This is a series I started a while back, with Emma Watson’s forays into hiding books all around the world. I haven’t posted one since then - to be honest it completely slipped my mind!
At the moment, we need to stand up for our black siblings, who experience the world so differently from someone who just happened to be born with a different colour skin. Therefore, I wanted to take this opportunity and use my platform to champion an absolute heroine of the literary world, and someone who I admire and love endlessly - Maya Angelou.
Having just spent the last few days making my way through her seminal autobiographical work, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, I want to tell you about why this woman is phenomenal, and why you should add her to your anti-racist reading list.
She speaks so eloquently and frankly about her experiences of growing up as a black girl in the South in 1930s America. No detail is spared, but also nothing is sensationalised past the point of the wonder with which her childlike eyes saw the world. Weight is given to all the right moments - adventures she had when she slept in a scrapyard for a month, the time she had to drive her drunken father home from a party, her tragic rape at the hands of her mother’s lover (oh yeah, big TW for this book - do not read if you’re feeling at all fragile).
It’s all tackled with honesty and confidence, and throughout all the adversity and trials she faced, what shines through is Angelou’s love and appreciation for the world as something wondrous, something to be grateful for, even when it seems impossible.
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