song of scant praise

LIKE Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou transcends the medium which first carried her message. According to her official website, she is a woman of sundry parts; historian, bestselling author, actress, playwright, civil rights activist, producer and director. "Dr Angelou," we're told, "continues to travel the world making appearances, spreading her legendary wisdom." Not surprisingly, the first question Oprah - no shrinking violet herself - asked her was where she got her confidence from. "There are so many gifts, so many blessings," she replied, "so many sources that I can't say one thing - unless that one thing is love."

There is only one word to describe this - guff. Yet we are told Angelou is a great writer, one of modern America's finest. Among the many honours heaped upon her was an invitation to read an original poem at Bill Clinton's inauguration, only the second time this has happened to a living writer. The first occasion was when Robert Frost read at the behest of JFK, which may be taken as a commentary on the state of contemporary American poetry. For all her gifts, Angelou is not a poet in Frost's class.

Not that that matters, for she is an institution, like the Smithsonian, whose monument is her serial autobiography, the opening volume of which, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, appeared nigh on 30 years ago. The present book, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, is the sixth and purportedly final instalment. It ends symmetrically with the opening sentence to her first book, its author just 40 years old. The year is 1968, not long after Martin Luther King Jr, was murdered. Angelou was unhinged with grief as she was a friend of King's and was about to help him organise a "poor people's march". With his customary charm he enlisted her to tour churches and talk to black preachers, not many of whom, he said, "can resist a good-looking woman with a good idea." But before she could start King was dead and, with him, his dream.

"Death of a beloved," writes Angelou, as if conducting a vast gospel choir, "flattens and dulls everything. Mountains and skyscrapers and grand ideas are brought down to eye level or below. Great loves and large hates no longer cast such huge shadows or span so broad a distance. Connections do not adhere so closely, and important events lose their glow."

In some quarters writing like this is regarded as "fine". True, it rolls mellifluously off the tongue and hangs in the air like an echo from a bell or the sonorous tones of a self-righteous preacher. But it makes little impact and lingers only fleetingly. No doubt the sentiments expressed are genuine enough but the over-wroughtness of the prose feels staged and ersatz. Real tragedies do not need hyperbole, for they are intrinsically hyperbolic.

Angelou, however, does not understand this. She never writes plainly if she can help it. "Jimmy Baldwin pried me loose from my despair," she says of her reaction to King's death, as if intoning lines from the Old Testament. Writing about the Watts riots in Los Angeles, she reflects: "Some men, embarrassed at their powerlessness, became belligerent, and their wives' bodies showed the extent of their anger." Why not just say that men without jobs take it out on their wives?

But Angelou is a writer intoxicated with her own voice. Returning from a spell in Africa she has to supercharge the moment. "A presentiment of unease enveloped me before I could find my seat at the rear of the plane." The source of her discomfort, we learn, is that she is among more white people than she'd seen in years. Goodness knows how lyrically she'd have waxed if the plane had been hijacked.

In Guyana, she'd taken an African lover, a high-born, powerful dude who liked to push her around. If she wanted to eat chicken, he'd insist on lamb. He was - how can one put it politely? - not a feminist. Yet he had a habit of asking awkward questions to which there were no easy answers. "You Americans can be bullheaded, stupid and crazy. Why would you kill President Kennedy?"

Angelou returns to America to join forces with Malcolm X, "to give," as she so generously says, "my energies and wit to the OAAU [Organization of African-American Unity]." But before she can go to work, he too is dead, killed in 1965 by members of his own race. "If a group of racists had waylaid Malcolm," Angelou writes, "killed him in the dark and left his body as a mockery to all black people, I might have accepted his death more easily. But he was killed by black people as he spoke to black people about a better future for black people and in the presence of his family."

Angelou's anger would have greater resonance if more pithily and less purply expressed. Instead she dissipates it by overdressing her prose. Homilies abound. "Human beings are like some plants," she says. "If we pause a few seconds in our journey, we begin settling down roots, tendrils that entangle other people as we ourselves are entangled." Elsewhere, she writes: "In the black community, a black person is always given her humanity." This from a woman who was raped by her mother's boyfriend when she was still a child, rendering her dumb for many years.

A Song Flung Up to Heaven is a sententious, pretentious book. Nevertheless it evokes colourfully a torrid period in America's recent past. Impeccably well-connected, she has survived and reinvented herself against improbable odds. That is admirable. What's not is the seriousness with which she now seems to take herself. In her quieter, more vulnerable moments, when writing about her son or her brother or her mother, we catch a glimpse of another, more humble, Maya Angelou. She is much missed.

Copyright 2002
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