Previously Lost Maya Angelou Interview Surfaces
An interview with Maya Angelou thought to be completely lost to time has surfaced in the Playboy archives. The interview with Angelou, conducted by Murray Fisher in 1999, is posted online with an introduction by novelist Edwidge Danticat. Danticat writes, "I first met Maya Angelou in print." Picking up from there:
I arrived in the United States from Haiti at the age of 12 and, after reading all the books by Haitian and French writers I could find at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, resolved to start reading in English. One afternoon, on a display table at the library entrance, I came across I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first book in Angelou’s multivolume autobiography. On its cover, a barefoot little black girl stood, completely lost in reading, in front of a modest wooden cabin that looked like the one where I had spent my childhood summers. Even before I cracked it open, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit in the author.
Maya Angelou and I were born and raised in different countries during different eras, but we had much in common. She too had been left as a young girl in the care of relatives, in her case her grandmother in tiny Stamps, Arkansas, and in my case my aunt and uncle in Port-au-Prince. She too survived sexual abuse as a child, though her abuser was punished in a way that made her feel she should punish herself by not speaking from the ages of seven to 13. In Angelou’s silence, however, were planted the seeds of a powerful writing voice. She devoured great works of literature, from Thomas Wolfe to Gustave Flaubert to Charles Dickens and many others. When Angelou was 17 (having returned to her mother’s care a few years earlier), she had a baby, left home with her infant son and undertook an eclectic and extraordinary breadth of pursuits—dancer, madam, actor, civic organizer, playwright. She eventually flourished, blossoming not just as a nuanced and commanding writer but also an extraordinary orator.
In person Maya Angelou was tall and elegant, looking every bit the regal aging dancer she was. She had a booming, musical voice that sounded as though she might break into song at any time. When I first heard her speak, at Brown University, where I was a graduate student, I wept as she described her childhood rape and how speaking about it had led her uncles to kill her attacker. I remember Angelou closing her remarks by reciting, as casually as she might say “Good morning,” a few lines from “Phenomenal Woman,” one of her seminal poems: “I’m a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman / That’s me.”
Read more of Danticat's remembrance and Fisher's complete interview with Angelou here.