Feminist Contours shaping Mia Angelous Poetry

Résumé ou Introduction

Language stands as a pertinent mode of communication conveying cognitive, historic as well as emotive realities. It is a tool by which those individuals, who have been feasibly pushed to the peripheries, the subjugated and disenfranchised quarters of the society, manage to express their notions on issues of concern and relevance to them. It is essentially through an understanding of the power of the written word and its ability to grant a narrative space to the subaltern, enabling it to speak that focally vocal and active feminist, Helen Cixous manages to empower women, imbuing in them a spirit to voice up and break away from barriers encumbering their intellectual growth.

In her well-known essay, Laugh of Medusa, Cixous calls upon for women to take their pens and write their “self” and manifest an “Ecriture Feminine” mode of writing. Basically meaning feminine writing, “Ecriture Feminine”, qualifies as a metaphorical act of liberation enabling women to claim their bodies which have been “confiscated” from them by the male patriarch, who has left no stone unturned to make them feel like an “uncanny stranger on display” or a “dead figure”(880) all by resorting to the power of the written word, redeeming their individual feministic narrative spaces, penned necessarily by “white ink”.

Enunciating similar contentions, eminent Black American poet and writer Maya Angelou believing in the libratory postures allotted to women through the potency of the written word, voices the same notions through her poetry. That is the very reason why her poetry becomes a site for reflection and expression, highlighting the aspects of female mindscape earlier, deemed worthy of suppression and negation by the corrosively coercive male hegemony.