Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou

Like millions of people around the world I’ve been watching with horror the events in the US following the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. The provocative rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump turns my stomach, and the understandable emotions of the protestors in every state leaves me feeling at a loss as to how the US can regain its equilibrium in the face of such division.

I don’t know what I can do, as one person, not even living in the US, but in its northern neighbour, other than to self-check my own biases (conscious or unconscious), call out racism when I come across it, and try to be part of a population that realises that Canada too has its own racism issues, especially with the Indigenous peoples of our country.

When I’m unsettled, I usually turn to my bookshelves to regain some equilibrium. I lifted and laid down a dozen books before I remembered a copy of Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou.

It’s a series of essays and poems dedicated to the daughter she never had, and therefore dedicated to all the daughters, no matter what their colour or creed. I bought it about three months ago, and because it’s the proverbial slim volume it had kind of got lost between larger, supposedly more imposing books.

I read it in an afternoon and came out the other side feeling not necessarily more hopeful of a good outcome from the current crisis but soothed by the emotional depth of humanity we can and should aspire to.

Angelou talks about growing up in Arkansas with her grandmother and in California with her mother when she reached her teens. About having sex for the first time, about being assaulted and beaten, about her anguish in leaving her son with her grandmother while she was working abroad, and how her fragile mental stage on return led her to contemplate both the prospect of murdering her son and committing suicide. She talks about learning lessons on cultural customs and context (that now we’d probably call cultural intelligence) from old men in Morocco and in the house of a Senegal actress in Paris. She talks about being a smart, literate African American woman, and therefore a target, and about African American writers and poets whose words still resonate. And she talks about the lure of the South, the displacement of people to the North and being a bridge between black and white college students who had no cultural reference for how to talk to each other.

For such a small book it covers a lot of ground, and I don’t think any of the essays are more than about five pages long and many are a lot shorter. Her poems and the poems she quotes from, from other writers especially have great power, made me emotional and want to seek out more of her poetry.

I love that she realised when she was offered a Professorship at a college in North Carolina that she was not a ‘writer who teaches’, but a ‘teacher who writes’. That’s the thing that resonated with this book. The lessons from the essays and poems aren’t revelatory, but they are taught and retaught with humanity, compassion, charm and self-deprecation. Maya Angelou believes in humanity, in dignity, in the power of people to effect change for the better and in the need for politicians to aim for the high ground.

I still have no idea how the US will move forward from the current crisis and I vacillate between not watching the news because I don’t want to watch Trump preen, posture and pontificate, and feeling that I have a responsibility to watch the news to witness each new situation unfold.

What I do know is that if she were still with us, Maya Angelou would have been eloquent in her commentary. I am a white, non-practising Presbyterian Scot, but in Letter to My Daughter I felt like she was talking to me, as well as to all the daughters she never had, and all the sons as well.

Letter to My Daughter by Maya Angelou was published in 2008 and my copy was published by Random House.