By Meredith Roberts
Maya Angelou has many daughters – and many mothers. While none of them gave birth to her, nor did she give birth to any of them, Angelou is drawing on the strong ties and irrevocable bonds that form when females go through life together. “Letter to My Daughter” marks the moments during her seven decades that are noteworthy to her, and writes them as a tribute to the daughters and mothers in her own life. More artistic and poetic than Maria Shriver’s “And One More Thing Before You Go,” Angelou touches on what it means to not only live, but to share that life.
Angelou’s text is difficult to categorize beyond the implications of its genre. The Letter is divided into 28 subsections and within those sections her writing is free form – prose, poetry, dialogue and personal narrative. Her concise and direct storytelling approach leaves us to interpret what each incident means. Sure, she tells us what it means to her, but what it means in the broader scope of humanity and our personal lives is up for our interpretation. In this interpretation, we may end up revealing things about our lives, our thoughts, our judgments and fears. And so Angelou’s book becomes one that we would want to keep on our bedside table to reference after a long day. To read with a pen and revisit the underlined passages. But its ability to capture the human soul and expose our inner workings makes it a private object. We don’t want friends to see what we have underlined – if they ask to borrow it, perhaps we should just buy them a fresh copy.
Of course we have to address the enormity of the author. “Letter to My Daughter” is the first of Angelou’s texts that I have read, but her fame and notoriety as a mixture between activist and peacemaker makes her an interesting character (probably the reason why her autobiographies are so popular – she can write about herself and we listen, rather than having to dream up some type of ridiculous science fiction world just to get an audience like some other authors).
Angelou’s topics range from her early pregnancy to her divorce, racism and nationalism, death and violence. There is no thematic progression, but her stories are loosely chronological. By choosing to focus not on plot but more on the messages of each letter, we are forced to apply the messages to our own lives – not bound by the details of her particular situations.
In her seventh decade of life, Angelou has earned the right to state her opinions (after all, in this book she preaches the obligation of older generations to tell the youth that sagging pants and messy hair are not appealing) and does so fearlessly in this autobiography. She rejects the opinions of sociologists and psychologists who state that rape is a purely violent act and says it must have something to do with sexual aggression – yet her delivery of such serious points is so gracefully done it sounds like a sweet opinion coming from your grandmother’s lips.
Not all topics are so grave – Angelou describes the importance of respect in a scene in which she was drinking an offering of coffee in Morocco. She thought the people were poor and dirty but drew upon the teachings from her late grandmother and drank the coffee anyway. She counted four cockroaches in the one tiny cup, but kept drinking and was sick for a month. Later, she came across the Moroccan tradition that the poor spend most of their spare money on raisins, which they put into drinks and offer to their favorite guests. Angelou’s vomit inducing cockroaches were actually the Moroccan’s sacred raisins.
Such stories are a trait of the older and wiser: the ability to look back and laugh. Angelou is not trying to stake her claim on past moments, she is recognizing them for what they are. She describes moments of embarrassment, glory, shame, and laughter all in the same way: a short sentence with a period at the end. In this way, we must engage in a conversation with Angelou and imagine how she felt.
It is Angelou’s artistry with words and bluntness that strikes me most. When combined with her life experiences, we are exposed to her grace and thoughtfulness. Some passages make our heart ache with sadness, such as how on April 4 for several decades Angelou and Coretta Scott King sent each other flowers and cards to celebrate Angelou’s birthday and mourn the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King, until the tradition ended when Coretta recently passed. Other passages describe “comic accidents” that make us laugh and can be summed up with “I learned that a friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face.”
In the end, it is Angelou’s humanistic and upfront approach to life that I can appreciate, and it seethes out of this text. While many of the situations are specific to her life, the lessons are broad and timeless, making this book an appropriate gift for anyone in our lives – regardless of age, sex, race or religion. She recognizes the differences in people but understands the foundation, and the explanation of this can be found within her letter, in passage 13: “All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unalike.”
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