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Still Maya Angelou rises

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CULTURAL ICON Actress, dancer, writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou PHOTO: supplied
CULTURAL ICON Actress, dancer, writer and civil rights activist Maya Angelou PHOTO: supplied

A new documentary about the late poet and author takes Gugulethu Mhlungu on a trip down memory lane

Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise
Directors: Bob Hercules, Rita Coburn Whack

Rating: 4/5

When Mama Maya Angelou passed away two years ago, aged 86, I refused to believe the news reports on my Twitter timeline confirming it.

I was waiting for Oprah Winfrey, my other chosen American mother and the media mogul with whom Angelou had had an incredible relationship, to confirm. And then she did, and I remember feeling an immense sense of being lost.

What would happen to the world now that she was gone?

Maya Angelou was always there; her words always close at hand to affirm, encourage, console, articulate and help me unpack what it meant to be black and female in a world that doesn’t value black women.

Actress Alfre Woodard describes Angelou’s immeasurable impact most aptly when she recalls reading Angelou’s work and “sitting down, opening a book and feeling like I am breathing for the first time”.

Winfrey says: “I always knew that what Maya Angelou held as a poet and a writer was something that the world needed to feel and experience.” And I suspect it is the profound effect of Angelou’s work and place in history that makes the documentary Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise so special.

It does not try to do too much in terms of presentation, and follows a chronological order that traces the writer’s life over four years, largely through her own voice.

She leads us through archival material, and it pauses only to make way for some of the people who knew and loved her – and that list is impressive, with Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Common, Quincy Jones, Cicely Tyson and Winfrey among them.

We learn of Angelou’s tumultuous childhood in the terrifying and racist Deep South of America; her experiences of abandonment by her mother; her close relationship with her brother; her rape by her mother’s then boyfriend and his death, which a young Maya blamed herself for; her entry into sex work as a teenager, which she always spoke openly and frankly about; and how the multitalented actress, dancer and entertainer became the prolific writer and poet she is most famous for being.

This leads us to a rare moment where she reads a poem at Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993, and upstages him. Her raspy and comforting voice leads the viewer through what is also a story of America in the 20th century.

David D’Arcy, writing for Sundance, said of the documentary: “Angelou was a poet, singer, author and civil rights activist, and the closest thing that America has to a cultural saint. This new documentary canonises her in cinema.”

Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise is safe and conventional in its presentation.

However, it captures Angelou’s voice and allows us to meet her once more, and for the first full-length feature of one of contemporary history’s literary greats, that’s a fitting tribute.

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