During my english class I had been reading this creative non-fiction called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which is written by Maya Angelou. This is a coming of age novel and is mainly talking about author’s childhood of living in South America during the 1930s and 1940s. Thought out this novel there are severals Ways of Knowing.

I think one of the major Ways of Knowing in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is memory. Because this is a story of Maya’s childhood so there whole book is a memory for her. Although it is written out as a novel, it’s still a personal memory of Maya. But our memory can be unreliable and we forget things easily, not to mention Maya wrote this novel 20 years after the events. So this mean that is possible that what Maya wrote in the book might not be 100% accurate. But it’s okay because this is not just a memoir, it’s an autobiographical fiction. The difference is that memoir is just writing about exactly what happened while autobiographical fiction is “based on a true story” but with some changes. So it doesn’t matter if Maya add or change things in her novel.

Another major Ways of Knowing in this novel is emotion. Because it is an autobiographical fiction so it contains a lot of Maya’s personal emotions. The whole book is very emotional, not just for the author , but also for the readers. Because Maya is very good at describing her feeling as a child so it can provoke our emotion easily. Because all the event happening in this book is striking and astonishing, so it can also bring out readers’ feeling. For example the event of getting raped by her mother’s boyfriend or the event of getting pregnant at the age of 16. All those events are very emotional towards both the author and the readers.

Language, I think is also a Ways of Knowing in this novel. Firstly, Maya have to write this book in a child point of view, so she have to use the language carefully in order to sound like a child. Secondly, after the big event Maya had stopped speaking for 2 years, this is also a tremendous event of her life. Language is use to express our idea and thought, so not speaking for two years meaning that Maya don’t want to express her feeling to the others that also means that she don’t trust anyone. Luckily, later on in the novel Mrs Bertha Flowers helped Maya to over come her silence by telling her to read all the books that she give her out loud. This is also why Maya loves language and literature so much, because it brings back her voice.

From here we can see that the novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings involve many different Ways of Knowing.