Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) is the first collection of poems by African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou. Many of the poems in Diiie were originally song lyrics, written during Angelou's career as a night club performer, and recorded on two albums before the publication of Angelou's first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). Angelou considered herself a poet and a playwright, but is best known for her seven autobiographies. Early in her writing career she began a practice of alternating the publication of an autobiography and a volume of poetry. Although her poetry collections have been best-sellers, they have not received serious critical attention and are more interesting when read aloud.
Diiie is made up of two sections of 38 poems. The 20 poems in the first section, "Where Love is a Scream of Anguish", center on love. Many of the poems in this section and the next are structured like blues and jazz music, and have universal themes of love and loss. The eighteen poems in the second section, "Just Before the World Ends", focus on the experience of the survival of African Americans despite living in a society dominated by whites.
Angelou uses the vernacular of African Americans, irony, understatement, and humor to make her statements about race and racism in America. She acts as a spokesperson for her race in these poems, in which her use of irony and humor allows her to speak for the collective and to assume a distance in order to make comments about her themes, topics, and subjects. Critic Kathy M. Essick have called the poems in Diiie "protest poems". The metaphors in her poetry serve as "coding", or litotes, for meanings understood by other Blacks, although her themes and topics are universal for most readers to understand.
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie has received mixed reviews from critics but was a best-seller. Many critics expected that the volume would be popular despite their negative reviews, but others considered it well written, lyrical, and a moving expression of social observation.
Background Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie is Maya Angelou's first volume of poetry. She studied and began writing poetry at a young age. After her rape at the age of eight, as recounted in her first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she dealt with her trauma by memorizing and reciting great works of literature, including poetry, which helped bring her out of her self-imposed muteness.
Angelou recorded two albums of poetry and songs she wrote during her career as a night club performer; the first in 1957 for Liberty Records and the second The Poetry of Maya Angelou, for GWP Records the year before the publication of her first autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). They were later incorporated into her volumes of poetry, including Diiie, which was published the year after Caged Bird became a best-seller. Diiie also became a best-seller, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Despite thinking of herself a playwright and poet when her editor Robert Loomis challenged her to write Caged Bird, she has been best known for her autobiographies. Many of Angelou's readers identify her as a poet first and an autobiographer second, yet like Lynn Z. Bloom, many critics consider her autobiographies more important than her poetry. Critic William Sylvester agrees, and states that although her books have been best-sellers, her poetry has not been perceived as seriously her prose. Bloom also believes that Angelou's poetry is more interesting when she recites them. Bloom considers her performances dynamic, and says that Angelou "moves exuberantly, vigorously to reinforce the rhythms of the lines, the tone of the words. Her singing and dancing and electrifying stage presence transcend the predictable words and phrases".
Early in her writing career, Angelou began alternating the publication of an autobiography and a volume of poetry. Her publisher, Random House, placed the poems in Diiie, along with her next four volumes, in her first collection of poetry, The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994), perhaps to capitalize on her popularity following her reading of her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at President Bill Clinton's inauguration in 1993. A year later, in 1995, Angelou's publisher placed four more poems in a smaller volume, entitled Phenomenal Woman.
Title
Angelou chose "Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie" as the volume's title because of her interest in unconscious innocence, which she says is "even lovelier than trying to remain innocent." The title is a reference to her belief that "we as individuals ... are still so innocent that we think if we asked our murderer just before he puts the final wrench upon the throat, 'Would you please give me a cool drink of water?' and he would do so'". Angelou has said that if she "didn't believe that, [she] wouldn't get up in the morning".
Themes Angelou uses rhyme and repetition throughout all her works, yet rhyme is only found in seven of the poems in Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie; critic Lyman B. Hagen calls her use of rhythm "rather ordinary and unimaginative". Death is an important theme throughout many of Angelou's works, especially in Caged Bird, which opens with it and, according to scholar Liliane K. Arensberg, is resolved at the book's end, when her son is born. Death is directly mentioned in 19 of the 38 poems in Diiie. According to scholar Yasmin Y. DeGout, many of the poems in Diiie, along with those in Angelou's second volume Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, "lack the overt empowerment themes of her later, better known works", especially And Still I Rise (1978) and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990).
Part One: Where Love is a Scream of Anguish The themes in the first section of Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie focus on love. In Southern Women Writers, Carol Neubauer states that the first twenty poems in the volume "describe the whole gamut of love, from the first moment of passionate discovery to the first suspicion of painful loss". Kirkus Reviews finds more truth in the poems in this section, which describe love from the perspective of a Black woman, compared to those in the second section. Hagen feels that Angelou's best love poem in Diiie is "The Mothering Blackness", which uses repetition and biblical allusions to state that the Black mother loves and forgives her children unconditionally.
