“I hadn’t so much forgot as I couldn’t bring myself to remember. Other things were more important.”
― Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings
What does the sentence in bold mean?
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I had hoped someone else would respond to this.
I haven’t read the book, which is the autobiography of the poet. I see that this superbly crafted text is the first paragraph of the book and seems to set the stage for her thoughts on her life, and so it seems that explaining this would be similar to trying to explain what “To be, or not to be” means.
But I’ll try.
“I hadn’t so much forgot as I couldn’t bring myself to remember. Other things were more important.”
It’s not that I had forgotten what happened in the past, but rather that I was reluctant to make the effort to remember it. I had other more important things to do than to re-live what had happened before.
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