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They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose garden. You must live and life will be good to you, give you experiences. I’ve always had the feeling that life loves the liver of it. Painting by Basquiat from Angelou’s ‘Life Doesn’t Frighten Me.’ Click image for more.Īt 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: Bitterness is a corrosive, terrible acid. I can become quite angry and burning in anger, but I have never been bitter. I’m very blessed that I have a healthy temper. Those people who gave me so much, and still give me so much, have a passion about them. They encourage you to be as strong, as volatile as necessary to make a well world. And so they keep one from becoming bitter. 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: 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.Īnd yet Angelou acknowledges with great gratitude the kindness of those who opened doors for her in her spiritual and creative journey. Reflecting on her youth, she channels an experience all too familiar to those who enter life from a foundation the opposite of privilege: To be sure, beneath Angelou’s remarkable optimism and dignity lies the strenuous reality she had to overcome. 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. 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. People often put labels on people so they don’t have to deal with the physical fact of those people. Or rather I hope I do, because I am all those things. 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.
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What I represent in fact, what I’m trying like hell to represent every time I go into that hotel room, is myself. 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: But I accepted it and I thought, well, aren’t I the lucky one. So if I had accepted what people told me I looked like as a negative yes, then I would be dead. My attitude was too arrogant - or tenderhearted. And my mother’s people were very very fair. I of course grew up with my grandmother: my grandmother’s people and my brother are very very black, very lovely. I have looked quite strange in most of the places I have lived in my life, the stages, spaces I’ve moved through. I just do not allow too many negatives to soil me. I’ve been very fortunate… I seem to have a kind of blinkers. 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: 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. The light of the world has grown a little dimmer with the loss of the phenomenal Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928–May 28, 2014), but her legacy endures as a luminous beacon of strength, courage, and spiritual beauty.