Nina Lee Smith
August 24, 2020
10MD
Question: Describe an important idea in the text. Explain whether or not you think this idea is relevant to teenagers today.
Poem: ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou
‘Still I Rise’ is a poem by the legendary Maya Angelou about rising above challenges despite the many obstacles that may be in your path. There are many different ideas in the text, but one very important one is racism, a topic which, especially at this particular time, is very relevant to teenagers. I believe that analysing this poem can help teenagers in their overall understanding of the outside world today and help them to better understand the past so they can make strides in the present and pave the way for the future. In this essay, I will explain what makes this idea so relevant, how it applies to the past, present and future of this generation’s teenagers.
Before we start, I’d like to describe the life of Maya Angelou to better understand the perspective of ‘Still I Rise.’ Maya Angelou was an American poet, actress and memoirist who lived from 1928 to 2014. She had a traumatic childhood, living as a young African American girl in Missouri and Arkansas throughout the 1930s and later lived in California and New York during the 1940s and 50s, times of which racism in America was very much alive. Sources also document that Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend before she was eight and was later murdered. This series of events left Angelou almost mute for a significant amount of time. Angelou had lived with her grandmother in Arkansas throughout the majority of her childhood and moved with her mother to California. During her time in California, she worked several jobs to make ends meet. It wasn’t until she moved to New York City in the late 1950s that Angelou started to explore her writing talents and also obtained a role in a folk opera which lead to her travels around the world. She returned to the US in the mid-1960s and had made a name for herself by 1968 with her 10-part TV series named, ‘Black, Blues, Black,’ which is about African culture in every-day American life. She also wrote the drama, ‘Georgia, Georgia’ after which she became one of the first African American women to have a screenplay produced as a feature film. Maya Angelou is a true rags-to-riches story. She worked hard and achieved fame and fortune despite the societal disadvantages she was born into.
‘Still I Rise’ is perhaps Angelou’s most well-known piece of work. It tells a story of confidence, ending almost every stanza with, ‘I’ll rise.’ It expresses power and reminds you that, despite everything you might’ve been through, you can rise above it if you work hard enough.
We tend to convince ourselves that racism doesn’t exist or is quite rare in our current world, although recent events have currently turned that belief onto its head, which I will elaborate on later. For now, I want to examine the way racism is used in, ‘Still I Rise’ and how it is used helps with our overall understanding of racism as it affects the world around us. As previously stated, Maya Angelou is a victim of racism, and thus she includes racism in ‘Still I Rise.’ She specifically references the enslavement of African-Americans during the early years of the U.S.A., for example,
‘Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?’
These violent phrases describe the way slaves were expected to act around their owners; bowed heads, lowered stance, cautious to keep from stepping out of line so they don’t get punished. These two lines and many others help us to understand the amount of oppression those of colour have been through.
The references to racism in ‘Still I Rise’ are mainly from the past, which has had a massive effect on the world as a whole. As most if not all of us know, about 100 to 200 years ago slaves were common among European society, specifically British and Spanish colonies, and most if not all of those slaves were not white. Some were Hispanic or South American, some might’ve been Asian, and some were African, but almost no slave was completely European or white. If I told a teenager this, I don’t think it would be much of a surprise. Knowledge of slavery is considered general knowledge in the present day, but that knowledge shapes our view of the world.
Because we know that humans once enslaved other humans believing that the slaves were inhuman gives us a perspective that I’m confident to say we treat as second nature. We have this sense of hatred towards the enslavers, and thus have a slight prejudice against countries that were known at one point or another to be discriminatory or racist. Don’t believe me? Think about it. If I were to bring up the topic of racism, what does your mind immediately shift to? The American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s? Perhaps the arising Civil Rights Movement this year? Maybe the British colonies and the slave trade they played a massive part of? Now, how did whatever you think of change your perspective of the world around you?
For me, I think most of the founding of America and the Civil Rights Movements of both the 1960s and this year, 2020. This is mainly because, as an American, American Civil Rights has been hammered into my head since I was a child. When I think about these moments, I mostly feel shame. I am ashamed that the society I happily and safely live in was built on the backs of slaves taken away from their homes and abused only for their descendants to be separated, beat and killed by those in the society they were born in. I feel ashamed that I’m one of the lucky ones, I get to live a comfortable life as a second-generation citizen while people who have lived in the same place for centuries live in fear every single day. I believe this shame has made me self-conscious about my nationality, which is quite honestly awful. No one should be ashamed of where they come from, not even Americans and Angelou expresses this in stanza eight, exclaiming,
‘Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise.’
This is an announcement by an African-American woman that it is possible to overcome this shame, it is possible to make things right by using our past as an example of what not to do. We can rise above this.
This brings us to the second point of this essay, how racism affects the present. I’ve already stated in the previous paragraph that we need to use the past to figure out what was done wrong and fix it to better develop our society. As you’ve most likely heard, thousands have started demanding these actions in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, launched into action by the death of George Floyd.
George Floyd was an African-American man who was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. Floyd was being arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit 20 dollar bill, and was pressed to the ground by the knee of a white police officer by the name of Derek Chauvin. Chauvin pressed his knee directly on Floyd’s neck and kept him on the ground for nearly eight minutes despite his desperate pleas to stop, crying out, ‘I can’t breathe!’ This action caused the death of George Floyd, and a multitude of protests and riots erupted from the news of this event, a video has gone viral on social media. These protests sometimes lead to riots and often lead to police brutality. Some protestors would smash and graffiti police cars and police would try to control the protests in riot gear, throwing tear gas into the crowds, beating protestors on the front lines with batons and shooting the crowds with rubber bullets, one of which hit a reporter in the eye, causing that eye to go blind.
In my opinion, these protests are completely out of control, but they are making the progress we need, and trying to prove the point of ‘Still I Rise,’ ‘I rise.’ This sentiment is the main focus and objective of the poem, shown by the constant repetition and placement at the end of almost every single stanza. Even though most teenagers most likely haven’t read ‘Still I Rise,’ I believe that the main idea in the poem is almost exactly the reason for the protests happening today, rising above the systemic issues that plague our society so we can eliminate the problem.
The third and final point of this essay is how the relevance of racism to teenagers will affect the future that they will be running. As Maya Angelou expressed in her poem,
‘Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.’
This metaphor is incredibly powerful and still stands today. If you still can’t quite grasp the meaning of this quote, in short, I believe that Angelou is telling the audience that we are responsible for bringing justice to the ancestors that were treated inhumanely. We are responsible for creating a society that those who have died working to make it equal would be proud of. We are responsible for our future.
Explaining the relevance of this is going to be a challenge because I’ll be talking about the future, which hasn’t happened yet, but I’ll do my absolute best. Black Lives Matter is already a massive topic, and so many people are already working hard to create the future, and the present, that Maya Angelou and many others would be proud of. As teenagers, we are going to run the world one day, and having the knowledge and aim to eliminate racism is going to turn the world we create into a vastly different one than the one we would create if we weren’t educated on racism. The more we know about the topic, the better we can fix the problems that have been written into society for far too long.
In conclusion, ‘Still I Rise’ brings a common objective of overcoming racism and using references to the past to help the audience better understand the hardships that victims of racism have gone through for centuries. This understanding has affected the present through a new spark of protests, exposing the systematic problems that are yet to be fixed and will give those that will be running the future, our generation’s teenagers, a goal to achieve.
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