Abstract:
This paper proposes to critically reassess Maya Angelou’s second autobiographical work, Gather together in my name (2004 [1974]). In her literary representation of herself, Angelou chronicles her life journey as a young black woman with a fatherless child struggling to survive with freedom in the markedly racist and sexist American society of the 1940s. A close reading of the sinuosity of the narrative fragments reveals that Angelou composes a variety of womanist prose, according to Alice Walker (1983), identified as poetics of her autobiographical truth, through which the writer examines her inner life, disturbs preconceived cultural conceptions of women of African descent, and redresses omission of this historical subject who regenerates herself.
Keywords:
Black women; African-American literature; Maya Angelou; Womanism; Autobiographical truth