A Stylistics Analysis of

I Know Why The Caged

Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Presented by Samuel Lim and Ranjitha Bala

Introduction
The story of Maya Angelou (2002) in her semi-fictionalized autobiography, “I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings”, written in 1969, is a fascinating, tragic but ultimately hopeful story about a
young, Black girl in 1930’s and 1940’s America on the road to self-actualization. We follow her
throughout her journey from a first-person perspective as she encounters the many trials and
tribulations of systemic racism, familial disintegration, loss of loved ones and sexual assault.
That being said, she too experienced moments of triumph and joy throughout .

This book, however, is merely the first volume of the seven autobiographies written by Angelou.
The journey through the life of one of the greatest writers in American literary history is a long
and arduous one. Just as a famous Chinese Proverb goes “A journey of a thousand miles begins
with a single step", so too do we analyze the very first pages of Maya’s autobiographical works.
Join us as we take the first step.
Themes

“I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” is a powerful exploration of not only what it means to be a
person of colour in White America but what it means to be a woman of colour. The author and
chief protagonist of the story, Maya, finds herself confronted with issues of identity from an early
age. Not only does she struggle with the discrimination of racism but also with her identity as a
woman, that was so often defined by Caucasian beauty standards. The themes of this book are
(Zaini & Khan, 2021):

● Alienation

● Racism

● Womanhood
Summary of the Prose
The prologue of “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” follows a young Maya performing
for an Easter Play in a church. Try as she may, she is unable to finish reciting through a
poem in front of the church congregation. The children in the congregation laugh at her.
She then ponders on the nature of her existence as a Black girl and longs to be
beautiful like the other White girls.
Maya’s First Person Point-of-View
Throughout the prose, the readers are privy to the actions, thoughts and feelings of the narrator
through a first-person point of view. In this case, a young Maya Angelou. It is rather apt that Maya
adopts this narrative perspective in lieu of a third-person omniscient one.

Rather than simply setting a scene by giving readers a bird’s eye view of the situation by objectively
describing the appearances, actions and thoughts of characters, we watch and experience her world
through her eyes. The unique power of this point-of-view is its ability to not only provide immersion
through a singular character’s description of a situation but to also inform the readers of the narrator’s
worldview (Diasamidze, 2014, p. 162).

Let’s take a look at some examples:

“As I’d watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist, I knew that once I
put it on I’d look like a movie star. (It was silk and that made up for the awful color.) I was going to look
like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody’s dream of what was right with the world.”
Maya’s First Person Point-of-View

“But Easter’s early morning sun had shown the dress to be a plain ugly cut-down from a white woman’s

once-was-purple throwaway. It was oldlady-long too, but it didn’t hide my skinny legs, which had been

greased with Blue Seal Vaseline and powdered with the Arkansas red clay. The age-faded color made my

skin look dirty like mud, and everyone in church was looking at my skinny legs.”

These highlighted statements are not simply objective descriptions of what she is seeing. Rather, they are

ideologically-laden observations rooted in her low self-esteem of both her ethnicity and her beauty as a

young woman.
Lexical Deviation - Onomatopoeia
What makes Maya Angelou’s works so raw and powerful is her use of visceral and vivid imagery
(Muhammed, 2016, p. 191). Unlike sanitized autobiographies that simply state facts, Angelou does
not merely wish for her audience to understand her history but to feel and connect to it.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the author uses the literary technique of imagery, which
appeals to our physical senses (Rosmaidar & Wijayanti, 2012).

Onomatopoeia are words that bear a similarity to the sounds made by their verbal utterances..
They are often used for dramatic effect, seeing that they bear an echoic quality that resonates
and lingers on the reader’s sense of sound. In Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings”,
we see multiple instances in which the author employs lexical deviation in the form of
onomatopoeias to create auditory imagery and to magnify the mood and emotions of a scene or
character:
Lexical Deviation - Onomatopoeia
“The children’s section of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church was wiggling and giggling over my
well-known forgetfulness.”

Sound: the sound of the white children squirming and quietly laughing
Purpose: to compound the author’s feelings of humiliation due to her forgetfulness and to
emphasize the cruelty she faced as a child.

“The dress I wore was lavender taffeta, and each time I breathed it rustled, and now that I was sucking in
air to breathe out shame it sounded like crepe paper on the back of hearses.”

Sound: Maya breathing heavily with her thin dress crumpling and rustling with every breath
Purpose: to give the readers some perspective into Maya’s anxiety and self-consciousness
which manifest physically in her breathing patterns.
Semantic Deviation - Similes
Maya Angelou also employs a masterful use of semantic deviation in the form of literary devices. This
technique includes the use of descriptive similes to give readers greater insight into her character’s
emotions and mental state.

