Reviews
Really enjoyed this
This is the second of Maya Angelou collection of autobiographies I have read and I really enjoyed it. It’s set in 1960s, Maya is 33 a traveling performer and she lives in Ghana for a few years
The book is very well written and so engaging I was reading about 30 pages in each sitting. Maya was a poet so the book is so lyrical and beautifully written.
Also was quite surprised at how many civil rights leaders lived in Ghana from her book quite a number of African American civil rights leaders and revolutionaries emigrated to Ghana some seeking the elusive motherland(africa), some in exile.
The book talks about the tension between Ghanaians and their distrust and somewhat internalised prejudice against Afro Americans. Living Nkwame Nkurumah’s Ghana and the promise of a better world for descendents of slavery and how it failed to live up to that promise.
Highlights
In Ghana, one unclaimed corpse merited prin- cipal news coverage, and Efua's emotional response, while in America, black bodies still quick with life demanded no such concern. Too often among ourselves, since lives were cheap, dying was cheaper. Since the end of slavery, black Americans running or walking, hitchhiking or hoboing from untenable place to unsupportable place, had died in fields, in prisons, hospitals, on battlegrounds, in beds and barns, and if pain ccOmpanied their births, only the dying knew of their deaths. Ihey had come and gone unrecorded save in symbolic lore, and unclaimed save by the soil which turned them into earth again.