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African American Spirituals

Though Maya Angelou’s poetry exists in written form, her most famous poems are perhaps best remembered from spellbinding performances she herself gave of them. This is certainly the case for “Caged Bird,” which Angelou recited publicly on numerous occasions. The performative aspects of Angelou’s poetry indicate a link to oral tradition, and particularly to the tradition of African American traditional of spirituals. Spirituals belong to a Black musical tradition that emerged during the time of slavery, and which featured songs that described the hardships of life as a plantation slave. Despite the difficult subject matter of these so-called “sorrow songs,” the point of singing them was to help gather the strength to survive. This tradition evolved into the genre we now identify as “the blues.” Like many spirituals, Angelou’s poems frequently discuss matters of hardship and oppression, but usually with an overarching message of survival. In the case of “Caged Bird,” Angelou references the tradition of spirituals through her allusion to Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy.” This poem centers the figure of a caged bird singing a song of sorrow. By adopting this same figure, Angelou references the long tradition of Black music as a practice for survival in the face of oppression.

Black Feminism

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s broadly aimed to end many forms of institutionalized discrimination against Black people. In the wake of that movement, there arose a more focused effort to think about the unique forms of discrimination experienced by Black women specifically. Black women intellectuals and activists developed a philosophical paradigm now known as “Black feminism.” This paradigm emphasizes the inherent value of Black women and the urgent need for specifically Black female liberation. Perhaps the first formal statement of Black feminism appeared in 1977, when a group known as the Combahee River Collective published a statement about their work. In that statement, the Collective emphasized the difficulty of “separat[ing] race from class from sex oppression.” These three aspects of oppression—race, class, and sex—must be considered together, “because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously.” Angelou first published “Caged Bird” in 1983, shortly after the Collective’s landmark statement. Though the speaker of the poem doesn’t explicitly address gender, it is possible to read the caged bird as symbolizing Black female experience. Such a reading would align with the commitment to Black feminism Angelou expressed in other poems, such as “Phenomenal Woman” and “Still I Rise.”

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