Still I Rise By Maya Angelou Essay

In Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, we read about the experiences an oppressed African woman faces while living in America, she uses the medium of poetry to express the images and emotions she has struggled with in her life. Throughout the poem we get to see how she argues that even the saddest movements we experience in life can be transferred in a shift in perception, and that these movements can provide the foundation for an improved life. That it is an exercise in which it examines the choices people make in the way they perceive themselves, and the way these choices can alter their identity. Angelou demonstrates an example a way in which perception of the past can be altered to a revolutionary new way of thinking.
Angelou’s narrator builds …show more content…
When the speaker puts forward the idea of “you may write down me down in history/ with your bitter twisted lies” (1-2), she is referring to the idea that it is something that is already occurring, but must be resisted by those who are being lied about. Yet, in the poem Angelou asks, “does my sexiness upset you?” (25), in a way to try to defiantly subverting the expectation of “blackness” that the narrator is struggling against. Rather than the primitive and unusual meaning that white people make with black lives as they struggled against slavery and institutional racism. However, Angelou throughout the poem suggest that black beauty is just as refined as any other, even perhaps more …show more content…
Despite being oppressed, Angelou expresses that having such courage to prosper against discrimination, is a way that you must change the way you perceive others and the past, for an improved foundation for your upcoming life. The poem strives for combining individuals together and making them stronger as one, even when Angelou is compared to dust and dirt; she sees through it and compares herself to be the same from when its original state was, demonstrating that nothing will stop her from rising against the