Author’s program note. To understand the point of this article, the point of Maya Angelou’s complaint about paraphrasing the great words of one of history’s most influential speakers into her own monument to her, you must love both language and precision. And above all you must love the truth.
Angelou is an honest woman. She is a woman who tells the truth. And she is a woman who understands and can effectively handle the right words in the right order. Most people will call her a writer, and she is a writer. But I prefer to call her a poet, because she is too.
A poet is a person who strives for maximum impact with the minimum of words… who works with the demons of truth, the difficulties of language, and who works obsessively (because every poet is obsessive) with delivering the right meaning. …and this is difficult.
For such a person, gifted with the scourge of outrage, the boorish behavior of the officials in charge of the new national monument to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. is deeply painful…and completely outrageous. Especially since, in a truly rude way, they had no idea that their seemingly innocent action would produce justifiable anger.
But before I delve into that, I want you to listen to Maya Angelou, poet, read her acclaimed works, as few poets have gained as much recognition as she has…listening to the woman as she reads her words will make it clear why. . Go to any search engine. She listens to the cadence, she feels how it caresses her tongue, tenderly loving each word before giving it to an expectant world. She is in love with language and the great power of language… and she is at war with the ignorant who, by killing language, erase meaning and leave us poorer.
The bottom.
In the late 1960s, Martin Luther King delivered a haunting sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In it he discussed the eulogy he could and should receive in the event of his death. Death and prophecy were in the air that day; Tensions ran high on both sides of the Civil Rights issue, those who embraced him and his leader and those whose words revealed unwavering opposition. The people, and not just those in the congregation, were restless, anxious, and in need of the balm of comfort…
…and so the mahatma of the movement, moved to the pulpit that no one could grace like him, and spoke, as he always spoke, from a heart, this time charged with thoughts of eternity and fragile humanity. He wanted to admonish, enlighten and, above all, prepare them for a reckoning with a destiny that he felt was his and theirs.
This is what he said…
“If you want to say I was a drum major, say I was a drum major for justice. Say I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for justice. And all the other superficial things don’t matter.” .”
And the people knew that their revered leader spoke of his legacy and what they must do to ensure his just and due recognition and that his message of justice and peace endure when he is not present.
It was only a couple of months later that this prophet of equality and justice was shot to death… and thus entered history.
His words and his monument.
At the time, the nation chose to honor the man and, above all, honor his message, in a great civic temple in the nation’s capital. Key passages from his world-changing thoughts would be etched into the towering walls of this building designed for the ages, telling even the most casual visitors what was important and what they should strive to remember and even appreciate. The words of his sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church were selected…then mutilated, insulted, diminished by the very people charged with revering and protecting the great man’s legacy. These, by gutting his words, became the murderers of his message. Little men, they were in charge of rethinking, rewriting and paraphrasing what was already perfect and did not need their help to resound resolutely through the centuries.
Paraphrase.
The culprits of this drama, the organizers of the monument, decided to paraphrase the original and searing words of a man who felt the culmination of his life and work… and thus set in stone the crucial words of his last sermon in Atlanta:
“I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”
Thus they outraged the man, his message, his meaning. Because what they intended to engrave in stone was profoundly different from King’s comments and purpose. These people, thinking of the good they were doing, were instead transgressing on high and mighty matters, matters they should have left alone.
Why did they do it?
The famous passage did not fit in the space arranged by the architect… they did not want to leave it out… and they decided to resort to paraphrasing. In doing so, they rewrote the passage, putting it in quotation marks so that readers would mistakenly assume the words were accurate, thereby sacrificing what they had been charged with preserving. To read the dictionary definition of paraphrase is to see how much they got wrong:
“a restatement of a text, passage, or work that gives meaning in another form.”
But these words, from this man, spoken at such a time and place needed tender care… never to be altered or manipulated.
Imagine if you want what would have happened if the organizers of the Lincoln Memorial, along with Dr. King’s, had paraphrased the Gettysburg Address, so…
“87 years ago our ancestors created a great nation of freedom where all men are created equal.
Now we are in a civil war to test if this great nation with its great ideas can continue to exist…”
The simple act of paraphrasing the great words of the great Lincoln makes it instantly apparent how outrageous paraphrasing can be… and demonstrates why diminished words and their diminished meaning must be instantly removed. If a place is found for them, all the better, but if not, the right thing to do is to shoot them down at once.
The organizers, of course, will complain about the extra work, the inconvenience, and especially the cost. They will also tell you that they executed their ridiculous and insulting plan to paraphrase before the US Commission of Fine Arts, which was overseeing the design. They, all the Philistines, had no problem with the proposal, thus indicating their unfitness for their work.
Here comes the honesty and rage of the poet. Because Maya Angelou knows that “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” (John 1-1). This is known to all poets, and surely it is Angelou’s enduring credo. It is also that of Our Savior whose words “Noli me tangere” (John 20-17), so ignored by the organizers of the monument, are very accurate and should be the last word on the matter.