Phenomenal Woman: Maya Angelou 1928-2014

After news of the death of the great Maya Angelou, we remember a woman who was always difficult to categorise

It won't only be the literary world mourning the death of Maya Angelou, whose tremendous energy touched every area of her career. Her series of seven autobiographies, that crossed the traditional lines of that form, span every chapter of her life, beginning with her youth up to age seventeen in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings .

It was a life fit to burst with experiences, not only as poet and writer, but also actor, journalist, victim, dancer, teacher, prostitute, streetcar conductor and mother. The canon of literature she leaves behind has been endlessly condensed into quotes, small parcels of the simple wisdom for which she was famed. Her literary voice swung from this homespun honesty to the resoundingly direct and vulgar, a mark of her fearlessness.

Familiar too was her physical voice, which sang out over Washington for President Clinton’s first inaugural address in 1993. She read her poem On the Pulse of Morning - it became an instant bestseller.

A voice for the state, and for quieter conversations; Angelou told the Guardian in 2009 of the thousands of letters she still received from young women, her global ‘daughters’, who looked to her as some kind of wise woman.

Angelou’s was the kind of career that refuses any title, so we’ll leave the Phenomenal Woman to speak for herself:

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou, 1978

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.