Still I Rise Essay Trauma

People talk behind the speaker’s back and spread whatever rumors they can conjure, even to the point of ramming her face in the mud and really making a picture of her as a dirty, good-for-nothing person. Yet despite that, she still walks with her head high, knowing they're not true. And when people can't seem to understand why she’s not upset, they'll continue putting her down. And she'll just laugh it off, not really caring about what they say or do. The last stanza shows that even if she had a checkered past and no matter what she may have done before, she can still rise, she can still stand up, she can still look the world in the eye and tell them, “I will rise.” In lines 21-24, Angelou states, “You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I’ll rise.” This shows that no matter what came Angelou’s way, she still rose to the occasion and made a difference. Thus, the racism that Angelou went through left its footprints in the making of her poetic

‘Still I Rise’ was written by an Afro-American poet Maya Angelou and consists of a mixture of tones, such as: playful, angry, comical and bitter. Slavery was long abolished but Angelou saw its effects on society and black people. In this poem she declares that no hatefulness of society will determine her success. In the poem ‘Still I Rise’ she is not only proclaiming her triumph but also calls others to stand up for themselves and live against society’s expectations.

Maya Angelou’s poem is all about the theme of identity and prejudice. Some of the techniques Angelou uses are repetition of words, the words ‘I rise, I rise, I rise’ these words emphasise the strength and resolve of Angelou. The resilience of her personality is shown by repeating ‘I rise’ in contrast to the aggression of her opposition, Angelou is clearly emphasising that she will not be oppressed or dominated. Within the poem are the use of metaphors ‘Im a black ocean, leaping and wide’ this suggest that she is a black lady and that she

Throughout her life, Maya Angelou was ridiculed for the color of her skin and was treated differently because of it. So many racist people lived in her town and used her and the black community as a doormat. African Americans were restricted to certain things and, “did not have the same rights and privileges as whites” (Agins 8). Racism was a big problem in Maya Angelou’s childhood, especially when she was eight. When Angelou was eight she helped her grandmother run the main store in Stamps. Momma rented out the house on the lot of her store to a poor white family. The girls would come by the store and demand things from Momma and Maya and would have to be addressed as “Miz”. One day when they went to walk up the steps they saw Momma standing on the porch with arms crossed and slippers on and started imitating her. Maya was infuriated and wanted to hurt the girls but Momma taught Maya to let it roll off her back, seeing as though racism would be a continuous thing throughout her life (Angelou 29-32). Maya felt that, “Being a product (is ‘victim’ a better word?) of southern Negro upbringing, I decided that I ‘would understand it all better by-and-by’” (Angelou 276). Angelou found it easier to be brought up through a segregated area where she was taunted and walked all over just for being black daily rather than finding it out later in life.

When reading, “Still I Rise”, by Maya Angelou, I immediately get a sense of perseverance and pride. The author seems to be addressing her adversaries directly through her words. I love the imagery used in this poem. I can almost see the dust rising and can feel the swelling of the black ocean that the author mentions. “Cause I walk like I got oil wells pumping in my living room”(Angelou, 1978), and, “Laugh like I’ve got gold mines diggin’ in my own back yard” (Angelou, 1978), tells me that the author feels that her life is joyous and priceless, and can’t be taken away. As the phrase, “I Rise” (Angelou, 1978), is repeated again and again, it’s as if I can

A powerful woman once said “ I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel” This powerful woman was a civil rights activist, writer and poet, Maya Angelou. Angelou grew up in 1928, in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, a segment of time where African American culture blossomed and the punished souls of the African Americans were expressed through literature and song. As an African American woman, Angelou experienced first hand racial prejudices and discrimination. Angelou had a rough childhood, with her parents splitting up, and being raped by her mother’s boyfriend at a young age, which made her mute for several years. She faced extreme hardship, racial intolerance and hurt, as at the

    Internationally respected brilliant poet, historian, and author Maya Angelou says "in all my work I try to tell the human truth-what it is like to be human...what makes us stumble and fumbleand fall and somehow miraculously rise and go on from the darkness and into the light (Ebony 96). This theme is consistently exemplified throughout Angelou's greatly acclaimed autobiographical worksand poems such as I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in my Name, Still I Rise and Phenomenal Women. All of these books depict the true-life stories of Ms. Maya Angelou's tragedies, and there dreadful conditions she had encountered in her youth. But in all of Angelou's novels and

