Research paper about I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS by Maya Angelou

Write a formal research paper about a thesis. I have an example thesis and an intro. Don’t copy the thesis and intro I provided. Use at least 3 secondary resources. The book I provided is a simplified version of the original story. Please provide a draft intro paragraph by 12/14 4 pm pst.

Thesis : The rape of a young maya is a metaphor for systemic racism, maya uses poetic sensibilities and prose as a platform to voice what is now known as intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw to describe a “lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”Crenshaw points out the way in which people “tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts.” Maya foretells the experience  of her rape, and then sandwhiches further life experiences between mentionings of the rape and the shame she feels. These life experiences detail all forms of discrimination through her use of prose. (still working on how to bring intersectionality, metaphor, and rape together in the way I see maya Use prose to do so. to be honest i can use intersectionality as its own thesis. I may need to seperate the two points i am trying to make). I intend to detail how she internalizes her rape and mirror that with the scene in which the priest in the tent is talking to his audience and she, in her observance, calls her own people masochists, using religion and other things to opress themseleves, just as maya uses her own guilt to opress her self when shame about the rape is triggered by other experiences. Stockholm syndrome and Helinski syndrome:  the rape becomes a metaphor when looking at the rapist and the masochism of african anericans described by maya. The shame about the pleasure she felt from being cuddled equates to the pleasure found in the  “freedoms” that the african americans feel they have been given by white people. Because of abuse and slavery and hardships inflicted upon african americans by white people, just as Maya had lacked emotional or physical intimacy in her upbringing due to factors like displacement and religious ideology, poverty, her gender and race, both parties feel a sense of guilt or shame. This shame  enrages some as they participate in white society to survive. Some of them believe that they can be better than the whites at doing what they do, which makes maya even more angry,  she transforms from a little girl ashamed to be black to a young girl who proclaims: ‘Let the whitefolks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly—mostly—let them have their whiteness. It was better to be meek and lowly…than to spend eternity frying in the fires of hell.’ (Angelou 133). This is the greater metaphor that is to “sing” like a caged bird .. The rape is again a  metaphor when looking at the rapist and in mayas opinion, white people. The rapist knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong, he threatened to kill maya or her brother if she told. The rapist did for himself without consideration for how it would affect maya, just as racists exercised their beliefs openly on african americans in her community (reference the killings of her people and the discrimination at the dentist). Oppressors are aware of the power their victims contain and use all kinds of tactics to keep their victims in check, just as the rapist told maya he would kill her brother.  Silent desperation: When maya realizes that her words have power she stops talking because her rapist was killed. This is another metaphor that describes the workings of systematic oppression and how the  masochism of her people is the very thing that keeps them oppressed in mayas opinion. Her people have power, but due to shame and other factors like domestication through labor or religion, they silence themselves in fear of retaliation or consequence. When maya overcomes this, she is able to advocate for herself thus becoming one of the first and only black women employed on the trains in san francisco, overcoming her confusion about her sexuality, driving her drunk dad out of mexico and choosing freedom in homelessness over returning to the toxic environment at her fathers home as well as preserving in school.  These are all moments where she overcomes oppression, and in each one she draws on the memory of being raped. This cycle of oppression is intersectionality, and maya proves it can be broken.

Maya Angelou employs poetic sensibilities throughout her transcendent novel, I Kknow Why the Caged Bird Sings, detailing traumatic experiences that mirror racism, slavery, sexism, displacement and the religious hypocrisy that is inflicted upon the African American community. Metaphor, simile, symbolism, personification and well thought innuendo weave together the story of how young Maya, Marguerite Johnson, overcomes sexual trauma and defies the odds as a black woman in a racist American society. The way Marguerite perceieves her sexual abuse and the internalization of her trauma mirrors the racism her people experience in their everyday lives. The path Marguerite finds herself walking continually exposes her to the depressing reality of being black in America, a reality that also contains the strength she uses to overcome the veil of her own self oppression and charge forward on her path to freedom. Her metaphorical perceptions detail a self-awakening which coincides with the undeniable truths that her people later face in order to overcome the oppressive forces within their own communities, and eventually white society.