Maya Angelou On Courage And Facing Evil

Maya Angelou on Courage and Facing Evil

In 1982, nearly a decade after their spectacular conversation about freedom, beloved poet, memoirist, dramatist, actor, producer, filmmaker, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou and celebrated interviewer Bill Moyers traveled together to the beautiful Texas countryside to discuss the ugliest aspects of human nature at a conference titled Facing Evil. It was a subject with which Angelou, the survivor of childhood rape and courageous withstander of lifelong racism, was intimately acquainted. In a recent remembrance of his friend, Moyers shares excerpts from the 1988 documentary about the event and reflects on the timeless goodness of her spirit.

Transcribed highlights below:

On the history of evil:

Throughout our nervous history, we have constructed pyramidic towers of evil, ofttimes in the name of good. Our greed, fear and lasciviousness have enabled us to murder our poets, who are ourselves, to castigate our priests, who are ourselves. The lists of our subversions of the good stretch from before recorded history to this moment. We drop our eyes at the mention of the bloody, torturous Inquisition. Our shoulders sag at the thoughts of African slaves lying spoon-­fashion in the filthy hatches of slave-ships, and the subsequent auction blocks upon which were built great fortunes in our country. We turn our heads in bitter shame at the remembrance of Dachau and the other gas ovens, where millions of ourselves were murdered by millions of ourselves. As soon as we are reminded of our actions, more often than not we spend incredible energy trying to forget what we've just been reminded of.

And yet Angelou was nothing if not a champion of the human spirit and its highest potentiality for good. She reflects on how refusing to speak for five years after being raped as a child ("I won't say severely raped; all rape is severe," Angelou notes in one of her characteristically piercing asides) shaped her journey:

To show you ... how out of evil there can come good, in those five years I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorized James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes. I memorized Shakespeare, whole plays, fifty sonnets. I memorized Edgar Allen Poe, all the poetry – never having heard it, I memorized it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling – I mean, it was catholic kind of reading, and catholic kind of storing.

[...]

Out of this evil, which was a dire kind of evil, because rape on the body of a young person more often than not introduces cynicism, and there is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. In my case I was saved in that muteness... And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself.

Angelou's most soul-expanding point is that courage – something she not only embodied but also championed beautifully in her children's book illustrated by Basquiat – is our indelible individual capacity and our shared existential responsibility:

We need the courage to create ourselves daily, to be bodacious enough to create ourselves daily – as Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as thinking, caring, laughing, loving human beings. I think that the courage to confront evil and turn it by dint of will into something applicable to the development of our evolution, individually and collectively, is exciting, honorable.

For more of Angelou's remarkable spirit, revisit her 1973 conversation with Moyers, her moving letter to her younger self, and her timeless meditations onhome and belonging and identity and the meaning of life.