Blog Post #2

 MAYA ANGELOU

By- Ava Daniels


I enjoyed reading this excerpt from The Nortons Book of Women's Lives. I think that the amount of detail really helped make this piece more interesting. Everything from how each character was feeling at a specific moment to what the pubic hair on a trouble starter looked like was described in incredible detail. The part of the chapter where troublemakers came into Angelou's family store was very eye opening. After they had finished causing a disturbance, something that confused Angelou was how her mother referred to all three of the girls as "Miss" despite their attitude towards her mother. this was eye opening because it showed how the role models in Maya's life, including her mother, had a very "turn-the-other-cheek" attitude.  Another part from this excerpt that stood out to me and kept me the most engaged was when Angelou was describing her time in church with her brother and talking about how they were trying not to laugh but, ultimately, failed.  This reminded me a lot of me and my siblings because of the close relationship that Maya and her brother, Bailey, shared. Throughout the chapter, both of the siblings did a lot of thing together and shared some of the same experiences. 

Comments

Parker said…
I really think that Maya Angelou was able to display strong imagery to the reader, which is such a strong idea to convey. I do agree that Maya was able to paint very clear pictures of everything happening to her family. Reading everything that Maya had said about how her normal daily life was, is eye opening once again to hear that these white folk where mistreating black people and allowed others to keep doing these wrong doings to black people.
January 13, 2023 at 6:46 AM
Ava Daniels said…
It is eye opening but at the same time not surprising at all.
January 20, 2023 at 7:12 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog #14

Times and Places / Emily Hahn By- Ava Daniels Emily Hahn was a very intelligent and bright woman who graduated from the University of Wisconsin as a mining engineer. She made history as being the first woman to do so and then went on to live in Africa and China between the years of 1930 through 1935. Later in the years, her life seemed to take a turn when she became addicted to smoking opium. Opium was a very heavily used drug in China and Hahn had known that before moving there with her sister, Helen. "Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China" (344). This was the first sentence from the Times and Places excerpt and it definitely caught me off guard at first. I could never wrap my head around why anyone would want to be an addict to any drug because throughout my life, I've only been told that drugs and addiction cause horrible problems. I would like to point out that the first time Hahn describes her experienc...
Read more

Blog Post #19

The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman / Nisa By- Ava Daniels In this excerpt titled The Life and Words of a Kung Woman by Nisa, I was taken back to the introduction of The Norton Book of Women's Lives when the author, Phyllis Rose was referring back to her childhood and how she enjoyed biographies of women that were very descriptive and written with no censors. With that being said, this reading was exactly that. The detail of Nisa's childhood and life was definitely uncensored and very descriptive and made me feel like I was there. In the first part of the excerpt titled Earliest memories, Nisa talks about her childhood and her relationship with her family. Because this takes place in Africa in the early 1920's, there was a huge culture shock when reading this. Nisa lived in a village in Africa where the men were in charge of hunting and gathering to provide for their families and the women were in charge of cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Nisa's younger years...
Read more

Blog #24

Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman By- Ava Daniels In 1959, Eva Hoffman emigrated with her family from Poland to Canada. In Lost in Translation, she uses this excerpt to talk about this transition and how it impacted her life. In the start of the reading, she talks about how she spent her days learning new words and expressions. Hoffman did not have a private tutor or teacher to teach her these things, so instead she learned new words and expressions through conversations she would have, tv shows, and other interactions. This reminds me of when I went to Australia and had to connect Australian words, dialect, and sayings to what we say here in America. "When my friend Penny tells me that she's envious, or happy, or disappointed, I try laboriously to translate not from English to Polish but from the word back to its source" (388). In this quote, Hoffman is describing how she would learn expressions and how it was hard at first. Hoffman's struggle with losing her nativ...
Read more