I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (by M. Angelou) : Я знаю, почему птица в клетке поет (по М. Ангелоу)


I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS (by М. Angelou)

Я знАю, почеМу птицА в клетке поет (по М. Ангелоу)
Учебное пособие

Вступительная статья, обработка и комментарии Г.Н. Бабич

5-е издание, стереотипное

Допущено Учебно-методическим объеджением по специальностям педагогического образования в качестве учебного пособия для студе^тов вузов, обучающихся по специальности 033200 — «Иностранный язык»



Москва Издатеёьство «ФёИ^TA» 2021

УДК 811.111(075.8)
ББК 81.2Англ-923
       Я11


Р е ц е н з е н т ы:
Ш.Э. Сивер, Fulbright Scholar (Эмори Университет, Атланта, США);
О.Г. Скворцов, канд. филолог. наук, доцент, зав. кафедрой иностранных языков
(Уральская академия государственной службы);
А.Б. Шевнин, канд. филолог. наук, доцент (Уральский государственный педагогический университет)


Я11 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (by M. Angelou) : Я знаю, почему птица в клетке поет (по M. Ангелоу) : [Электронный ресурс] учеб. пособие / вступ. ст., обраб. и коммент. Г.Н. Бабич. — 5-е изд., стереотип. — М. : ФЛИНТА, 2021. — 136 с.
    ISBN 978-5-9765-0250-5
       Пособие состоит из двух частей: текста для чтения (сокращенный вариант романа М. Ангелоу), практических заданий по усвоению содержания текста, активизации речевых навыков, объединенных в 11 уроков. В приложениях содержатся грамматический комментарий и познавательная информация о США. Дана биографическая справка об авторе романа. Приведены сведения лингвострановедческого характера, представляющие интерес с точки зрения межкультурной коммуникации.
       Для студентов 1—2 курсов, изучающих английский язык.

УДК 811.111(075.8)
ББК 81.2Англ-923







ISBN 978-5-9765-0250-5

© Колл. авторов, 2016
© Издательство «ФЛИНТА», 2016

            Contents






To the Reader............................................. 5
Introduction: Black English or African-American Vernacular English.....................7

ABOUT THE AUTHOR......................................... 11

Section I.     I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (after Maya Angelou) .................................... 12
                 1 ...................................... 12
                 2....................................... 18
                 3........................................22
                 4........................................25
                 5........................................28
                 6........................................32
                 7........................................37
                 8........................................46
                 9........................................50
               10 ........................................57
               11 ........................................61

Section II.     Reader’s Guide............................65
               Unit 1 ................................... 65
               Unit 2 ................................... 71
               Unit 3.....................................75
               Unit 4 ................................... 80
               Unit 5 ................................... 87
               Unit 6.................................... 93

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                Unit 7 .....................................99
                Unit 8 ................................... 104
                Unit 9 ................................... 110
                Unit 10 .................................. 115
                Unit 11 .................................. 121


Questions for Review ......................................... 127


Appendix 1.   Map of the United States ..... 129
Appendix 2.   Slogans of the States ........ 130
Appendix 3.   U.S. Legal or Public Holidays (Red-Letter Days) .......................... 133
Appendix 4.   Common Affixes ............... 134
Appendix 5.   Irregular Forms of the Verbs . 135


References ..................................................... 136

            To the Reader:



   This Home-Reading Guide is intended to provide supplementary reading practice for secondary school and college students, teachers, and others who are studying English as a foreign language. This edition of the Home-Reading Guide contains an abridged text of the novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou with a biographical note, commentary, and assignments.
   The Guide has been designed as a content-based practical instruction book to help readers better understand the novel. In addition, the Guide provides opportunities for students to further perfect their speech skills while expressing their own point of view on the issues raised in the novel. Through this Guide, students are challenged to comment on matters of general and global interest.
   This Guide has several goals. The primary goal is to allow readers to get acquainted with Angelou’s novel, the first of five volumes of her autobiography. The novel is written with the warmth and bittersweet humour that mark Angelou’s work. Portions of the book are reproduced in order to serve as a condensed reader for foreign language students of English. Another secondary goal of the book is to increase the motivation of readers and promote effective language learning. The book provides methods through which students can develop their vocabulary and comprehension of the information in Angelou’s novel.
   This Reader’s Guide allows students to have access to and gain an understanding of African-American literature. Since so much of the story includes speech in Black Vernacular, the introduction is a short section about the history of Black Vernacular speech, how it came about, and how it differs from standard English. It also contains information about Black culture and the influences upon Black culture. We consider this would make the text more understandable.

