This week’s choice is “Human Family” by Maya Angelou which I have chosen to mark meeting Rachel’s daughter Emily and her fiancé Forrest.
I’ve sailed upon the seven seas
and stopped in every land,
I’ve seen the wonders of the world
not yet one common man.
- Maya Angelou (1928—2014)
Poem 433. Human Family
I note the obvious differences
in the human family.
Some of us are serious,
some thrive on comedy.
Some declare their lives are lived
as true profundity,
and others claim they really live
the real reality.
The variety of our skin tones
can confuse, bemuse, delight,
brown and pink and beige and purple,
tan and blue and white.
I’ve sailed upon the seven seas
and stopped in every land,
I’ve seen the wonders of the world
not yet one common man.
I know ten thousand women
called Jane and Mary Jane,
but I’ve not seen any two
who really were the same.
Mirror twins are different
although their features jibe,
and lovers think quite different thoughts
while lying side by side.
We love and lose in China,
we weep on England’s moors,
and laugh and moan in Guinea,
and thrive on Spanish shores.
We seek success in Finland,
are born and die in Maine.
In minor ways we differ,
in major we’re the same.
I note the obvious differences
between each sort and type,
but we are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
We are more alike, my friends,
than we are unalike.
Maya Angelou’s poem is an appeal to us to stop treating other people as strangers and start thinking of us all as part of the human family.
She comments on what she describes as “the obvious differences”—skin tones, personality, sense of humour (or lack of it)—in her travels around the world she has seen many men but no two the same, and the same for women—there is no “common man” and millions of “Mary Janes” because each person is different, thinks differently, and acts differently based on those thoughts.
Despite this she says that regardless of our nationality, creed, colour, gender identity or any other “obvious difference” we all find and lose love in the same way, we weep the same way, we laugh, moan, thrive, seek and find success and are born and die the same way so ultimately there is more similarity than difference between us.
I like it because it is inclusive, it expresses a sentiment that seems to be unfashionable at present, and because it expresses the ideas so clearly. I like the idea of travelling the world and finding no common man—not in the sense of someone unremarkable but meaning a genuinely common type—a clone perhaps. I like also the way she expresses human diversity and then the things that make us “more like than unalike”.
I have chosen Maya Angelou’s own performance of her poem at the gathering for the United Nations Development Fund for Women’s Achievement Awards in 1996.