Maya Angelou has reached 70 but, Ann Donald finds, she's enjoying ageing and has just been published again.
MAYA Angelou answers the phone promptly and demandingly. It's early morning and the writer's creamy deep voice sounds just a breath tired. Understandable when you consider the whirlwind of interviews to be packed into a three-day London visit. Understandable when one of the first calls you get on your 70th birthday is from a faceless journalist. ''I'm celebrating my birth month not just the day,'' she chuckles.
The parameters have already been set from her publishing house. This is going to be a quick-fire round of questions with one of the world's most celebrated writers and poets. A woman whose tumultuous life has famously been logged in her five autobiographical works starting with I Know Why The Cage Bird Sings. Born in 1928 St Louis, Missouri, and raised by her grandmother in Arkansas, Maya Angelou has packed in more roles than the average 70-year-old. Add to autobiographer the following: civil rights activist,
producer, performer,
actress, ambassador, film-maker, professor, and poet to the president.
To celebrate all of the above, a new collection of essays and thoughts has been published. Even the Stars Look
Lonesome may not be ranked alongside other works in the Angelou pantheon, given the hasty appearance of some essays. However, some of the strongest work that rises is on ageing and an acute sense of the unjust. Summarising the theme of her work, she says: ''Life can be rough, it can be tough, but if you have the courage to love, you survive. Life loves those who live it.''
So how does it feel to be a very positive-sounding
70-year-old? ''It feels great,'' Angelou replies in that gravelly voice. ''My sixties were my best decade so far. So I'm hoping that this decade will get even better. Society seems to have this negative view of ageing that has to do with marketing,'' she continues, warming to the subject. ''They run with this crazy idea that you can never be too white, too thin, too young, too rich . . . ''
In her essay on the matter Angelou expounds on the great pleasure of enjoying a smooth Scotch, decent wine, men, and music - all in moderation - but she concludes: ''Mostly what I have learned so far about ageing, despite the creakiness of one's bones and the cragginess of one's once silken skin, is this: do it; by all means do it.''
As a political activist who became the northern
co-ordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of Dr Martin Luther King, Angelou has always been vocal in her observations on the state of African-Americans. In her essay Danger in Denial
she rages against the rift between the sexes and predicts that the chasm can only widen. How then does Angelou see the progress of black/white relations in America since she entered the world? ''There are still areas in America that are polarised and never the twain (black and white) will meet,'' she sighs. ''But in areas the march of time has seen thousands of elected officials in high political positions, Congressmen and women who made a difference.''
AlThough she talks of a filtering down, Angelou acknowledges an underclass. ''There is of course a real and tragic underclass,'' she says. ''But it is very important for people who do not see that underclass that drug problems and random shootings are not an apt evaluation of the large percentage of
African-Americans.''
Finally, there is the matter of Robert Burns, who was the subject of Angelou's earlier Ex:S documentary. She continues to teach both Burns and an African poet named Paul Lawrence Dunbar at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. She enthuses over both men. ''Even though there was a century and an ocean between them I felt both men managed to reach into the mouths of their people and bring out the language, wit, pathos, need, and hunger, and put it all down on the page.'' And at her best, Angelou achieves the same level of intimacy with her readership.
n Even The Stars Look Lonesome by Maya Angelou is published by Virago at #12.99.
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