Why Maya Angelou’s Memoir I Know Why The Caged Chook Sings Turned One of many Most Banned Books of All Time

February 24, 2023

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Some excellent news: Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir I Know Why The Caged Chook Sings, a recounting of her first 17 years, together with a rape on the age of seven or 8 by her mom’s boyfriend, and her subsequent emotional trauma, not leads the American Library Affiliation’s Workplace for Mental Freedom’s record of banned and challenged books.

The dangerous information: there’ll all the time be titles assigned to excessive schoolers that vividly depict younger folks’s precise expertise, that folks and group teams will goal on related grounds.

New African listed a number of the verbatim objections which were leveled in opposition to I Know Why the Caged Chook Sings – that it inspired “profanity”, was stuffed with “descriptions of drug abuse, sexually specific conduct and torture”, preached “bitterness and hatred in opposition to whites”, was “prone to corrupt minors” and contained “inappropriately specific sexual scenes.”

Angelou, who accused the guide’s detractors of not studying greater than two phrases of it, bridled that anybody would “act as if their youngsters are usually not confronted with the identical threats.”

Mollie Godfrey’s TED-Ed lesson, animated by Laura White. above, factors out how radical Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Chook Sings was for a piece of its time:

Her autobiography was one of many first to talk brazenly about youngster sexual abuse and particularly groundbreaking to take action from the angle of the abused youngster. For hundreds of years Black girls writers have been restricted by stereotypes characterizing them as hypersexual. Afraid of reinforcing these stereotypes, few have been keen to put in writing about their sexuality in any respect however Angelou refused to be constrained. She publicly explored her most private expertise with out apology or disgrace.

Robert P. Doyle, vice-president of the Freedom to Learn Basis, revealed that the ALA was impressed to launch Banned Books Week in 1982, when the American Booksellers Affiliation displayed I Know Why the Caged Chook Sings and different works in a cage exterior the doorway to their annual convention:

The show generated quite a lot of press consideration. And the guide group realized that we have now not solely a possibility, however a duty to interact the American public in a dialog in regards to the First Modification because it pertains to books and literature. A coalition was shaped instantly with the authors, publishers, and main distribution facilities (bookstores and libraries) within the U.S. to attract consideration to the significance of the liberty to learn, to publicize threats to that freedom, and to offer data to fight the lack of know-how.

Most of the guide’s excessive profile defenders found it at a formative age, together with rapper Frequent, who determined to develop into a author after encountering it as a fifth grader, and Oprah Winfrey, who was blown away to be taught that one other younger Black lady had additionally endured sexual abuse:

I learn these phrases and thought, “Any individual is aware of who I’m.”

No much less shifting is a touch upon Godfrey’s TED-Ed lesson left by a trainer in Texas:

Caged Chook helped saved my life. Grateful for the day my eleventh grade English trainer at a conservative Christian college handed it to me and stated, “learn this, candy pea”…I nonetheless encourage my college students at a conservative Christian college in TX to learn it.”

“I’m glad you bought the provide help to wanted,” one other viewer responded. “I stay in Florida, and that trainer who helped you’d be charged with a felony right here. I’m useless critical.”