Original artwork, not a still
To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.
Behind the line
What it means
Our interpretation.
Angelou compresses a whole mother into a weather event: awe and danger and beauty, with no ordinary comfort in it. It is one of her most quoted sentences about family. The 2013 book pinned to it describes the same woman at full length, but the sentence itself predates it by more than four decades.
Context reviewed
In context
Spoilers for Mom & Me & MomShow the scene
The sentence is not from Mom & Me & Mom (2013). Maya Angelou wrote it in her first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), about her mother, Vivian Baxter. A 2013 SFGate review of Mom & Me & Mom quotes it as coming from that 1969 book and says the later one, six memoirs on, takes the reader into the eye of the storm. Mom & Me & Mom is Angelou's seventh and last autobiography, and the first to centre on her mother, including her mother's abandonment of Maya and her brother when they were young. The popular form of the line continues with the climbing, falling colours of a rainbow.
Sources (2)
- SFGate review, 'Mom & Me & Mom'opening paragraphReference checked
- Wikipedia, Mom & Me & MomleadReference checked
Context reviewed
