The Singing Cure- healing Process in Maya Angelou’s "Caged Bird"

Abstract

Do Boi in his famous book ‘The Souls of Black Folk’ called slavery as “a national trauma, and an intensely personal trauma” (Boi 1967). The pain and suffering of slavery was such that it became the part of the unconscious mind. For Maya Angelou, growing up as a black and women, in such times, in the rural south; there was no escape from racial prejudice.

However the first volume of her autobiography, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" not just shows her own past but also shows a collective past of blacks in American Society. She uses a powerful medium of life narrative and through this reconstructs the history in a way which gives a healing process. It could be sensed through the title, where although the bird is still caged like it was caged in Dunbar's Symphony, but Anglo's bird sings, has a voice and a self-realisation. This paper would try to explore the healing elements in her first autobiography and how it reconstructs the history.