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   The Guide consists of 11 units, with each unit being allotted for a week’s study in class as well as independent work at home. The material of the novel is divided into more or less self-contained parts. This material has been carefully analyzed to determine main concepts and topic-related vocabulary. Each unit contains Study Questions, Topics for Discussion and Writing, and a Challenge or Bonus section containing jokes, poems, linguistic games, and assignments for research connected with the information in the text. Each unit’s material requires a profound study of the contents of the novel. Student’s reading comprehension and written and spoken language skills will be greatly improved through the use of this Guide.
   The Guide also contains reference lists and appendices. These include the map of the United States, U.S. public holidays, slogans of the states, common affixes, and irregular verb forms.
   The Guide can be used strictly by its instructions or teachers can adjust the curriculum depending upon their experience and the needs and interests of their students. We hope that this edition will be a useful accompaniment to English textbooks. It should not only provide enjoyable reading, but also will improve English language competence.


            Acknowledgements


   I owe a special thank you to Shelly A. Seaver for the proofreading of the book. I also want to thank Dr. Skvortsov O.G. and Dr. Shevnin A.B. for their comments.
   Thanks to the publishers for their interest and help. We would welcome any suggestions you have for improving this text.
                                     Galina N. Babich Yekaterinburg, October 2007

Introduction: Black English or African-American Vernacular English


   The story of Blacks in history is surrounded by controversy. The story of their language is no exception. Black English itself was the product of one of the most infamous episodes in the history of the USA, the slave trade. The very first reference to African Americans or blacks in America dates from 1619, when John Smith of Jamestown, Virginia wrote in his journal that a Dutch ship “sold us twenty Negars.” The making of Black English probably began even before the slave ships arrived on the west coast of Africa.
   When Portuguese traders opened up contact with the West African coast, they had no knowledge of the indigenous languages, nor did the West Africans have any knowledge of Portuguese. It is most likely that many of the Portuguese traders and sailors knew a widespread Mediterranean communication system called Sabir (or Lingua Francia). Perhaps, some few West Africans knew a little Sabir from earlier contact with Arab traders. Whether any Sabir was shared by the Portuguese and West Africans or not, they began to develop a communication system (a pidgin) that allowed them to carry on rudimentary trade talk. Similar systems developed between the West African languages and other European languages.
   There is much confusion about the term pidgin. The word itself comes from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word business. The roots of pidgin English are controversial. Technically, a “pidgin” is an auxiliary language, one that has no native speakers. It is a speech-system that has been formed to provide a means of communication between people who have no common language. When a “pidgin” (English, French or Portuguese) becomes the principal language of a speech community — as on the slave ships — it evolves into a creole. (The word “creole” seems to have come from the Portuguese crioulo, meaning a slave born


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in a master’s household, a house slave. By 1829 creole meant any African American as opposed to a native African.)

    In the early days in the United States, nearly all who were brought from Africa must have used one or another form of English-based creole. Eventually the creole lost ground in favor of local varieties of English. As Blacks came into regular contact with Whites, as they were provided with education, as they were made part of the economic, cultural and political life of the United States, their speech decreolized — moved in the direction of standard and nonstandard varieties of English.
    By one route or another words and phrases from various West African languages passed into American speech. There are the words and phrases that emerged from nearly 250 years’ experience of slavery itself. The slaves were called Negroes, or Blacks, or euphemistically, servants. Phrases like slave labour and slave driver came from the plantations. To sell down the river, now generally used to mean taking advantage of someone, comes from the 1830s. ft was a way of punishing a slave to sell him to a sugar-cane plantation owner on the Lower Mississippi, where the slave conditions were the worst. Mark Twain’s Nigger Jim from the novel Huckleberry Finn was always afraid they would sell him down the river.
    The entry of Black English into the mainstream of American life began with the Uncle Remus Stories by Joel Chandler Harris. Later it was to sustain its place there through minstrel shows, vaudeville, music hall, radio and finally the movies.
    The plantations of the South became the cradle of a new ingredient in American culture. The influence of Black English was felt in the fields, in the house, in the nursery. Up to the age of about six years, Black and White children grew up together, played together, and learned together. Southern boys from good families, in contrast, were usually sent away to White schools, often in the Northern states. From the age of six or seven they were separated from Black talk and educated in an environment hostile to Blacks. The women remained on the

