<P>--Opal Moore </P> <P> Angelou's description of being raped as an eight - year - old child overwhelms the autobiography, although it is presented briefly in the text . Scholar Mary Vermillion compares Angelou's treatment of rape to that of Harriet Jacobs in her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . Jacobs and Angelou both use rape as a metaphor for the suffering of African Americans; Jacobs uses the metaphor to critique slaveholding culture, while Angelou uses it to first internalize, then challenge, twentieth - century racist conceptions of the Black female body (namely, that the Black female is physically unattractive). Rape, according to Vermillion, "represents the black girl's difficulties in controlling, understanding, and respecting both her body and her words". </P> <P> Arensberg notes that Maya's rape is connected to the theme of death in Caged Bird, as Mr. Freeman threatens to kill Maya's brother Bailey if she tells anyone about the rape . After Maya lies during Freeman's trial, stating that the rape was the first time he touched her inappropriately, Freeman is murdered (presumably by one of Maya's uncles) and Maya sees her words as a bringer of death . As a result, she resolves never to speak to anyone other than Bailey . Angelou connects the violation of her body and the devaluation of her words through the depiction of her self - imposed, five - year - long silence . As Angelou later stated, "I thought if I spoke, my mouth would just issue out something that would kill people, randomly, so it was better not to talk". </P> <P> African - American literature scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe calls Angelou's depiction of the rape "a burden" of Caged Bird: a demonstration of "the manner in which the Black female is violated in her tender years and...the' unnecessary insult' of Southern girlhood in her movement to adolescence". Vermillion goes further, maintaining that a Black woman who writes about her rape risks reinforcing negative stereotypes about her race and gender . When asked decades later how she was able to survive such trauma, Angelou explained it by stating, "I can't remember a time when I wasn't loved by somebody ." When asked by the same interviewer why she wrote about the experience, she indicated that she wanted to demonstrate the complexities of rape . She also wanted to prevent it from happening to someone else, so that anyone who had been raped might gain understanding and not blame herself for it . </P>

Background of the poem i know why the caged bird sings