Maya Angelou Remembered - Part 4 (Final)

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
July 5, 2014

When she took the lectern, Maya Angelou appeared to be visibly choked with a great sense of wistfulness. And I am quite certain that she said a lot of significant and meaningful things about her experiences living and working in the Ghana of the 1960s, in much the same way as the metaphorical "Caged Bird" of the Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) classical poem of the African-American experience titled "Sympathy," from which Angelou's celebrated autobiographical work, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, borrows its title. Angelou lived in Ghana between 1962 and 1965.

Yes, she must have said a lot of quite significant and interesting things but, unfortunately, I was too awestruck and bemused with my own speculative ruminations about how it must have felt for her living in the heady days of a postcolonially young, idealistic and politically fragile days of Ghana in the early 1960s to coherently make out much of what she said.

She did not speak or stay for very long; she had several other equally significant commitments to fulfill that Sunday of April 28, 1996, she adumbrated. I don't remember her even pulling up a chair to sit on; at 68, Angelou was rather sturdy and youthful for her age. And when she was done with solemnly and heavy-heartedly reflecting on her historic encounter and her sharing of sisterhood with Efua Theodora Morgue Sutherland with the attendees, she was gone almost as abruptly as she had entered.

For the twenty, or so, minutes that she held forth at the lectern, the room was singularly charged with the pall of her commanding presence. It was palpably as if the very land masses of North America and continental Africa had collided in a "big-bangy" sort of way and were frantically backing away from each other, and barking and/or snarling at each other at the same time. For Ms. Angelou's presentation was as charitable as it was brutally frank.

For me, though, unlike the others who thought that she might have, somehow, verged a little overboard, or been a little carried away by her emotions, I firmly believed that the way she had gone at it was practically the only natural way for any reasonable auditor to expect she would; for nobody had any legitimate right to expect that her three relatively long years of living in Ghana would be all cozy and saccharine. In the end, her thesis appeared to be that her good friend, Efua Sutherland, had exerted herself in the godly, or matronly, service of her national community well beyond what her health could reasonably absorb.

"Efua was a mother to almost everybody who came her way," Ms. Angelou pensively, albeit plaintively, opined. And in so doing, Angelou's quite unmistakable subtext appeared to be that Sutherland was left with little energy and time to cater to her own needs. "I did not envy her one bit," she concluded her musings.

It was not very clear what she hoped her listeners would carry away with them from her talk. What was crystal clear, however, was the fact that by the time she was done with paying her rather quite unusual tribute to her old and recently deceased friend, Maya Angelou was decidedly disillusioned with almost the entirety of her continental African experiences. It clearly appeared that in boldly and courageously attempting to reconnect with the proverbial Motherland, Angelou had ended up also finding herself and her real place in the complex scheme of the global African experience. And in so doing, she had also confidently reclaimed her paradoxical, albeit practically unimpeachable, identity as an African-American. And she had definitively made her peace, that is, pensively come to incontestable terms with her undeniably excruciating and even traumatic continental African past.

The second and last time that I encountered Ms. Angelou was at the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Convention Center, at an annual conference sponsored by the American Dietetics Association (ADA). I had gone along with my then live-together girlfriend who was a registered dietitian and a public health administrator at the time. We were in a "live-together" relationship because we, each of us, owned our adjoining cooperative apartments and had copies of the keys to each other's apartment.

Anyway, this occasion was more cordial and relaxed; and Ms. Angelou, who had been invited as the keynoter, looked matronly cheerful and sedate. My girlfriend and I had taken our seats close to the front of the very capacious auditorium, and so were among the first members of the audience to meet, greet and shake hands and briefly chat with Ms. Angelou. The auditorium must have held close to four-thousand conferees; and the crowd looked overwhelmingly lily-white. And it was quite obvious that Ms. Angelou was especially happy to see us,once we had introduced ourselves and proudly announced our bona fide Ghanaian national identity.

What I remember most vividly about this final encounter with Ms. Angelou, which occurred either sometime in 2002 or 2003, actually happened outside of the premises of the Philadelphia Convention Center. And it was in the physical absence of the ADA keynoter but, nonetheless, squarely about her. My girlfriend and I had boarded a SEPTA trolley to the hotel where we were lodging for the three-day duration of the conference and made the brief acquaintance of a middle-aged white woman who was also attending the conference. We had taken the elevator and were about to alight on the ninth or tenth floor, where we were lodging, when almost out of nowhere, this aforementioned white woman conferee sarcastically snapped:

"That was some epic presentation, wasn't it? The Maya Angelou talk. And we [the ADA] had to pay her $10,000 for this."

My girlfriend, to whom the unmistakable tinge of sarcasm in the white woman's remarks was totally lost, perkily responded, "Oh, wasn't it really superb!" The white woman seemed a bit confused and flustered.

When we got into our room, I explained to Afua Oyema the mischievously racist drama in which she had so heartily and innocently participated. You see, Angelou had been scheduled to speak on the theme of good dietary habits; and I am quite certain that the executive membership of the ADA who invited the renowned writer was fully aware of the fact of Maya's being primarily a poet and a performance artist, notwithstanding the fact that the conference keynoter had authored one or two highly regarded cookbooks.

Instead, in the warped opinion of our tangential white woman acquaintance, Maya had chosen to talk about her father's cooking experience on a U.S. naval ship, which the critic found to be unforgivably amateurish and even insulting. As well as Maya's Arkansas-born, lowly-educated paternal grandmother's remarkable flair for cooking.

Oyema couldn't stop her sides from splitting with laughter. "Serves her right!" she spurted in a half-scream. "Yes, serves them right, these white folks. They think they're the only smart people in the world."

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