“The truth of the statement was like a wadded-up handkerchief, sopping wet in my fists, and the sooner
they accepted it the quicker I could let my hands open and the air would cool my palms.”

Purpose: the simile is used to likened to the uncomfortable truth of her failure in the church play and the
insignificance of her role as to the experience of holding a wet handkerchief in her hand. The quicker she
accepted it, the better.

“I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody’s dream of what was right with
the world. Hanging softly over the black Singer sewing machine, it looked like magic”

Purpose: the simile is used to show her initial pride in the dress she wore to the Easter Play and how it
would transform how people would view her, like magic.

“
Semantic Deviation - Similes
This linguistic feature is also used to foreground Maya’s ideological viewpoint built on the notion of racial
discrimination and White beauty standards at the time (Muhammed, 2016, p. 190). Her use of hyperbolic similes
are meant to both engage the reader through visual imagery and to also show us Maya’s worldview of the ideal
hypothetical and the undesirable real.

“As I’d watched Momma put ruffles on the hem and cute little tucks around the waist, I knew that once I put it on I’d
look like a movie star). I was going to look like one of the sweet little white girls who were everybody’s dream of
what was right with the world”...

In these two similes, we see a young Maya take pride in her Sunday best, a dress with ruffles on the hem, as
she compares her beauty to that of a “movie star” or “one of the sweet little white girls”. Beneath her seemingly
innocuous revelry of a nice dress, there is the heart-breaking social subtext of Maya’s self-loathing and longing
for acceptance. She’s so starved of strong African-American female representation in the media and alienated
from community because of racial discrimination, that her only point of reference to idealized beauty is through
Anglophilic lens.
Semantic Deviation - Similes

“The age-faded color made my skin look dirty like mud, and everyone in church was
looking at my skinny legs.”

In contrast to her early similes of her longing to meet White beauty standards, we see
her disparage her skin colour by comparing it to be as dirty as mud. This simile further
foregrounds young Maya’s disdain for her African-American roots.
Semantic Deviation - Metaphor
Racism and Internalized Oppression

Maya Angelou suffered throughout her childhood. The racism in the South would have been difficult for
any young girl to endure, but worse than the racially insensitive insults and remarks hurled at her was
how it began to affect the way she viewed herself. She had begin to believe those lies. She had
internalized her oppression. Internalized oppression is a psychological phenomenon when an individual
believes the negative stereotypes against their gender, sexuality or ethnicity, which can both damage the
individual and the communities around them (David, 2015).

Maya believed that she is ugly and abnormal.

“Because I was really white and because a cruel fairy stepmother, who was understandably jealous of my
beauty, had turned me into a too-big Negro girl, with nappy black hair, broad feet and a space between her
teeth that would hold a number-two pencil…”
Semantic Deviation - Metaphor

In the aforementioned example, we see Maya employ the use of metaphors to describe the
awkwardness of her physique which she thought was keeping people away from her- because they were
uncomfortable of her being a
“Southern black girl”

“Wouldn’t they be surprised when one day I woke out of my black ugly dream, and my real hair, which was
long and blond, would take the place of the kinky mass that Momma wouldn’t let me straighten? …

“My light-blue eyes were going to hypnotize them, after all the things they said about “my daddy must of
been a Chinaman” …

This metaphor showed how much she yearned that all the awkwardness that she had would one day
turn beautiful and people would began liking her for the very same reason they kept away from her.
References
.Angelou, M. (2002). I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House.

David, E. (2015). Internalized Oppression: We Need to Stop Hating Ourselves. Psychology

Today. Retrieved 29 December 2021, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us

/blog/ unseen-and-unheard/201509/internalized-oppression-we-need-stop-

hating- ourselves.

Diasamidze, I. (2014). Point of View in Narrative Discourse. Procedia - Social And Behavioral Sciences, 158,

160-165.

Muhammed, M. (2016). Beyond the Law of Transitivity:A Functional Stylistic Study of Maya

Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Journal Of University Of Babylon, 24(1), 188-197.
References
Rosmaidar., & Wijayanti, R. (2012). IMAGERY IN LANGSTON HUGHES’S POETRY. Jurnal

Imiah Bina BAHASA, 5(2), 103-114.

Zaini, Q., & Khan, M. (2021). Maya Angelou’s Battle with Alienation in I know Why the

Caged Bird Sings. Arab World English Journal, 5(1), 177-186.