Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
Racism and Segregation
Maya confronts the insidious effects of racism and segregation
in America at a very young age. She internalizes the idea that blond hair
is beautiful and that she is a fat black girl trapped in a nightmare.
Stamps, Arkansas, is so thoroughly segregated that as a child Maya
does not quite believe that white people exist. As Maya gets older,
she is confronted by more overt and personal incidents of racism,
such as a white speaker’s condescending address at her eighth-grade
graduation, her white boss’s insistence on calling her Mary, and
a white dentist’s refusal to treat her. The importance of Joe Louis’s
world championship boxing match to the black community reveals the
dearth of publicly recognized African American heroes. It also demonstrates
the desperate nature of the black community’s hope for vindication
through the athletic triumph of one man. These unjust social realities
confine and demean Maya and her relatives. She comes to learn how
the pressures of living in a thoroughly racist society have profoundly
shaped the character of her family members, and she strives to surmount
them.
Debilitating Displacement
Maya is shuttled around to seven different homes between
the ages of three and sixteen: from California to Stamps to St.
Louis to Stamps to Los Angeles to Oakland to San Francisco to Los
Angeles to San Francisco. As expressed in the poem she tries to
recite on Easter, the statement “I didn’t come to stay” becomes
her shield against the cold reality of her rootlessness. Besieged
by the “tripartite crossfire” of racism, sexism, and power, young
Maya is belittled and degraded at every turn, making her unable
to put down her shield and feel comfortable staying in one place.
When she is thirteen and moves to San Francisco with her mother,
Bailey, and Daddy Clidell, she feels that she belongs somewhere
for the first time. Maya identifies with the city as a town full
of displaced people.
Maya’s personal displacement echoes the larger societal
forces that displaced blacks all across the country. She realizes
that thousands of other terrified black children made the same journey
as she and Bailey, traveling on their own to newly affluent parents
in northern cities, or back to southern towns when the North failed
to supply the economic prosperity it had promised. African Americans descended
from slaves who were displaced from their homes and homelands in
Africa, and following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862,
blacks continued to struggle to find their place in a country still
hostile to their heritage.
Resistance to Racism
Black peoples’ resistance to racism takes many forms in I
Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Momma maintains her dignity
by seeing things realistically and keeping to herself. Big Bailey
buys flashy clothes and drives a fancy car to proclaim his worth
and runs around with women to assert his masculinity in the face
of dehumanizing and emasculating racism. Daddy Clidell’s friends
learn to use white peoples’ prejudice against them in elaborate
and lucrative cons. Vivian’s family cultivates toughness and establishes
connections to underground forces that deter any harassment. Maya
first experiments with resistance when she breaks her white employer’s heirloom
china. Her bravest act of defiance happens when she becomes the
first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. Blacks also used
the church as a venue of subversive resistance. At the revival,
the preacher gives a thinly veiled sermon criticizing whites’ charity,
and the community revels in the idea of white people burning in
hell for their actions.
