Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise
Liane Buck: Well, which leads me, it’s like holding what you just said. Would then you classify her life archetypical in one way? Her life as a Hero’s journey? Despite everything that she went through and witnessed, she was never a victim. It requires a fabric of soul, the different fabric of soul not to give in. Would you say that her life had a lot of the elements of the hero’s journey?
Rita Coburn Whack: I think so. I understand what you mean. I think that there have been people in our society that have risen to heights that we don’t necessarily know how they got there. Martin Luther King, Gandhi. People who decided to fight for freedom. Gloria Steinem. People that decided that they were going to fight, whether you agreed with their fight or not.
And I think those people, collective as a people; that’s one reason why it’s a likeminded situation. There are very few people in American culture in the ’60s that formed relationships with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, since both of them are civil rights leaders, approach their positions from opposite ends of the spectrum. And here was a woman who was able to work with both of them and to understand both of them. And I think that the understanding that she had that, again, came out of not just the trauma of race, but the trauma of sexual abuse and how she dealt with that. So for the five years that she was a volunteer mute, she also did a lot of reading. And that form of education is something that has happened to a lot of what you call heroes in our society.
They seem to have educated or taken it upon themselves to do that. To just really nourish themselves on books and knowledge that are available to many of us. But from five from seven to 13, if you read Shakespeare, Poe, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and you read and take all this in, there are PhDs in literature that doesn’t do that.
And so the wide amount of knowledge that she had, paired with where she was in society, that may be some of those stepping stones, as you call, to some hero’s journey. But a lot of it was she; it’s an earned respect.
