Book Notes, Fiction # I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969) ★★★★★ First read in June 2022 --- A perfect book if there ever was one. Never expected perfection from this first volume of an autobiography spanning seven volumes in total, but perfection is what I got. She writes a beautiful ode to artists in one of the chapters - "We survive in exact relationship to the dedication of our poets," she says. And this, her own book, is a marvellous example of that dedication and of the "unmeasurable, unquantifiable value" as she puts it, that art brings to people. ## Favourite quotes - this hilarious and profound rant taken from the chapter about her graduation ceremony, when she finished school at 14, perfectly capturing any and all teenagers' anger and frustration when discovering how the world really works: "We should all be dead. I thought I should like to see us all dead, one on top of the other. A pyramid of flesh with the whitefolks on the bottom, as the broad base, then the Indians with their silly tomahawks and teepees and wigwams and treaties, the Negroes with their mops and recipes and cotton sacks and spirituals sticking out of their mouths. The Dutch children should all stumble in their wooden shoes and break their necks. The French should choke to death on the Louisiana purchase (1803) while silkworms ate all the Chinese with their stupid pigtails. As a species, we were an abomination. All of us." - this beautiful ode to the city: "In San Francisco, for the first time, I perceived myself as part of something. (...) The undertone of fear heightened my sense of belonging. ==Hadn't I, always, but ever and ever, thought that life was just one great risk for the living?== Then the city acted in wartime like an intelligent woman under siege. She gave what she couldn't with safety withhold, and secured those things which lay in her reach. The city became for me the ideal of what I wanted to be as a grownup. Friendly, but never gushing, cool, but not frigid or distant, distinguished without the awful stiffness. " - related to my long held, pre-motherhood impression that, contrary to popular belief, children's suffering can never be as heartbreaking as the suffering of the elderly, precisely because of their innocence, of their not knowing it can be better: =="Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives."  - this paragraph describing the tension in the house and her Grandmother when Maya's 11 year old brother is late one evening returning from the movies: "Her apprehension was evident in the hurried movements around the kitchen and in her lonely, fearing eyes. The Black woman in the South who raises sons, grandsons and nephews had her heartstrings tied to a hanging noose. ==Any break from routine may herald for them unbearable news.== or this reason, Southern Blacks until the present generation could be counted among America's arch conservatives." - the entire chapter about graduation is wonderful (see page 194), especially the _“We should all be dead”_ paragraph where she captures the humiliation of having to hear a white man in power talk to a graduate school of blacks about their place in the world. “It was awful to be Negro and have no control over my life. It was brutal to be young and already trained to sit quietly and listen to charges brought against my color with no chance of defence. We should all be dead. (...) As a species, we were an abomination, all of us.” "==The intensity with which young people live demands that they "blank out" as often as possible.== I didn't actually think about facing Mother until the last day of our journey." - related to my long term confusion when seeing poor people buy ridiculously expensive goods that make no sense, when they could use that money to better their situations. That universal hood mentality - from the familiar one I witnessed first hand in the post-Communist hoods of Eastern Europe to the American ghettos I learned about from movies, it's the same everywhere. Abject poverty side by side with luxury cars parked in trash. The obsession for luxury clothing brands and bling. "The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is  that man who is offered only the crumbs from his country’s table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin’s-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticised but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.”  “one who is not able to compete legally to his fellow citizens” (re: discrimination) --- `Em Suru | 2024 | Just carbon and water. Just atoms and the void.` ---