Maya Angelou makes her life story swing

Disappeared just ten years ago, the African-American writer Maya Angelou magnificently recounted her childhood in the South of the United States, at the time of racial segregation: “I know why the caged bird sings” (1969 ). Then the cage opened, the black lark flew away and resumed its song in the open air. Having worked through a swarm of odd jobs (tram driver, cook, madam, etc.) before becoming known as an author and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou also knew how to sing and dance. Here is an autobiographical story full of this music that his ancestors “had managed to create from a terror impossible to express other than through songs”. Its title displays the program: “Sing, swing, party like at Christmas”.

Let’s first set the scene: San Francisco at the dawn of the fifties, the emerging consumer society and McCarthyism which weighs down the atmosphere. A saleswoman at a record store, Maya Angelou meets a white man, crazy about jazz, whom she marries, hoping to become “the good wife of the magazines.” A divorce later, it was in a seedy strip club that she found work. Beginning of a life as a dancer and singer which will soon open the doors of the opera “Porgy and Bess” to her: “the greatest range of black talent I had ever seen”. She is committed; the troupe takes him on its international tour and into an unknown world: Paris, Venice, Yugoslavia, Egypt, Athens and even Lausanne, “white and icy city”.

There is no shortage of funny, tender, fierce or poignant scenes. We love Maya Angelou for her verve, her swing, her humanism, the finesse of her observations on racial barriers, the drollness with which she portrays herself as an artichoke, and also for her courageous obstinacy to follow against all odds. advice from his grandmother: stand “with your shoulders back, your head held high, to look the future straight in the eye”.

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