PARAGRAPH WRITING. Literature & Language Assignment.

Read the following passage and then answer the questions that follow.
Answer each of the questions below in about 100 words each.
Question 1
Based on your reading of the passage, describe the relationship between the writer and her son.
Question 2
How does the writer’s definition of home change after her son’s accident? Provide details from the passage to support your answer.
Question 3
In paragraph 5 the author says the following: “We listened to the melodious languages and laughed”. According to this sentence Guy and his son might have experienced a culture shock in Ghana as they could not understand the local languages. In your own opinion what else might have been a new experience for them in a country like Ghana?
Guy
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou is a poet, writer, director, and producer. Her best-known work, I know why the Caged Bird Sings, is a memoir of her life as a girl in Arkansas. In this excerpt, taken from her autobiography All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes, Angelou recounts a personal tragedy that she experienced while in Ghana.
1. The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, and then disappearing into the utter blackness. Daylight was equally insistent, but much more bold and thoughtless. It dazzled, muddling the sight. It forced through my closed eyelids, bringing me up and out of a borrowed bed and into brand new streets.
2. After living nearly two years in Cairo, I had brought my son Guy to enter the University of Ghana in Accra. I had planned to stay for two weeks with a friend of a colleague, settle Guy into his dormitory, and then continue to Liberia to a job with the Department of Information.
3. Guy was seventeen and quick. I was thirty-three and determined. We were Black Americans in West Africa, where for the first time in our lives the color of our skin was accepted as correct and normal.
4. Guy had finished high school in Egypt; his Arabic was good, and his health excellent. He assured me that he would soon learn a Ghanaian language, and he certainly could look after himself. I had worked successfully as a journalist in Cairo and failed sadly at a marriage, which I ended with false public dignity and copious secret tears. But with all crying in the past, I was on my way to another adventure. The future was plump with promise.
5. For two days, Guy and I laughed. We looked at the Ghanaian streets and laughed. We listened to the melodious languages and laughed. We looked at each other and laughed out loud. On the third day, Guy, on a pleasure outing, was injured in an automobile accident. One arm and one leg were fractured and his neck was broken.
6. July and August of 1962 stretched out like fat men yawning after a sumptuous dinner. They had every right to gloat, for they had eaten me up. Gobbled me down. Consumed my spirit, not in a wild rush, but slowly, with the obscene patience of certain victors. I became a shadow walking in the white-hot streets, and a dark spectre in the hospital.
7. There was no solace in knowing that the doctors and nurses hovering around Guy were African, nor in the company of the Black American expatriates who, hearing of our misfortune, came to share some of the slow hours. Racial loyalties and cultural attachments had become meaningless.
8. Trying utterly, I could not match Guy’s stoicism. He lay calm, week after week, in a prison of plaster from which only his face and one leg and arm were visible. His assurances that he would heal and be better than new, drove me into a faithless silence. Had I been less timid, I would have cursed God. Had I come from a different background, I would have gone further and denied his very existence. Having neither the courage nor the historical precedent, I raged inside myself like a blinded bull in a metal stall.
9. Admittedly, Guy lived with the knowledge that an unexpected and very hard sneeze could force the fractured vertebrate against his spinal cord, and he would be paralyzed and die immediately, but he had only an infatuation with life. He hadn’t lived long enough to fall in love with this brutally delicious experience. He could lightly waft away to another place, if there was really another place, where his youthful innocence would assure him a crown, wings, a harp, ambrosia, free milk, and an absence of nostalgic yearning. (I was raised on the spirituals, which ached to “See my old mother in glory” or “Meet with my dear children in heaven,” but even the most fanciful lyricists never dared to suggest that those cavorting souls gave one thought to those of us left to moil in the world.) My wretchedness reminded me that, on the other hand, I would be rudderless.
10. I had lived with family until my son was born in my sixteenth year. When he was two months old and perched on my left hip, we left my mother’s house and together, save for one year when I was touring, we had been each other’s home and center for seventeen years. He could die if he wanted to and go off to wherever dead folks go, but I, I would be left without a home.