By Maria Popoya
“Life loves the liver of
it. You must live and life will be good to you.”
The light of the world has grown a little dimmer
with the loss of the phenomenal Maya Angelou, but her legacy endures as
a luminous beacon of strength, courage, and spiritual beauty. Angelou’s
timeless wisdom shines with unparalleled light in a 1977 interview by
journalist Judith Rich, found in Conversations with Maya Angelou (public library) — the
same magnificent tome that gave us the beloved author’s conversation with Bill Moyers on freedom — in
which Angelou explores issues of identity and the meaning of life.
Reflecting on her life, Angelou — who rose to
cultural prominence through the sheer tenacity of her character and talent,
despite being born into a tumultuous working-class family, abandoned by her
father at the age of three, and raped at the age of eight — tells Rich:
I’ve been very fortunate… I seem to have a
kind of blinkers. I just do not allow too many negatives to soil me. I’m very
blessed. I have looked quite strange in most of the places I have lived in my
life, the stages, spaces I’ve moved through. I of course grew up with my
grandmother: my grandmother’s people and my brother are very very black, very
lovely. And my mother’s people were very very fair. I was always sort of in
between. I was too tall. My voice was too heavy. My attitude was too arrogant —
or tenderhearted. So if I had accepted what people told me I looked like as a
negative yes, then I would be dead. But I accepted it and I thought, well,
aren’t I the lucky one.
She later revisits the question of identity,
echoing Leo Buscaglia’s beautiful meditation on labels, as she
reflects on the visibility her success granted her and the responsibility that
comes with it:
What I represent in fact, what I’m trying
like hell to represent every time I go into that hotel room, is myself. That’s
what I’m trying to do. And I miss most of the time on that: I do not represent
blacks or tall women, or women or Sonomans or Californians or Americans. Or
rather I hope I do, because I am all those things. But that is not all that I
am. I am all of that and more and less. People often put labels on people so
they don’t have to deal with the physical fact of those people. It’s easy to
say, oh, that’s a honkie, that’s a Jew, that’s a junkie, or that’s a broad, or
that’s a stud, or that’s a dude. So you don’t have to think: does this person
long for Christmas? Is he afraid that the Easter bunny will become polluted? …
I refuse that… I simply refuse to have my life narrowed and proscribed.
To be sure, beneath Angelou’s remarkable
optimism and dignity lies the strenuous reality she had to overcome. Reflecting
on her youth, she channels an experience all too familiar to those who enter
life from a foundation the opposite of privilege:
It’s very hard to be young and curious and
almost egomaniacally concerned with one’s intelligence and to have no education
at all and no direction and no doors to be open… To go figuratively to a door
and find there’s no doorknob.
And yet Angelou acknowledges with great
gratitude the kindness of those who opened doors for her in her spiritual and
creative journey. Remembering the Jewish rabbi who offered her guidance in
faith and philosophy and who showed up at her hospital bedside many years later
after a serious operation, Angelou tells Rich:
The kindnesses … I never forget them. And so
they keep one from becoming bitter. They encourage you to be as strong, as
volatile as necessary to make a well world. Those people who gave me so much,
and still give me so much, have a passion about them. And they encourage the
passion in me. I’m very blessed that I have a healthy temper. I can become
quite angry and burning in anger, but I have never been bitter. Bitterness is a
corrosive, terrible acid. It just eats you and makes you sick.
Painting by Basquiat from
Angelou's 'Life Doesn't Frighten Me.' Click image for more.
At the end of the interview, Angelou reflects
on the meaning of life — a meditation all the more poignant as we consider, in
the wake of her death, how beautifully she embodied the wisdom of her own
words:
I’ve always had the feeling that life loves
the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you, give you
experiences. They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose
garden. But more than likely if you do dare, what you get are the marvelous
returns. Courage is probably the most important of the virtues, because without
courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues, you can’t say against a
murderous society, I oppose your murdering. You got to have courage to do so. I
seem to have known that a long time and found great joy in it.
The totality of Conversations with Maya Angelou is a
powerful portal into the beloved writer’s soul. Complement it with Angelou on home, belonging, and (not) growing up, her children’s verses about courage illustrated by
Basquiat, and her breathtaking reading of “Phenomenal Woman.”
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/05/29/maya-angelou-on-identity-and-the-meaning-of-life/
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