Aesthetic Musicality of Monologue in Maya Angelou’s The Reunion

Music works as a deep river in life and writing of Maya Angelou as a treasured African-American artist. Angelou presents the passions of her black people in terms of rhythms of words and music of ideas. The bulky experiences of her life help her translate any situation she passes by into a kind of emotional musicality. Angelou sings her life in a theatrical way in different melodic tones. The aesthetic voice of the Black woman as a performer is present in Angelou’s long or short narrative discourse. In her short story “The Reunion”, we find that she employs the mechanism of aesthetic monologue as a musical tool in order to participate in the main stream of black aesthetics in modern American literature. In her inspiring narrativity, she constructs an aesthetic harmony between her personal history and that of her oppressed people. She’s aesthetically elevating the status of the Black woman in life and literature. Our paper will argue the significance of the Black woman’s voice as an aesthetic monologue.

Keywords:

Maya Angelou , The Reunion , aesthetic musicality , monologue , aesthetic elevation.