Different, Yet Related: Black Creative Autobiographers in Dialogue

Abstract

This chapter discusses the continuities and divergences in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood, and Derek Walcotťs Another Life. The chapter foregrounds the creative continuity among the individual writings of these autobiographers and in their writings as Black writers. How they continue the communal and resistance traditions already discussed in relation to slave narratives and how they diverge in relation to religion, Blackness, gender, and language are foregrounded in this study. An overriding principle that informs this chapter is the fact that Black professional writers, like those discussed here, grow up as writers within Black communities. They are part of these communities and their activities, as children and later as writers, are tied to the resistance traditions of their various societies, as the autobiographers influence the directions of these traditions both intellectually and sociologically.