I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is in the news again [see UPDATE]
I read about it at Althouse:
I don’t know if Kristol knows what he’s telling us we need to “be,” but he’s upset that “pursuant to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s order to purge so-called DEI content from military libraries and classrooms, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was removed, along with 380 other books, from the U.S. Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library.”
Kristol asserts, despite not having read the book, that “‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ is not ‘DEI content.’ It’s a quintessentially American autobiography—a popular and important one. It’s a book a student at the Academy might want to read for his or her education, or for pleasure.”
Why would the story of a particular individual represent the promotion of the DEI agenda?
Althouse goes on to add that a commenter of hers observed that perhaps this was a case of malicious compliance from some anti-Trump holdover. That’s certainly possible. It’s also possible that in general books that aren’t especially related to naval or military matters are being pulled.
The reason I’m writing about this is twofold, however. The first is that pulling a book from a library or a school isn’t “banning” it or making it so that students can’t or shouldn’t read it, but stories in the MSM about Republicans doing that are common in order to depict them as racist troglodytes. The second is a point about the book itself, which is certainly not a DEI polemic or a polemic of any sort: it’s a coming-of-age story. Because the protagonist, Angelou, was born in 1928 and raised mostly in a small segregated town in Arkansas, of course racism is part of the story. But to me – and I read the book when it first came out in 1969, and even own it – it wasn’t the main part at all.
I was going to write a description of the book here, and then I realized – as often happens – that I’ve passed this way before. Here’s the post I wrote about it in 2014, on the occasion of Angelou’s death. Summary version: it’s a great book. Some people don’t like memoirs, but I happen to like them and this one is excellent, touching, and well-written, and was especially powerful if read when it first came out. It also has the single most compelling and sensitive description of child sexual abuse I’ve ever read. Here’s what I wrote about that in 2014:
The rape that occurs [to the author] later, at the hands of Angelou’s mother’s live-in boyfriend when 8-year-old Maya and her brother have been sent back to St. Louis to live with her, is heartbreakingly rendered. Described from the child’s viewpoint, it somehow manages to depict something that has rarely been conveyed so well: how the child’s starvation for paternal affection can set up the neediness that makes him/her vulnerable, how wily and then how brutal the rapist can be, and how a sensitive child might react. In Angelou’s case, when her uncles took revenge and murdered the rapist, she felt that her talking about the rape had caused his death, and so she decided to stop talking entirely …
Angelou wrote many more memoirs besides Caged, and over the years I’ve read quite a few of them. They’re of interest to anyone interested in Angelou’s life, and they constitute a story of overcoming great odds. But none of them even remotely touches the heights of her first book. I’ve often thought that many writers have one book in them that they must write, are driven to write, and that for Angelou that book was Caged. The rest was commentary.
UPDATE 10 PM:
Apparently Kristol got his facts wrong. See this:
I looked at the list. It is NOT Maya Angelou’s book that is being pulled. It is a collection of “critical essays” about her book. The full title is “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – Critical Essays.” edited by Mildred Mickle. It’s was the “edited by…” That clued me in. Because I KNOW that Angelou’s book didn’t credit an editor. That, and the 2010 publication date. I looked it up. It’s academic critical essay crap.
If the idiots at the New York Times would bother to actually look up what was being pulled…
I also suspect a little “malicious compliance” by whomever typed up the list. They were sly about not including the full, correct title of the ACTUAL book. (The only thing Mildred edited about “caged birds” is this collection of essays.)
Does anyone remember David Alan Grier’s multiple impressions of Maya Angelou on SNL? They were hilarious.
E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8nrIF0aeco
I am 80 now, and for some unknown reason, the textbook from my very early education, “Fun with Dick and Jane” just popped into my head, and looking on Ebey you can see several beat up copies from printings in the 1940s to early 1950s for sale.
My, what an innocent, and much less complicated time that was, and these textbooks, while idealized, were what I believe to be a good general reflection of the mindset of those days, and the sort of gentle and sunny mindset children were inculcated with back then.
God knows what today’s textbooks for these earliest grades contain, and what they’re teaching.
If midshipmen wish to read her work, they can get it through inter-library loan.
==
This is the Naval Academy. I assume some liberal education is imparted to the midshipmen which is not symbiotic with the coursework in military and naval affairs, technology, and engineering (as well as some which is). I’m not understanding why 20th century American literature should be part of that.
I don’t think much of Maya Angelou as a poet, but that memoir is very good. So too is Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas, which in parts is laugh-out-loud funny.
I have absolutely no inside information about the Naval Academy library, but I can confirm that malicious compliance is a very common feature of academic politics.
Usually, the issue is either budget or some kind of arcane political infighting over bureaucratic turf, and I’d be surprised if some libraries haven’t already applied the tactic to DEI issues.
As a group, college and university librarians are almost a self-parody of woke. Many of their careers have become inextricably entwined with DEI, and they won’t easily let go of it.
I’d say malicious compliance. My hunch is it got on the list by being an assigned reading from a DEI course that’s in the order’s crosshairs.
