Childhood Trauma in Maya Angelou’s Autobiographical Fiction – Abuse and Displacement

Nina Roșcan

doi:10.31178/ubr.9.1.4

Abstract

The article discusses how trauma is represented in Maya Angelou’s autobiographical fiction, one of the most important themes in all her seven autobiographical novels and an African American feminist marginalized experience that speaks about the intensity and effects of women’s oppression. It explores how the novelist locates traumatic affects in the protagonist, and suggests that Frantz Fanon’s model of racial trauma in Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth remains essential for the interpretation of postcolonial texts. My purpose is to explore the different juxtapositions that the story offers between individual and collective experiences of

Highlights

Trauma, be it individual or collective, has been a constant topic in criticism and literature for the last decades whose most defining characteristic was an ‘intense concern with the demands of otherness’ (Zapata 523-4)
Maya Angelou invites to a comparison to Simone de Beauvoir who had a great influence on feminist theory by drawing attention to a broader perspective behind trauma: redefinitions of family, workplace, sexuality, legal inequalities, racial and gender oppression
The children were sent to their grandmother unsupervised on a train may be traumatic, the narrator is careful to remark that the significance lies, not in the event itself, but rather in the socio-economic context as portrayed in the 1930s American South, where the novel takes place

Summary

Introduction

Be it individual or collective, has been a constant topic in criticism and literature for the last decades whose most defining characteristic was an ‘intense concern with the demands of otherness’ (Zapata 523-4). Autobiography became for Angelou a process of catharsis, in which she spoke about the profound effects that childhood sexual trauma had upon her and the displacement from her family when they separated and the two children, young Maya and her brother Bailey, were sent to their paternal grandmother unsupervised on the train with tags on their hands.

Results

Conclusion