Paper Details

Name: Saroj Kumar Ray
Country: India

Year: 2025
Volume: Volume-12, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 68-72
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20322794

ABSTRACT
This study examines life writing as a form of witness in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings and Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan: A Dalit’s Life. Both texts transform
individual suffering into public testimony by situating childhood pain within broader histories of racial segregation, caste hierarchy, poverty, labour exploitation, and social humiliation. Although Angelou writes from the African American experience in the United States and Valmiki from the Dalit experience in India, both authors show how private memory becomes historical evidence when it exposes the everyday structures through which domination is reproduced. The study argues that life writing in these texts is not merely autobiographical narration but a social archive. Angelou and Valmiki convert trauma, silence, hunger, labour, and insult into counter-history. Their autobiographies make visible those forms of violence that official histories, elite literary traditions, and dominant social memories often exclude. The study also reads both works through an economic lens, emphasizing how race and caste operate not only as cultural identities but also as material systems that regulate access to food, education, dignity, work, and social mobility.

Keywords: Life writing, witness, Maya Angelou, Omprakash Valmiki, caste, race, Dalit
autobiography, African American autobiography, public history, economic marginality.