'History, despite its wrenching pain/ Cannot be unlived, but if faced/ With courage, need not be lived again." Those words of Maya Angelou, from the mesmerising incantation she delivered at the inauguration of Bill Clinton as US president in 1993, were spoken from her own history: the enslavement of African-Americans. But they were also consciously directed at all other cultures – it is not accidental that they resonate so powerfully with Irish conditions as well.
Angelou was one of those rare figures who managed at once to embody the drama of her own time and her own people and to speak for humanity as a whole. Her’s was a voice of elemental anger at indignity and injustice but never one of petty bitterness. Her challenge was one of transcendence: “Do not be wedded forever / To fear, yoked eternally /To brutishness.”
Angelou, who died on Wednesday at the age of 86, was essentially a performer: an actor, singer, dancer, teacher, TV personality as well as a consummate memoirist. Even on the page, in her electrifying 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the poems and autobiographical volumes that followed, it was her personal presence that enraptured readers.
That presence drew its power from a great absence: her’s was the first self-portrait by a black American woman from the Deep South to attain a worldwide audience. What she recreated so vividly was a kind of bearing – the straight-backed, undefeated, defiant stance of a woman who not merely withstood the insults of the Jim Crow system of discrimination but who refused to allow them to define her.
The life that Angelou recounted could have made for a series of "misery lit" shockers – the poverty of rural Arkansas, her rape as a child, single teenage motherhood, the murders of her friends Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. She dealt with all of these things and many more, but with lyricism, wisdom, craft, humour and above with dignity. The end of her much-loved poem And Still I Rise is another incantation: "I rise/ I rise/ I rise." Whenever people rise above insult and bitterness, Angelou's spirit will rise with them.