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plantations, rearing children, coping with the servants, and mixing with the house slaves.
    At the end of the Civil War, four million slaves were freed. Congress passed legislation granting full citizenship and the guarantee of the rights to vote to the freed slaves. All these gains were lost as White Southerners wore down the North. The word segregation became part of the vocabulary of discrimination, as did uppity, a White Southern word for Blacks who did not know their place. fn the 1890s the Supreme Court sanctioned segregated education.
    fn the 1920s and 1930s, Blacks living in the cities were seen by most White Americans as stereotypes — maids, cooks, waiters, porters, and minstrels. ft was through the entertainment business that many Southern Blacks fought their way out of the poverty-ridden South to Chicago and New York.
    Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s was the pinnacle of Black city life. fn those days, the Whites traveled uptown to see the shows. The downtowners who came uptown would have been called jazz babies or flappers if they were women, and a jazzbo or sheik, if they were men. The fascination of White “flappers” and “sheiks” with Black music and lyrics carried much of the private code of the jazz players into the mainstream of American English. The language of the jazz players was known as jive talk.
    Jive talk soon caught on generally. The words and phrases that were employed by entertainers in New York’s Harlem have passed into the language: beat (exhausted), have a ball (to enjoy oneself), out of the world (perfect), sharp (neat, smart), groovy (fine), chick (girl). Sport was another way of getting out of the ghetto. Joe Louis, the world heavyweight boxing champion, was one of the lucky few.
    The talk of the jazzmen also became the cult slang of the White hippies (from “hip” or “hip talk”, the language of hipsters) in the 1960s. Much of the vocabulary of the drug culture was also borrowed from the Blacks.
    During the Civil Rights Movement, especially in the 1960s, “Black” became the key word. Black is Beautiful was the slo

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gan during the 60s. Many colleges and universities instituted Black Studies programs. People started to talk and write about Black English (a term made common by professor Joey Lee Dillard) or African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). During this period the language gained words and phrases like sitin, bussing, nitty gritty, rap, soul (soul food, soul brother, soul food restaurants).
   “Ah, soul food. Soul food is just what the name implies. It is soulfully cooked food or richly flavored foods good for your ever-loving soul. But soul food is much more than a clever name penned by some unknown author. It is a legacy clearly steeped in tradition; a way of life that has been handed down from generation to generation, from one black family to another, by word of mouth and sleight of hand.” (Sheila Ferguson, Soul Food, 1989) People-black and white-talked about and enjoyed trotters (pigs’ feet) served in vinegar and hot sauce, corn oysters (fried fritters made of corn kernels), black-eyed peas, yams and okra -both of African origin—prawlines (an altered form of pralines), gumbo, jambalaya, and chiltins.
   As succeeding generations of African Americans (1969, designating American citizens of African descent) received more formal schooling, mingled more freely with whites, and moved to northern cities, the dialect of English and African elements changed. In 1996 there appeared the word Ebonics (ebony = “black” + phonics = “the scientific study of speech sounds”), a synonym of Black English, used by the Oakland, California School Board, which voted to recognize it as a “second language” in its school system. It was a subject of discussion in the late ’90s.
   Black English (and Black cultural patterns in general) have had a profound influence on the life of all Americans through sports, music, youth movement, civil rights activities, religion, and so on. In music, the Blacks have given jazz, the blues and rock’n’roll; in dance, the jitterbug and break dancing; in slang, the street talk and jive-talk. The African-American presence in the USA has made a substantial impact on English vocabulary.

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            About the author



Maya Angelou, born April 4, 1928, poet, entertainer, author of the best-selling Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in My Name and Heart of a Woman, has also written five collec

tions of poetry. In theater, she produced, directed and starred in Cabaret for Freedom, in collaboration with Godfrey Cambridge at New York’s Village Gate, starred in Genet’s The Blacks at the St. Mark’s Playhouse and adapted Sophocles’ Ajax, which premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 1974. In film and television, she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia and wrote and produced a ten-part TV series on African traditions in American life. In the sixties, at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she became the Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Lead

ership Conference, and in 1975 Maya Angelou received the Ladies’ Home Journal Woman of the Year Award in Communications. She has received numerous honorary degrees, was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, and was appointed by President Gerald R. Ford to the American Revolution Bicentennial Advisory Council. She is on the board of trustees of the American Film Institute. One of the few woman members of the Directors Guild, Maya Angelou is the author of the television screenplays I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Sisters. Most recently, she wrote the lyrics for the musical King: Drum Major for Love, and was both host and writer for a series of documentaries, Maya Angelou’s America: A Journey of the Heart, along with Guy Johnson. Maya Angelou is currently Reynolds Professor at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Her works speak to the heart, inspiring us to love five and to persevere through its challenges.

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                Section I

                I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS (after Maya Angelou)






Ф

   When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed—“To Whom It May Concern” — that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson, Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.
   Our parents had decided to put an end to their calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home to his mother. A porter had been charged with our welfare — he got off the train the next day in Arizona — and our tickets were pinned to my brother’s inside coat pocket.
   I don’t remember much of the trip, but after we reached the segregated southern part of the journey, things must have looked up. Negro passengers, who always traveled with loaded lunch boxes, felt sorry for “the poor little motherless darlings” and plied us with cold fried chicken and potato salad.
   Years later I discovered that the United States had been crossed thousands of times by frightened Black children traveling alone to their newly affluent parents in Northern cities, or back to grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban North reneged on its economic promises.
   The town reacted to us as its inhabitants had reacted to all things new before our coming. It regarded us a while without curiosity but with caution, and after we were seen to be harmless (and children) it closed in around us, as a real mother embraces a stranger’s child. Warmly, but not too familiarly.

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