Literary Testimonials Of Racism And Oppression In Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Résumé: Abstract I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings is the first volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiographies and the most successful one, it is a personal narration of her childhood traumatic events. The autobiography portrays the life of a black girl who suffers from displacement, poverty, racism and sexual abuse. The aim of this thesis is to analyze those events lived by the main character “ Maya “ and to show how she comes up at the end with her recovery and self identity. This Autobiography was selected because it holds very important themes and changed many stereotypes about Black Americans. Literature plays its significant role in Maya Angelou’s life as it helped her to overcome trauma, insecurity and feeling of shamefulness to self- confidence, race pride and speech recovery. This research includes two chapters; the first one consists of a theoretical presentation of the African-American literature from early times to the 20th century, as well as a general overview of Black American autobiography from its beginning as slave narratives to the modern neo slave narratives. The second chapter is the analysis of the autobiography and how a little black girl faced different racist events and she could overcome and resist creating her self- identity and even influenced many youth generations. The conclusions that are reached from this research are the importance and power of literature and reading books in Maya’s life, how they could do miracles in changing her situation from the worse to the better, and her survival after all what she went through

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