In "To a Husband", Angelou praises the Black slaves who helped in the development and growth of America. She idealizes Black men, especially in "A Zorro Man" and "To a Man"; she dedicates Diiie to the subjects of both poems. DeGout views "A Zorro Man" as an example of Angelou's ability to translate her personal experience into political discourse and the "textured liberation" she places in all her poetry. The use of concrete imagery and abstract symbolism to describe emotional and sexual experience, but also has another meaning, that of liberation from painful and poignant memories. According to DeGout, "A Zorro Man" lacks the clear themes of liberation that Angelou's later poems such as "Phenomenal Woman" have, but its subtle use of themes and techniques infer the liberation theme and compliment her poems that are more overtly liberating. The poem and others in Diiie, with its focus on women's sexual and romantic experiences, challenges the gender codes of poetry written in previous eras. She also challenges the male-centered and militaristic themes and messages found in the poetry of the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Angelou's use of sexual imagery, from a woman's point of view, provides new interpretations" and excavates it from derogatory assessments". Although the poem's speaker feels trapped, women's sexuality is depicted as powerful and controls her partner, which moves away from "the patriarchal assumption of male control over the sexual act". Angelou's depiction allows her readers, mostly women, to identify, celebrate, and universalize their sexuality to all races. DeGout states that "A Zorro Man" "enact[s] empowerment by liberating the reader from stigmas placed on women's sexuality from gender assumptions of male (sexual) power, and from racialized notions of women's experience".
Librarian John Alfred Avant states that many of Angelou's poems could be set to music like that of jazz singer and musician Nina Simone, especially the first poem in this section, "They Went Home," which he says "fits into the torchy unrequited love bag". Hagen considers Angelou's best poems to be the ones meant to be song lyrics, such as "They Went Home". In his analysis of "They Went Home", Hagen calls Angelou a realist because she recognizes that the married man who dates other women usually returns to his wife. He states, "While the sentiment is psychologically sound, the lines are prosaic, reflecting the pitiful state of the abandoned". Essick, when analyzing "When I Think About Myself", states that the poem central theme is "one's self-exultation and self-pride that prevent one from losing her will in spite of experiences involving pain and degradation".
According to Hagen, in his analysis of "No Loser, No Weeper", the speaker expresses the common experience of loss, beginning with childish and minor ones such as losing a dime, a doll, and a watch, and ending with the loss of the speaker's boyfriend. Kirkus Reviews considers this poem, along with "They Went Home", both slight and carrying "the weight of experience".
Part Two: Just Before the World Ends The poems in the second section of Diiie are more militant in tone; according to critic Lyman B. Hagen, the poems in this section have "more bite" and express the experience of being Black in a white-dominated world. He states that Angelou acts as a spokesperson, especially in "To a Freedom Fighter", when she acknowledges a debt owed to those involved in the civil rights movement. According to Bloom, the themes in Angelou's poetry, which tend to be made up of short lyrics with strong, jazz-like rhythms, are common in the lives of many American Blacks. Angelou's poems commend the survivors who have prevailed despite racism and a great deal of difficulty and challenges. Neubauer states that Angelou focuses on the lives of American Black people from the time of slavery to the 1960s, and that her themes "deal broadly with the painful anguish suffered by blacks forced into submission, with guilt over accepting too much, and with protest and basic survival".
Critic William Sylvester states that the metaphors in Angelou's poetry serve as "coding", or litotes, for meanings understood by other Blacks. In her poem "Sepia Fashion Show", for example, the last lines ("I'd remind them please, look at those knees / you got a Miss Ann's scrubbing") is a reference to slavery, when Black women had to show their knees to prove how hard they had cleaned. Sylvester states that this is true in much of Angelou's poetry, and that it elicits a change in the reader's emotions; in this poem, from humor to anger. Sylvester says that Angelou uses the same technique in "Letter to an Aspiring Junkie", in which understatement contained in the repeated phrase "nothing happens" is a litotes for the prevalence of violence in society. Hagen connects this poem with the final scene in her second autobiography, Gather Together in My Name, which describes her encounter with her friend, a drug addict who shows her the effects of his drug habit. According to Hagen, the poem is full of disturbing images, such as drugs being a slave master and the junkie being tied to his habit like a monkey attached to the street vendor's strap.