ABSTRACT
For many readers, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings stands out as a memorable, even life-changing book. Some readers have written autobiographically about reading this autobiographical text. In this essay, I look briefly at some of this writing about reading Angelou’s book, asking how it has affected different readers in the US and UK at different moments. For many, Angelou’s representation of Black experience in the American South, and of childhood sexual abuse, is crucial. I propose that for a reader such as myself, living in the wake of the widespread discrediting of ‘recovered memories’ that emerged in the 1990s, I Know Why could serve to destabilise the boundary between uncontested childhood memories and discredited memories of abuse.
When I was 17, I lived for a month or two with a friend in a shared house. A couple in their 30s lived in a room upstairs, and we sometimes encountered each other in the kitchen, making tea and toast. One evening, we joined them at the table next to the kitchen. We drank beer and talked into the night. Janine had spent a few months in a state of depression, barely moving from her room, but was beginning to have better days. Something that had helped her, she said, was a book by Maya Angelou called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
For a long time, I had a vague intention of reading that book. I lost touch with Janine, but about 20 years later, having developed an unanticipated university career in literary studies, with a growing interest in life stories, and an awareness of the importance of reading beyond the white canon, I ordered I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I still did not read it though, for another few years. Then last Christmas, I started making my way through, and it shook me to the core. Or rather, it set off a gentle earthquake of recognition, somewhere around the base of my lungs.
I’ve done a lot of research into reading experiences. I’ve done oral history interviews with readers to find out about peoples’ memories of books. Many of us forget a lot of what we read, so I wanted to know why some things stay with us. Embarking on a project called ‘Memories of Fiction: An Oral History of Readers’ Life Stories’ (2014–2018)Footnote1, I was thinking that there might be for many readers one or two, or perhaps three, transformational, memorable reading experiences—moments of discovery, life-changing moments of new understanding, of new insights into oneself or the world or something. I had not yet read I Know Why and had no such memorable reading experiences of my own, but maybe somewhere amongst my reasoning, I remembered Janine. One of the findings of our project, however, was that for many readers, or at least most of those we talked to, there are no such transformational memorable moments. So, I reflected instead on other kinds of remembering, and other things like the everyday value of reading in helping people to live their lives (see, for example, Trower Citation2020).
Two colleagues also working on the project found that reading tends to be more transformational in LGBTQ+ lives. Where there is a lack of understanding and a need to find community, books can be important in finding a way in, finding recognition and other people with similar experiences to connect with. Both these colleagues had their own transformational moments of reading, too, and both were younger than me. I wasn’t expecting to read anything very much transformational being now in my 40s, and relatively heterosexual, and middle class, and white. So that Christmas, despite its reputation, I Know Why was a surprise.
Around the time I first heard of this book, at the age of 17, Melba Wilson published Crossing the Boundary: Black Women Survive Incest (1993). In that book, she described her own experience of reading Angelou’s book over twenty years previously—soon after its publication in 1969 (40–46). Wilson, an African-American woman, had grown up in a semi-rural town in south-east Texas and had since moved to London, where she wrote and published this new book with its reflections on reading I Know Why.
Three readers then, decades and continents apart. Wilson, reading I Know Why in a Texan town in her early twenties, in about 1970; Janine reading it in a south-west British town in her thirties, in the 1990s; before I finally read it in my forties, about 50 years after it was published, over the Christmas of 2020. Like Wilson, I had moved to London, and am also now writing about reading that same book. For both of us, and also I imagine for Janine, the book helped us to recognise and understand certain life experiences and to make connections between ourselves and another.
Same book, different readers. Thousands and thousands more. Tamara Burke, the originator of the #MeToo movement, is another. In a speech in 2018, she described herself as a regular girl from the Bronx whose life changed aged 11, when her feminist mother allowed her to read I Know Why (in the mid-1980s). Having suffered two sexual assaults, she found huge relief in knowing she was not alone—‘I felt like, there were two of us’. Those were the seeds, she said, of #MeToo (Citation2019).
For Wilson, I Know Why ‘touched something in me’ (Citation1993, 40). It was her first encounter with a publication about incest in the black community, and she also refers to a kind of affinity with both this book and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) due to a shared southern US background. Her identification with these books, she notes, ‘owes much to the empathy I have with their descriptions of rural, small-town black life. It was my reality too, growing up as I did in a small south-east Texas town’ (40). Hence the ‘immediate kinship’ she felt upon reading about Angelou’s grandmother’s country store, which seemed to mirror her own childhood visits to the local country store to shop for her grandmother, who allowed her to keep the change:
It rarely amounted to more than a few pennies. But the delight in deciding whether to spend it on sweets or cookies or better still, saving up for a bottle of Coca-Cola from the Nehi Soda refrigerated box where the soft drinks were kept, makes me smile thirty-odd years later. (41)
It was then that I began the process of thinking about who I was and where I’d come from and what had contributed to me being the person that I was, in a serious way. I began to think about myself in a whole new way – as someone, if you will, whose experience counted for something. Began to feel that those everyday, ordinary things – which help to make up mine and the collective fabric of all black women’s lives – were important to remember, record and pass on to those who came after. (41)
Different histories, different geographies, different lives, encountering this one book. Wilson’s experience of reading it was in some ways utterly different from mine. Her connection with the book through the shared everydayness of growing up in a southern US town was in part why it could have such an impact on her sense of identity and could give her a sense that her experiences mattered. What does it mean when a white woman, living in another country and another century, also feels touched by this book? I cannot possibly feel the same connection.