I looked at the list. It is NOT Maya Angelou’s book that is being pulled. It is a collection of “critical essays” about her book. The full title is “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings – Critical Essays.” edited by Mildred Mickle. It’s was the “edited by…” That clued me in. Because I KNOW that Angelou’s book didn’t credit an editor. That, and the 2010 publication date. I looked it up. It’s academic critical essay crap.
If the idiots at the New York Times would bother to actually look up what was being pulled…
I also suspect a little “malicious compliance” by whomever typed up the list. They were sly about not including the full, correct title of the ACTUAL book. (The only thing Mildred edited about “caged birds” is this collection of essays.)
A slight correction. It’s a series called “Critical Insights” edited by Mickel. And one of the books in the series focuses on critical essays on Angelou’s book.
“A slight correction” not “a shift writing.” The camera of fulmination with a phone.
I’m so annoyed, I’m almost tempted to subscribe to the Bulwark just to CORRECT Kristol about which book it is.
Nah.
Lee Also
Which very few people would have read, anyway. Sounds like a good candidate for pulling from the stacks–called “weeding” in the library business.
I read her book in the ’70s.
Mention of “banned books” reminds me of Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints. It is an apocalyptic tale of third world immigration to Europe–not politically correct for some people. When I looked some years back at Amazon, its print version was in the hundreds of dollars, suggesting that it was not being printed. Which suggested “banned” to me.
Currently one can get a Kindle version of it from Amazon at nominal cost, and many sites have it in PDF free for the downloading.
Lee Also:
Thanks for the information. Fascinating.
@Lee Also:I looked at the list. It is NOT Maya Angelou’s book that is being pulled. It is a collection of “critical essays” about her book.
We always have to go and check the source. We have to assume legacy media is trying to deceive us; too often, it is. Or all too often, the PR outfit that wrote the story and laundered through a journalist is trying to deceive us….
I never read “Caged Bird” but I did read Angelou’s inaugural poem in 1993 and thought it flabby and predictable.
So did Gerard Vanderleun back then. He was replying to someone who had said Angelou wrote her poem as a response to Robert Frost’s poem at the JFK inauguration.
______________________________
It never struck me at all that the poem was a response to the Frost poem,
but reflecting on it now I can see where you made that connection.
My problem is only that the Angelou poem was very much inferior to the
Frost poem.
It struggled at trying to jam *every* politically correct concept into
itself and resulted in a rather bloated bit of work.
Reminded me of the sort of mundane work that poets laureate usually do.
–Gerard Vanderleun
______________________________
Suits me.
Lots of people loved the Angelou poem. They tended to be unspecific. It seemed to me they were grateful they could understand the poem. Or they were grateful for the good publicity it brought to poetry. Or they liked the politics.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/life-of-john-f-kennedy/fast-facts-john-f-kennedy/the-gift-outright-by-robert-frost
https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/teaching/soc-220/maya-angelou-inaugural-poem/
huxley:
I did not like Angelou’s inauguration poem, as I wrote here, in a piece about poetry for occasions like that.
However, her first book – IKWTCBS – is excellent and was especially trailbreaking when written. As I indicated in today’s post, I think she had this one book that she had to write, and she did so. Perhaps it’s the sort of book more popular with women than with men. But I liked it in 1969 and I like it still.
Kristol has corrected his mistake, right?
Mac – Hahahahahahaha!
Grammatical error by Kristol: “I also suspect a little “malicious compliance” by whomever typed up the list. ” Should be “…by whoever typed up the list.”
I followed the link from Kristol’s X account to an NBC News republishing of an AP report. AP, NBC, and Kristol (and two other authors at the Bulwark, who co-wrote a screed about this) never bothered to check the story before going hysterical about it.
As a group, college and university librarians are almost a self-parody of woke. Many of their careers have become inextricably entwined with DEI, and they won’t easily let go of it.
==
Librarians themselves are often ready consumers of different sorts of offal, social, political, and professional. Varies person to person. The operations of the libraries themselves are not ‘woke’ except when the provost insists on hires being cleared by the head diversicrat. Personnel offices distribute templates on how interviews are to be conducted, but these are facially neutral.
Hey, grammarian–
“By” is a preposition. “Whomever” is the object of that preposition, thus objective case. “Typed the list” modifies the “whomever.”
Would you say, “I suspect ‘malicious compliance’ by he”? Or “I suspect ‘malicious compliance” by him”?
Hey, Someone Else, You’ve fallen victim, as did Kristol, to a common misconception. “Whoever typed up the list” is a separate clause, with “Whoever” its subject, thus using a pronoun in the subjective, not the objective case. If you don’t believe me, I’m sure you can find an explanation online. Check it out.
Ya, grammar was always a problem for me in high school. I could tell if a sentence was wrong, and fix it but, I could never accurately name the various parts of speech, or what rule was being broken.
David, thanks for the grammar correction. I see a sentence diagram in my mind’s eye.
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I didn’t realize Bill Kristol was still active.
The naval academy should be about studying the enemy qutb mao marx et al
Not wallowing in self loathing
om–Just for you.
Today just happens to be National Unicorn Day.*
Enjoy.
* See https://nationaltoday.com/national-unicorn-day/
My local library sells off books on the cheap by the metric shit ton.
Censorship!
Racism!
Witchcraft!
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