Finally you come upon something reasonable to say.
Anyway. Back among the living once again!
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas by Maya Angelou
This one took me awhile to read for various reasons most of which had really nothing to do with the quality of Maya's third entry into her autobiographical memoir series. One of my goals for this year was to learn and study music theory along with playing the guitar more regularly. Adulting seems to be more about balancing things than anything else. Considering the title of the book and most of the events revovle around her singing and dancing in an all black San Francisco stage production it's a cool connection. Combined with the fact that Maya displays some of her most musical and rhythmic literary prowess here it's been somewhat dizzying to see how powerful song and dance can be and how it affects others.
Being the third book in her six (or technically 7 - the 7th book is a focused look into the relationship between herself and her mother and not just about a certain period of her life) book series this felt like the close of an arc. In this Maya gains her world famous name (Marguerite Angelos was her married name) and at the close of the book she has pencil and paper in hand as she begins writing. In essence this feels like the final act of an origin story. In between she manages to get married (and divorced), work at a record shop owned by a white woman, gain notoriety as a costumed singer and dancer in San Francisco, and join the touring company of Porgy & Bess to tour Europe.
While Maya doesn't explicitly touch on identity (and all those tangents) she does explore the area with each stop of the company's tour. Retelling how the villagers in the various towns reacted to seeing her and the rest of the cast. In several cases whole villages had never seen a Black person before. Coincidentally, this made me refer back to James Baldwin and his essays I have read recently. He shared similar experiences as he himself ventured Europe around the same time frame. While Maya doesn't dive deeply into philosophical identity the way Baldwin does she manages to explore that isolation and simultaneous global community with her language.
The biggest difference between this and the previous two memoirs is that this book features a period of Maya's life where she is legitimately happy, healthy, and headstrong. Even the divorce feels positive and healthy and is really only covered for a couple chapters at most. Maya isn't the type to dilly-dally or beat around the bush. She accepts everything at face value no matter how trivial or embarrassing. This is a woman who, after all, started up her own prostitution house previously in the second book. Despite that she continues to display some naivety, but it is clearly something she is growing out of.
As an adult this is something that is fascinating to read. Sometimes I think we all feel isolated with our lack of confidence, anxiety, and depression. It's comforting to read that people from all walks of life go through similar experiences. Maya is a legend and her strides were the paces of giants by the time she died, but she literally started from a dirt floor shack. Throughout her life she exhibits the same anxiety, self-doubt and self-loathing, and depression all of us everyday people experience.
While these are definitely feelings Maya held throughout the events of the book much of them are pushed to the back and expressed more subtlety compared to the other two books. Maya is, after all, having the time of her life and it is a real pleasure to read such an experience. It's hard for me to knock her for this period of her life, but I have to admit I didn't find it nearly as fascinating. Happiness is abundant and there's not much there to threaten it apart from feelings and emotions building up within her. By the end she is full-blown depressed (she goes as far as to see a psychiatrist), but this depression is only acknowledged for a couple pages. Like I said earlier - Maya doesn't dilly dally.
I had Malcolm X's autobiography on deck, but I put in a switch hitter because I needed to pivot from the autobiographical to something different. So far I'm only about 30 pages into Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf, but it is pretty great thus far. The writing style will take a couple pages to get into since it starts off somewhat jumpy, but it makes for a compelling and arresting narration style.
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