More Thinking on Maya Angelou
We are still, of course, thinking about writer and activist Maya Angelou, who died last week. We've rounded up some of the most considered, enjoyable articles, videos, and other posts making their way around the Internet-consciousness. Here go:
The New York Times looks at Dr. Angelou's deep understanding of cooking.
In the days since Maya Angelou died last Wednesday at 86, much has been written about her poetry, plays and memoirs, but little about her skills as an accomplished cook, cookbook writer and home entertainer (in both senses of the word). At that first meal I had yet to start my own career as a food historian, but I got an early glimpse of her deep love and understanding of food, and how passionately she enjoyed sharing it.
The LA Times remembers Wanda Coleman's scathing review of Angelou.
To read Coleman’s review now is to marvel, in some ways, at its fairness; she goes out of her way to praise “Caged Bird,” as well as Angelou’s 1986 book “All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes” and to note her role in Bill Clinton’s 1993 inaugural.
In the moment, though, it sparked a controversy that culminated in Coleman being disinvited from an event at L.A.’s leading African American bookseller, Eso Won Books — although Angelou, to her credit, did not take part in the back-and-forth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08zXTyAb6TY
When Amiri Baraka died in January, Angelou mourned his passing. An AP Story:
One of her favorite memories of Baraka was from a tribute to the late poet Langston Hughes. She and Baraka were photographed clasping hands and dancing in Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in an atrium above where Hughes' ashes were buried. A caption read that she and Baraka were "highlighting the ancient African rite of ancestral return."
"I called Amiri Baraka and asked him if he was performing an African rite," Angelou recalled. "He said, 'No, I was doing the jitterbug.' And I said that I was doing the Texas hop.'"
The New Yorker looked at Angelou's life in photos.
Ron Silliman pointed us to a conversation Angelou had at The Smithsonian just last year as part of the National Museum of African Art's Director's Discussion Series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8S-mNq3ypg
The New York Times' Culture Desk also made a video in farewell to the writer. Her manuscripts are being preserved at the Harlem-based branch of the New York Public Library, they note.
At The Washington Post, former Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway writes about the crucial finding of Angelou's work as a young black female writer.
I had been given a journal for my birthday — one of those that has a small lock on the front — and I’d begun to keep a record of my days. When I realized that my stepfather had picked the lock and was reading it regularly, I began to think that nothing I wrote could be private, so I started writing with the awareness that he would see it. I wrote directly to him, cursing him, knowing that for him to challenge me on what I had written would be for him to admit what he was doing: invading that private world of words I was setting down on paper.
And the image at top is courtesy of The Zinn Education Project. They write:
As noted in the Democracy Now! broadcast, "A Peace Warrior": Poet, Civil Rights Activist Maya Angelou Remembered by Sonia Sanchez, Angelou’s activism is not nearly as well known as her books. Yet, as poet Sonia Sanchez explained, "there was no separation for us between our art and activism at all." In the 1960s, Angelou was active in the modern Civil Rights Movement, joining marches and raising needed funds along with other performers such as Harry Belafonte. In the 1980s, Angelou protested the U.S. role in apartheid South Africa. The photo ... was taken shortly before she was arrested along with Tillie Olsen, Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, and many others in U.C. Berkeley’s Sproul Hall.