Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, tells the story of her life to the age of 17. It is a deep look into, not just the circumstances that shaped a woman who would become a gifted and beloved poet, but also into the conditions of life for black Americans in the south.

In her autobiography, Angelou opens up her young life fearlessly, sharing personal details not only of her family and their lives, but her pain, shame and sorrow. At the same time, she paints vivid portraits of Black culture as she experienced it, both negative and positive. We see the grinding poverty and constant threat of white insult and violence in the rural areas, but also the strength of family and community ties. We see ourselves within the rich urban black culture of St. Louis, with its connections to the underworld, and its influence on the life of the city.

Angelou - born Marguerite Johnson - and her brother Bailey were sent to live in Stamps, Arkansas when they were three and four, respectively. Their parents, then living in California, had ended their marriage and neither was in a position to care for the children, so they were put alone on a train with address tags on their wrists and tickets pinned to their clothes and sent home to their paternal grandmother. After several years living in Stamps, they were taken by their father to St Louis, where they lived first with their maternal grandmother, and then with their mother, a woman well connected to the underground gambling scene, and her lover. While there, Angelou was raped by her mother’s lover. The man was convicted, but avoided serving time. When he was found dead not long afterward, Angelou believed he had died because she had lied in court about how often he had touched her, and decided never to speak again to anyone except Bailey lest she kill someone else with her words. Not long afterwards, she and Bailey were sent back to Stamps, Angelou wondering if they had been sent away because of her family’s frustration with her silence.

After several years in Stamps, Angelou and her brother relocated again, this time to San Francisco, where their mother was now living, not that far from their father, still in Los Angeles. It is here that she takes the first steps toward womanhood and independence. School, her first job - as the first black female tram conductress - coming to terms with a father who was too self-absorbed to love her, the growing between her and her brother, her developing sexuality, and, in the final sequence recounted in the book, the birth of her son after a casual sexual interlude undertaken just to see what sex was all about.

Angelou offers loving portraits of those who helped to shape her life, from family to members of the community who introduced her to literature and the power of well-crafted words, to others further outside her circle who, kindly or otherwise, taught her about life beyond her grandmother’s general store (which served both blacks and poor whites) and her mother’s gambling connections. And she connects the events of her life to the condition of blacks in America, showing in a hundred ways, large and small, the strength and resilience of a people oppressed.

Angelou wrote several other autobiographical volumes, something I had not known before, as this volume is the one the everybody talks about. I think I’ll have to find and read the others.

Sara Farizan: If You Could Be Mine

If You Could Be Mine, the debut novel by Iranian-American writer Sara Farizan, is that very important thing, a story for young adults about queer and trans characters in non-Western cultures. Set in modern Iran, the novel explores a variety of aspects of queer and trans life under the ayatollahs, where same-sex attraction can lead to death, but being transgender is considered a medical problem and gender confirmation surgery is paid for by the state - though trans folk do experience discrimination in many areas of life.

The main character is Sahar, a young woman from an impoverished branch of a wealthy family. She is serious, studious, takes care of her father who is emotionally adrift after the death of his wife, is studying hard for the entrance exams to get into the best university in Tehran so she can become a doctor. She is also in love with Nazrin, who’s been her best friend since childhood. Nazrin the pretty, somewhat vain, and to my mind rather selfish and shallow daughter of a wealthy family. She says she loves Sahar, and they share modest physical intimacies, but she has accepted the marriage proposal of Reza, a young and ambitious doctor favoured by her family, and she expects that Sabar will continue being her devoted lover even after she marries Reza - in short, she wants the best of both worlds without thinking about Sabar’s feelings or future.

Sabar in determined to prevent the marriage snd find a way that she and Nazrin can be together. After meeting Parveen, a trans woman who is a friend of her wealthy cousin Ali, who is gay and, thanks to his wealth and ability to bribe the police, able to live almost openly as gay, Sabar hits upon the idea of transitioning to male in order to marry Nazrin herself.

As Sahar explores the options for transgender people in Iran, all the while knowing that, unlike Parveen and the other trans men and women she meets, she is not really transgender, the day for Nazrin’s wedding grows closer and Sahar becomes more desperate to find a way to be with Nazrin. Yet at the same time, she begins to see that while Nazrin may love her, she also wants the security and conventionality of a family, a professional, financially well-off husband, and children, things that Sahar cannot give her now.

This is no fairy-tale romance. It ends honestly, with no one getting everything they want, but everyone a little wiser and more self-aware. The story drags at times, but is strong enough to hold the reader’s interest. The writing has many of the flaws of an inexperienced writer, but that is something that time will rectify. And the light it casts on queer and trans issues in Iran is truly interesting.