Maya Angelou born Marguerite Ann Johnson on April 4, 1928, is an American autobiographer and poet who has been called “America’s most visible black female autobiographer” by scholar Joanne M. Braxton. The poetess presents in ‘Still I Rise” the average black American woman who rises like the phoenix each time she is bent by oppression. The typical Black American would be willing to break rather than bend. Here, she triumphantly asserts with conviction how she continues to rise with renewed vigour.

History is said to bear testimony to the events of the past and the character of a person. Nevertheless history is quite often produced from the biased view of the individual historian, and most of the time is distorted. Indeed, the pen is mightier than the sword. However, Maya Angelou declares that she will rise from history that may “pin her in coruscating prose.” Though she is subject to bitter, twisted lies, and though she is trampled in the dirt, she will rise like dust. She endeavours to touch everything with her personality, just as dust touches everything on its way, by it presence. She reminds one of the celebrated Uzbek poet Boborahim Mashrab who asserts: “From the dust of my shirts edge there will rise hundred thousand gods”.…