When I Met and Loved Ms. Angelou
In her autobiography, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou said Shakespeare was her first white love.
Little did she know, almost a century later, I’d claim her has my first female love.
We both fell in love with someone long dead, who changed our interaction with words.
The words I’m tempted to associate with Maya are words like “overcome,” “victorious,” “resilient,” “survivor,” but these words don’t deliver. They’ve never delivered for any aspect of my life, yet Maya is exactly who I want to be—bold, hilarious, capable of appreciating the small things in life while grasping the complex. It is her very ability to understand the small, minute, generally overlooked portions of the world that give her—I believe—the capacity to bring the complex out of its complexity, and turn it into a poem or metaphor that hits the heart at just the right place.
I want to do what she does with words, though my genre, style, and story are different.
I want to believe I can be as fully present with life and love as she is, not despite or because of my suffering—the suffering should have never happened—but somehow the suffering is the reason I have my voice.
It’s why Maya has hers. Stories took her to faraway places when her world was fearful and uncertain. Words gave her a voice when she couldn’t speak, when she was powerless to change the events around her.
Stories and words have always functioned this way for me, so when I met Maya, I could not help but fall in love.
Words bridged the time between us, the way Shakespeare’s words bridged time and worlds between himself and Maya.
I’ll thank words, and read another one of Maya’s poems.
Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash