a stand-in grandmother), and I read her reflections on her mother and her son from the same (shared) standpoint--and feel that I understand what she is saying.

The puzzlement comes from an earlier reading session--All God's Children Need Dancing Shoes--a few weeks ago, just prior to joining a Zoom session intended to focus on white supremacy.  That session was intended to discuss Layla Saad's Me and White Supremacy, which I had, admittedly, mostly skimmed and only read in bits.  Just coming from a recent reading of Angelou's life experiences in Ghana and having my own experience well in mind from past years in Kenya and Tanzania, I had my own ideas about approaching the issues raised by Saad--including some questions about her perspective and experience.  To me, these ideas and questions are all part of inquiry and seeking understanding.  To the facilitator, they were an expression of my race and my racism.  

That kind of attitude took me aback.  The facilitator (who, by the way was also White) seemed to be taking a fairly dogmatic approach to a set of ideas that were actually the product of someone else's thought and experience--without much actual scientific research.  What has troubled me since then is the increasing sense that some of the approaches I am seeing to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (with or without the inclusion of Justice) seem more divisive that healing or binding.  Indeed, as I learn more about Ethical Culture, I am finding some of these discussions very much out of sync with respect for the inherent worth of the each individual, including respect for diversity of thought as well as diversity of identity.  I am seeing an emphasis on race (and sexual orientation) with disregard for age, disability, or other factors that combine to make us all unique individuals.  My concern is less with the content of the discussions than the manner, which sometimes belittles or demeans those who are being criticized for the results of systems not of their own creation or actions not of their own doing.

Perhaps I am being naive.  Perhaps this is a reflection of White privilege, White fragility, and White supremacy.  And perhaps I am diverting myself from my central concern:  How can/may a White woman read Maya Angelou?

Returning to that central concern, my response is that a White woman may indeed read Angelou.  She will bring her own experiences to the reading.  Some of them will parallel Angelou's own experiences and allow Angelou's writing to resonate deeply.  Some of them will not parallel Angelou's experiences.  There may be some additional learning needed to approach Angelou's writing--and, very clearly, some learning to be taken from it.  There may be points at which both writer and reader will miss each other.  In reading, Angelou, I am sometimes aware of our differences, but I am also completely drawn in to the universality of her emotions and relationships.  We have a number of social problems related to race in the US and much work to do to resolve them.  Losing sight of our connection to each other is not, I believe, the way to solve the problem.  Finding our commonality, seeing the threads that link us together, realizing how much we are the same is, I believe, a better way.