The Significance of Womanism in Maya Angelou's Selected Poems

Abstract

This thesis tries to analyze and uncover the side of womanism in two selected poems by Maya Angelou. In this research, I took two selected poems from Angelou based on the author's experience as a black woman who in the past often received unfavorable treatment by several white people, so she became a black person who became an activist in the civil rights movement. Through poetry, Maya Angelou explores thought and experience. Therefore, this research uses Michael Riffaterre's semiotic theory of poetry to determine the significance and meaning of the selected poems. This research was conducted because there was a gap between previous research and the struggle of black women in fighting for their existence contained in selected poems. The type of research is qualitative, an influential research method for identifying intangible problems such as race, ethnicity, religion, social norms, and others. Therefore, I used qualitative methods for my research, and this research used two types of data, namely primary data and secondary data. Primary data used in this research was taken from every word, phrase, and stanza of poetry, and then secondary data was taken from articles, websites, and several previous studies. The results of this research explore the struggle of black women to escape the unfair and harmful actions they received from white women, resulting in the emergence of the term "womanism" as a platform for black women to voice justice for them. Angelou, through her poetry, tries to show that black women have the right to have a voice to speak out about injustice and that they can be above women of other races.