¶ … prolific black American writers recognized in the world of contemporary American literature is Maya Angelou. Maya Angelou was born Margurite Johnson in Arkansas, but later changed her name to Maya Angelou, after her husband's last name, a man named Tosh Angelou (Life and Times 2002). Maya Angelou had struggled through hard life and poverty, living her life in perpetual abuse to opportunist and abusive men. She had a difficult childhood, and was raped at the age of 8 by her mother's friend, and by the age 16, gave birth to her son (Quilt Pages 2002). She sustains herself and her son by working, and Maya Angelou worked on different odd jobs. She was considered the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco, the first black woman screenwriter and director in Hollywood, and became known for her work for the civil rights movement along with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (ClassicNotes 2002). Maya Angelou had led a life of eternal struggle and suffering, yet, her suffering did not become a barrier for her to pursue a meaningful and fruitful life as a writer and activist of women's...

Of the numerous poems she had composed, the poem "Africa" is a soulful reflection of herself, and the poem is an analogy of her life with that of the great continent of the world. This paper will provide a critical analysis of the poem 'Africa" by Maya Angelou, and will relate this poem analysis in the context of her life and experiences as a woman and black American in the white American society.
The first stanza of the poem "Africa" is descriptive of the qualities of a woman and of the continent Africa. The stanza can be viewed as having dual meaning, and the analogy of Africa and herself 9 Maya Angelou) starts at the first lines of the poem. The lines "sugarcane sweet / deserts her hair / golden her feet / two Niles her tears..." (lines 2-6, I) are descriptive phrases of the qualities the subject possesses (Africa and Maya Angelou). Notice that the firs three lines mentioned attributes to the exotic quality of the subject; however, the last line illustrates that despite the beauty that we see in those lines in the first stanza, there is suffering beneath…