Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato)
CThere’s still a lot to read and summer is practically over. Not that you can’t read in winter but those little pages consumed just before a nap comfortably placed in the shade to escape the seaside or mountain heat… provide – in my opinion – one of the most intense pleasures of this season.
It’s time to return to reality and face the problems, but keeping some time for our favorite therapy – reading – can help us make a softer landing in the land of responsibility.
Once again I couldn’t read all of Dostoevsky and I preferred to dedicate myself to a writer who I guiltily knew little about and only through some intense poems which are part of his rich bibliography.
Like cherries, one after the other I found all Maja Angelou’s booksAfrican-American poet and writer who died at 84 in 2014.
From the first I know why the caged bird singsthe multifaceted author has strung together a series of autobiographical novels that chronicle her turbulent and adventurous life since she played on the dusty streets of Stamps in Arkansas and the threat of the Ku Klux Klan was not just a legend but an everyday reality that scared the kids of the black neighborhood to death more than any innocent tale of the big bad wolf.
“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
None of us can understand that what it means to be born with dark skin and grow up in a ghetto neighborhood of an American city and Angelou with her direct and compelling prose opens our eyes to many themes that we still struggle to understand today.
From being completely self-taught, the writer has become a symbol for the fight against racism and a champion of the rights of African Americans and women but before publishing her numerous novels, teaching at university and inflaming audiences with the reading of her poems, Maja went through the twentieth century living a thousand lives.
She was the first black woman to ride a streetcar through the streets of San Francisco and a dancer in the cast of Porgy and Bess; a violated child and a single mother and the first poet to recite her verses during the inauguration ceremony of a president in the White House.
Armed with courage and an inexhaustible joy of living the powerful voice of Maya Angelou continues to teach us that no matter how many difficulties, hatred and mistrust we may encounter on our path, we will still find the strength to rise again, as she writes in her poetry Still I laughed. Few precious verses to always keep on hand.
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