A Study of Maya Angelou’s Memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings: A Tryst with Selective Mutism
A Study of Maya Angelou’s Memoir I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings: A Tryst with Selective Mutism

Author(s): Bhattacharyya Suchandana
Subject(s): Other Language Literature, American Literature
Published by: Scientia Moralitas Research Institute
Keywords: selective mutism; disability; self-expression; African American literature;
Summary/Abstract: The paper explores how Angelou records the extent and degree of debilitation endured by her body and mind, as she initially sinks into selective mutism and gradually reverts her situation into her creative strength of resistance in her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In this first volume of her autobiographical narrative, she probes the impact of her mutism upon her psyche leading to an extreme inability to express how both her body and mind had been mutilated beyond repair. However, what is most intriguing is the self-enforced silence she withdraws into caused by her belief that words had terrible consequences. This reverse psychology in which the victim bears the guilt, is set aright when she is finally able to break free from her mutism. The scars that she bore from the tender age of eight left her with the epiphany that “there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you”. Therefore, her disabled self, threatened into silence, gradually willed itself to heal. This transition from mutism to self-expression, as recorded in this volume of her memoir, creates scope for introspection as to how a form of disability can eventually ignite the most articulate expression of selfhood.

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