Journeying With Maya
The Age
Friday August 26, 1994
WOULDN'T TAKE NOTHING FOR MY JOURNEY NOW. By Maya Angelou. Virago Press, $19.95.
MAYA Angelou's latest is a little hardcover book, a format recently adopted by Bloomsbury, Heinemann and now Virago. I'm not sure how it's catching on, or of the economics involved in its production, but to me it's a welcome return. I remember those inexpensive, small but durable editions that were available before the definitive onslaught of the paperback. Those Everyman books from England or the Modern Library from America. A delight to read, hold and collect.
This particular book sits as well in the heart as in the hand, which is what you might expect from Maya Angelou. While `Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now' is an apparently simple collection of observations, what it really portrays is the life so splendidly plumbed in the previous five volumes of her autobiography. Here it is pared to the bone.
There's little in the way of story, although it does sneak in - the oft-told tale of how she got drunk in a bar the night of her triumph as a writer is included, as is a lovely piece on what happened to an aunt when she was a live-in housekeeper in Bel Air. But apart from occasional deferences to the human need for narrative, the book, with its clean, almost Psalmic language, is nothing so much as a guide for living. We are given the pith, the marrow of a life that, if not always wisely led, has been sucked for its juices.
Angelou is one of America's most treasured writers, the first of those black women whose numbers include Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, and whose presence can be said to have transformed American literary horizons over the last quarter- century. Late in the 1960s, she took as her object the poetic resuscitation of what previously had been all but invisible, the history of the African-American woman.
Her approach to autobiography has been communal rather than individual: ``Once I got into it I realised I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass - the slave narrative - speaking in the first-person plural, always saying `I' meaning `we'."
Like so many of her sisters, Angelou was a single mother at 16, worked as a cook, waitress, prostitute, madam, dancer, singer and SCLC organiser before turning to writing. With the 1970 publication of `I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings', the searing first volume of her autobiography, this changed. She found a centre, a focus, but life was still charged with conflict.
Angelou is 66 now, a woman who has been many places but feels she has settled, and the thoughts and insights and adages in this book appear to be written with younger black women embarking on similar journeys in mind. But Angelou is a writer who has sought the universal through the particular, so her wise-woman sayings have meaning for others as well. A sample: On charity: ``When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed."
On dress: ``You will always be in fashion if you are true to yourself, and only if you are true to yourself."
On forgiving: ``Remember your own shortcomings, and when you encounter another with flaws, don't be eager to righteously seal yourself away from the offender forever. Take a few breaths and imagine yourself having just committed the action which has set you at odds."
And on life as art: ``Of course, you will need the basic talents to build upon, a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings."
So you could do worse than to carry around this sturdy little offering of hers in your pocket.
Sara Dowse is a Canberra writer.
© 1994 The Age