Being both inside and outside of American literature, African American literature poses the problem of the identity of Africans and their African American descendants in the United States. Through this literature, there is a permanent quest of identity which is a response to the dehumanizing systems fostered on their ancestors since the time of slavery. Slaveholders used stereotypes, clichés, biases and misinterpretations of the Bible to dehumanize Africans and dispossess them from their identity. Frustrations felt by the enslaved and their descendants prompted the penning of African American literature including Maya Angelou’s (1928–2014) spiritual narrative I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). Though spiritual narratives share similar themes and objectives with its sister-genre slave narratives in the eradication of slavery and in the construction of Black identity, spiritual narratives have been largely less studied recently. Our objective is to emphasize the Messiah complex in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Through the lens of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, we probe into the Messiah tradition of Maya Angelou’s work in order to highlight how the Messiah complex helps in the construct of American national identity. Our paper therefore investigates the identity of Maya the heroine to answer the question pertaining to the place of African American literature in the American identity. First, we deal with the theoretical framework, which is psychoanalysis and the Messiah complex. Then, we discuss how Maya’s Messiah complex contributes in building her national identity.

African American complex identity Messiah