The Freedom Theatre family mourns and takes the time to remember our great supporter Maya Angelou, who died this past week. She was a key adviser to the US Friends of the Jenin Freedom Theatre. Maya Angelou is known throughout the world as a supporter and fighter for civil and human rights: from working for civil rights in the USA to advising The Freedom Theatre. She felt it is always important to speak your mind on human rights:
“You have no idea who you will impress and inform and change and enhearten and empower. You have no idea who will take just something you said from your heart … or the way you walk or the way you dress. There’s some 14-year-old who says, ‘I like that.’ You have no idea who you will inform because all of us are caged birds, have been and will be again. Caged by somebody else’s ignorance. Caged because of someone else’s small-mindedness. Caged because of someone else’s fear, hate and sometimes, caged by our own lack of courage.” [From Maya Angelou’s keynote speech at the Human Rights Campaign 1998].
Maya Angelou lent her voice to The Freedom Theatre because she thought it was a model for the future for young people to be working together to create art and change their own lives in spite of the occupation.
Below is the poem that inspired Maya Angelou for the title of her most important book , I know why the Caged Bird Sings.
Sympathy By Paul Lawrence Dunbar written in 1899
I KNOW what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals —
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting —
I know why he beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings —
I know why the caged bird sings!