Still I Rise, by the African American poet Maya Angelou, offers a different mixture of tones.(Assertive, Confident, Pride and Sarcasm)Ultimately, however, the poem’s tone, as the work’s title suggests, that the poem will be persuading the reader to never give up. The poem’s first word—“You”—is important. This is a poem clearly putting others in the place of others. It is not simply a private, lyric meditation. Much of its energy comes from its bold and strong feeling. The poem presents us with a black woman willing to speak up for herself, the poem is both highly political and highly personal. The author is finally responding to decades and even centuries of depression and mistreatment. Her tone, then, never sounds unintelligent or mean. Instead,

One of the first poems that demonstrates Angelou’s ability to speak for the disenfranchised in a bold way is the poem “Still I Rise.” The poem could be an anthem against slavery, or it could simply be an anthem for any person who feels as though he or she is being oppressed. In lines 1-4, the speaker seems to comment on behalf of black slaves when she says, “You may write me down in history/ with your bitter, twisted lies,/ You may trod me in the very dirt/ But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” These lines show that no matter what oppressors may have said or written about slaves, the black race would overcome with their indomitable spirit. Critic Sandra Cookson agrees with this statement by explaining that the poem is “about the survival of the black women despite every kind of humiliation…” and the poem “celebrates black women while simultaneously challenging the stereotypes to which America has subjected them since the days of slavery” Angelou’s sassy attitude that appeals to a more general audience is shown through the use of questions she asks of her oppressor in stanza two:

Since a young age Maya Angelou has experienced racism from the children around her. It is strenuous for Maya growing up because she feels as if she does not belong. From a young age to adulthood Maya had to go through racism and segregation due her skin color. There was a group of young boys, around Maya’s age, saying rude comments towards Maya because she was black: “Boys? It seemed that youth had never happened to them.

Maya Angelou had a traumatic childhood filled with sad events that left an impact on her for her writing career to develop. She faced racism as a child being a young black girl living in San Francisco during the time of war and heavy racism she stuck our everywhere: “she wasn’t a white girl with long blonde hair. As she remembered that she was a girl with dark skin, a gap between her teeth, and kinky hair” (“Maya Angelou” 24). She was also being beat by her father’s girlfriend and ran away to live in a junkyard for a month with other misfits who struggled as well. At the age of seven and a half, she was raped and hospitalized by her mother’s boyfriend. He went to jail and when he got realized he was kicked to death by her uncles. Angelou felt the murder was her fault so she stopped talking for five years. During this time of not speaking she read every book in the

Growing up during times of common race and gender discrimination, Maya Angelou has proven to people she is a strong African American woman who would not allow inequality of any kind bring her down. This paper describes the feminist strengths Angelou refers to and implies in her two famous poems Phenomenal Woman and Still I Rise.

Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" is a poem about strength and endurance, and about affirmation. I feel as if Maya Angelou main message into writing poem is about prejudice people that are against African Americans. She is saying that she has the strength to carry on and the courage to get back up when she has been look down upon and degraded by others that won’t accept her for who she is. This

Racism has played a major factor throughout society. Being prejudice and being racist can be expressed interchangeably with each other since they both are defined in nearly identical ways: having hatred or looking down on one of a different race or nationality. Resembling its counterpart, racism has occurred in the years leading all the way back to biblical times. In Maya Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise”, Angelou uses diverse literary elements while writing, such as similes, tone, imagery, symbolism, repetition, and allusions to allow the poem to have an overall sense of racism and how she possesses a strong willingness to rise above the issue.

Racism and sexism have been used for hundreds of years in order to keep the population where the person in power wants it to be, though in the words of Abraham Heschel, “Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason” (Heschel). These ideologies were grand problems in the life of Dr. Maya Angelou, an African-American woman born and raised in the late 1920s in Missouri, U.S.A, a place known for its discrimination against black people. Maya Angelou wrote her poem “Still I Rise” in 1978 at the age of 50, though that only adds to the power behind the poem itself. With her use of imagery, metaphorical language and similes, as well as repetition, this poem is Dr. Maya Angelou's most famous work, as well as