It was also the first time that Wilson had read about incest in the black community. She observed how black communities had kept incest hidden, unspoken, partly in order to avoid playing into prejudices and stereotypes of black deviance, to avoid furthering the marginalisation of African Americans. By not only talking about her experiences but by publishing them, placing them in the public sphere, Angelou was breaking through silences and allowing readers to see their experiences of incestuous abuse acknowledged and shared. Wilson is among the many readers who could see their experiences in this respect, too, represented in the book—but again this is in a specific context of the silencing of incest, of its lack of representation in print, which is not so much the case in twenty-first century Britain.
Following the account of Coca-Cola and ordinary things being remembered and recorded and passed on to other readers, Wilson wrote: ‘But even more importantly, here too was my experience of incest’ (41). Reading the incestuous scenes between Marguerite and her mother’s boyfriend had an effect on Wilson that we might now describe as triggering: ‘It could have been me and my father, in the Negro section of Beaumont; for it awakened within me the same sense of guilt, fear and confusion that I had experienced as a child with my father’ (42). But this is a positive process. It helps her to see that her own difficult experiences with her father were not unique to her, but shared. It also helps her to acknowledge not only the pain of incest but the feeling of special closeness she had felt with her father, as Marguerite had with her mother’s boyfriend:
The watershed I experienced was twofold: first, I began to think that this secret, which I’d kept so close to my bosom for so many years, was maybe, just maybe, a lot bigger than just me and my father. Secondly, it was then that I began the process of facing up to all of my feelings – including my feelings about enjoying the closeness and intimacy with my father.
It was a turning point for me. […] The power of those words, of seeing my experience verbalised, will remain one of my most unforgettable moments. (44–45)
Can I be comparably touched by this book, considering my geographical and racial and historical distance, considering that I have never even visited the southern US states, considering that I have never been subjected to racism, and that sexual abuse is far less hidden in the twenty-first century Britain. Feminism and charity-led media campaigns have made it clear that childhood abuse including incest is common. If I Know Why helped me to recognise and gain an understanding of my childhood experiences of abuse, I could hardly have thought that such experiences were unusual, that I was alone. Why would this book have any such memorable effect on me—or on another reader today living in a comparably distanced context from Walker and Angelou’s? Why would I feel a new sense in reading this book of understanding, affirmation, and connection?
Vast aspects of the book lay beyond my experiences and were an opportunity to learn about the sufferings and triumphs and everyday lives of people I didn’t know. If, amongst all this, the descriptions of sexual abuse resonated with my own experiences, there was another aspect of the book that felt recognisable. It was the way her mother’s boyfriend ignored her after those incidents that seemed to remind me of how a certain frenzied period would be followed by coldness, disgust, contempt. (In the interests of avoiding incrimination here, if any sexual abuse did occur, this could have been perpetrated by a neighbour or lodger, a family friend, an uncle.) After a certain age, for the remaining years of my childhood, he barely spoke to me at all. There was a point for Marguerite, when as a result of all this nothing between her and her mother’s boyfriend, she nearly forgot it had ever happened: ‘For months he stopped speaking to me again. I was hurt and for a time felt lonelier than ever. But then I forgot about him, and even the memory of his holding me precious melted into the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood’ (Angelou Citation2010, ch.11).
In my 20s, I had strange and chaotic disturbances of memory. To use shorthand, these disturbances seemed to involve ‘flashbacks’ and ‘dissociation’. I reached for these concepts as I desperately sought understanding, but as much as they seemed to potentially help explain what was going on, they also seemed dubious. I knew I’d had a difficult childhood in some ways, and I experienced strange, confusing states of being and remembering, but it didn’t seem possible to be certain of anything. My experiences seemed to suggest that I might have forgotten some things that were now coming back to me, in fragmented, partial fashion, but this was also a time of widespread scepticism about ‘recovered memories’. To the proliferation of public discussions, and publications of personal accounts of incest, abuse, and so on, there had emerged a counter-narrative that called their veracity into question. Elizabeth Loftus’s studies were circulating to show how easy it is to create ‘false memories’; psychiatrists like Richard McNally were saying that trauma is pretty much unforgettable; lecturers at my university were dismissing recovered memory narratives as a cultural construction. (For a well-researched account of the controversy over ‘recovered memories’, including discussion of Loftus’s studies and their circulation, see Heaney Citation2021; see also McNally Citation2005; Luckhurst Citation2003).
