<P> During Maya's final year of high school, she worries that she might be a lesbian (which she confuses due to her sexual inexperience with the belief that lesbians are also hermaphrodites). She ultimately initiates sexual intercourse with a teenage boy . She becomes pregnant, which on the advice of her brother, she hides from her family until her eighth month of pregnancy in order to graduate from high school . Maya gives birth at the end of the book . </P> <P> Angelou's prose works, while presenting a unique interpretation of the autobiographical form, can be placed in the long tradition of African - American autobiography . Her use of fiction - writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and thematic development, however, often lead reviewers to categorize her books, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, as autobiographical fiction . Other critics, like Lupton, insist that Angelou's books should be categorized as autobiographies because they conform to the genre's standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme . In a 1983 interview with African - American literature critic Claudia Tate, Angelou calls her books autobiographies . </P> <P> At first, Angelou intended to return to poetry and play - writing after completing Caged Bird and write no more autobiographies, but she chose the genre as her primary mode of expression because of its challenge and so that she could "change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century". In a 1989 interview, she stated, "I think I am the only serious writer who has chosen the autobiographical form to carry my work, my expression". As she told journalist George Plimpton during a 1990 interview, "Autobiography is awfully seductive; it's wonderful". She also told Plimpton that like the tradition begun by Frederick Douglass in slave narratives, she used the literary technique of "speaking in the first - person singular talking about the first - person plural, always saying I meaning' we"'. As critic Susan Gilbert states, Angelou was reporting not one person's story, but the collective's . Scholar Selwyn R. Cudjoe agrees, and sees Angelou as representative of the convention in African - American autobiography as a public gesture that speaks for an entire group of people . </P> <P> Scholar Joanne M. Braxton sees Caged Bird as "the fully developed black female autobiographical form that began to emerge in the 1940s and 1950s". The book presents themes that are common in autobiography by Black American women: a celebration of Black motherhood; a criticism of racism; the importance of family; and the quest for independence, personal dignity, and self - definition . Angelou introduces a unique point of view in American autobiography by revealing her life story through a narrator who is a Black female from the South, at some points a child, and other points a mother . Writer Hilton Als calls Angelou one of the "pioneers of self - exposure", willing to focus honestly on the more negative aspects of her personality and choices . For example, Angelou was worried about her readers' reactions to her disclosure in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, that she was a prostitute . She went through with it, anyway, after her husband Paul Du Feu advised her to be honest about it . </P>

Meaning of poem i know why the caged bird sings