Maya Angelou's memoir

Using the tool the Autobiographical "I" from Smith & Watson's toolkit helped me understand why certain kinds of language is used with Maya Angelou's memoir. When I consider the time in which she was writing this and how she would want to be historically accurate about her experiences. When I consider the "gap between the narrating "I" and the narrator" I realize that she writes as if she was going through the experiences all over again. Instead of recalling these experiences and discussing them from the view of an adult she describes her thoughts as a child going through this for the first time. This makes the memoir more poignant as the readers are brought along and experiencing this with her and understand her thoughts. For example, when she is discussing her rape, the word "rape" is never said, since as a child she didn't understand what had happened to her. In this way she only discusses what she felt as a child and does not have to provide her thoughts as an adult recalling the memories. This was definitely eye opening as I realized how much thought must have been out in to how to approach these painful subjects for her.

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