So here, in my 40s, in the wake of a year of renewed disturbances and uncertainty, I’m reading a classic, well-respected autobiographical narrative, depicting uncontested scenes of childhood sexual abuse—and yet, Angelou also wrote that she could have forgotten those sexual encounters that had happened up until the rape. If he hadn’t brutally raped her, leading to her hospitalisation, his trial at court, and his murder, would she have remembered their abusive relationship? If she’d been abused in ways that didn’t result in serious physical injury, that never came publicly to light, that nobody else knew about, that she never talked about, tried never to think about again, tried desperately to believe that it hadn’t in fact happened at all, it being something for which she had no words anyway, as so many children are—maybe, later, she would have wondered.
The other part of I Know Why that resonated was this: ‘[I] had generally come to believe that the nightmare with its attendant guilt and fear hadn’t really happened to me. It happened to a nasty little girl, years and years before, who had no chain on me at all’ (Angelou, ch.11). In my 20s, much of what I read invalidated what I seemed to be experiencing; in my 40s, I Know Why seemed to nudge me closer to a place where things made just enough sense—including not only ‘memories’ of abuse but my manner of forgetting it and my long-standing sense of there being this unspeakably dirty little girl, who had never grown up, trapped in that childhood house.
One book of course proves nothing; I’m describing a sliver of my experience of reading a book, and its effect on my sense of things. That gentle earthquake seems to do with a sense of being able and allowed to know what she/I always already knew. And almost immediately following those moments of feeling the depths of my ground tremor, shift, and settle, its magnitude collapses. You’re one among a thousand thousand readers. You’re one among a million who’ve been abused—suddenly it feels like, well of course it might have happened it’s so damn common. Why all that fuss and doubt, that sense of the familiar being impossible? It’s kind of calming, it doesn’t matter.
After a decade or so of knowing that really, yes it did happen, and knowing that it definitely couldn’t have, I may never know, but maybe now, I can see what is possible, and that’s enough—it feels like that girl is no longer stuck in that house.
What do those of us who have read it, remember of reading I Know Why? It depends, of course, on who, where, and when we are. It would be easy for me to remember mostly only its scenes of sexual abuse and its aftermath, as so many feminists and survivors seem to have done. It is such scenes that are extracted in an anthology for writing by survivors of childhood sexual abuse, I Never Told Anyone, edited by Ellen Bass and Louise Thornton (Citation1983, 121–135). Readers of that anthology, then, may only be able to remember those scenes of abuse in I Know Why because they might not have read the rest of the book. Brenda Daly, in Authoring a Life: A Woman’s Survival in and Through Literary Studies (Citation1998), discusses not remembering Angelou’s book at all because she didn’t read it. She describes her extensive reading as a child in the 1950s, and says that she doesn’t remember any stories by women being taught at school, let alone any stories about incest—and it could be such a gap that an anthology like I Never Told Anyone can help to fill. Daly imagines that books like I Know Why could have changed her life:
How might my life have changed had I read these stories while in junior or high school, years when I lay in frozen silence as my sister struggled against my father. At the time, I wasn’t aware that my experience was missing from the literature curriculum; nevertheless, I was aware that the men in charge—fathers, ministers, principals, doctors—spoke with authority even when what they said was quite at odds with my reality. (34)
Feminists in the 1980s became interested in autobiographical writing through the second-wave emphasis on how ‘the personal is political’, and their aim to use women’s experiences in creating women’s knowledge, but many have rightly criticised the attempts to universalise such experiences and knowledge without understanding the differing experiences of African-American women, British-Asian women, working-class women, lesbian and transgender women and many others. If I focused only on Angelou’s scenes of sexual abuse, I’d be forgetting other important dimensions of the book, including its articulation of black Southerners’ everyday lives, their experiences of racism, and more. I fear that I’d be colluding with the 1980s feminists who focused on a universal kind of womanhood that suffered under patriarchy, who failed to acknowledge the issues around intersectionality that are since, at last, becoming better known and understood.
I Know Why is also a book about reading. Marguerite turns to reading when lonely, when her mother’s boyfriend ignores her. Reading seems healing when her brother reads to her for hours in the hospital. Later, it is through reading that she regains her voice—having become mute in the aftermath of the rape and all its consequences. The aristocratic Mrs. Flowers who Marguerite so looks up to, observes that she likes reading, gives her some books and instructs her to read them aloud. When Mrs. Flowers reads from A Tale of Two Cities, ‘She was nearly singing’ (ch.15). Marguerite goes home and reads it aloud too, and in the process finds new joy in literature and a new relationship with the words on the page, and recovers her voice. Following a long history in which African Americans were denied literacy, I Know Why affirms how reading can be empowering.
Reading can also be problematic. One of the editors of I Never Told Anyone, the anthology that includes the extract from Angelou’s book, Ellen Bass, later wrote another book, with Laura Davis, which became notorious: The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988). Critics have often denounced this book as one that, like a bad therapist, encourages women to ‘recover memories’ of things that never happened. Reading can lead astray, and indeed women and children have for centuries been considered vulnerable to its dangers. As somebody with dodgy memories, who dipped into a friend’s recommended copy of The Courage to Heal in her 20s (my utterly unreliable memory has it that I read a couple of pages of the introduction), I am well aware of how suggestible one such as me is deemed to be. Curiously, though, nobody seems to have advanced the theory that we might also be susceptible to books that denounce the possibility of recovered memories, to books that warn of the dangers of The Courage to Heal, to books that warn of other books—advancing their own superior reality (for example, see Luckhurst Citation2003; Citation2008). Might such books talk us out of remembering what we remember? My unreliable memory has it, that I may have read far more of these kinds of books than the other, bad kind—I hardly dared, until recently, to read books that might remind me of anything that didn’t happen. Partly because being reminded of being abused as a child can be upsetting, especially if what you’re being reminded of is unbelievable.
If I needed I Know Why, it was for different reasons than Wilson. It seems to me that there is some overlap in what Wilson and I gained from the book, but there is also a specific and restricted post-1990s context in which I was reading, in the wake of widespread reaction against and criticism of recovered memories, at least in the UK and US. I might seek to use I Know Why to unsettle the boundary between a respected autobiographical narrative of uncontested childhood abuse and the recovered memory narratives so often discredited by psychiatrists, feminists, literary critics and others. Childhood abuse is now accepted as a common experience, but there is a kind of subset of such experiences—those that involve ‘recovered memories’—that is dismissed out of hand. But there could be a danger in my experience of reading it as an affirmation of controversial, ever-contested memories, that I forget the importance of everything else in it—perhaps echoing how privileged white women took up #MeToo and how it served to exclude (see, for example, Robinson Citation2020).
There is a long-standing and dire need for first-person narratives far beyond the white canon. It seems important to remember that I Know Why is not, in fact, about recovered memory, and it is about so much more than incest. Considering the prejudiced notions of black sexual deviancy, however, it has also been important to uncover incest in white families—to challenge the colonial and patriarchal ideology of the nuclear family, idealised as an untainted and safe haven from such dangers.
Acknowledgements
I would like especially to thank Alison Waller, Rachele Dini, and Sarah Pyke, for reading a draft of this essay, for their helpful encouragement, and for some excellent comments and feedback, and also Laura Peters for her immense support and understanding.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Shelley Trower
Shelley Trower is Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. She was recently Principal Investigator of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects, ‘Memories of Fiction: An Oral History of Reader’s Life Stories’ (2014–2018) and ‘Living Libraries’ (2019–2020). Major publications include Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History (Palgrave, 2012), Senses of Vibration (Bloomsbury, 2013), Rocks of Nation (Manchester University Press, 2015), and her next monograph, Sound Writing: Voices, Authors, and Readers of Oral History (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2022).
Notes
1 The ‘Memories of Fiction’ project was funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (roehampton.ac.uk/Research-Centres/Memories-of-Fiction/).
References
- Angelou, Maya. 2010. I Know why the Caged Bird Sings. London: Hachette. Kindle edn.
- Bass, Ellen, and Louise Thornton. 1983. I Never Told Anyone. New York: Harper and Row.
- Burke, Tamara. 2019. "Founder of the 'Me Too Movement, Speaks at Hamilton College". Last modified 2 May 2019. Accessed December 8, 2021. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKqyAZVTbI0.
- Daly, Brenda. 1998. Authoring a Life. New York: University of New York Press.
- Heaney, Katie. 2021. "The Memory War". The Cut. January 6, 2021. Accessed December 8, 2021. www.thecut.com/article/false-memory-syndrome-controversy.html.
- Luckhurst, Roger. 2003. “Traumaculture.” New Formations 50: 28–47.
- Luckhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. Abingdon: Routledge.
- McNally, Richard. 2005. Remembering Trauma. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Robinson, Jennifer. 2020. "The #MeToo Movement: Intersectionality". Glasgow Women’s Library. Last modified 2020. Accessed December 8, 2021. https://womenslibrary.org.uk/2020/08/25/the-metoo-movement-intersectionality/.
- Trower, Shelley. 2020. “Forgetting Fiction: An Oral History of Reading.” Book History 23: 269–298.
- Wilson, Melba. 1993. Crossing the Boundary: Black Women Survive Incest. London: Virago.