What happens to a dream deferred? … Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun? from Harlem, Langston Hughes
Dear friends and readers,
Last night I watched a YouTube of all of American Theater production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun with Danny Glover and Estelle Rolle. It is long (2 hours and 50 minutes) and to do it I stayed up to 1:45 am, but it was well worth it, yes. I recommend to all who come to my blog to watch it sometime in the next couple of days (or soon) too and then read on:
Elaine Pigeon, a listserv friend, who I’ve also met at a JASNA conference, who alerted us on WomenWriters at Yahoo to the production, wrote concisely:
While it’s main premise is an African American’s family’s desire to realize the American Dream and own their own house, Hansberry’s play touches on many issues that resonate today: racism, gender conflict, the fragility of masculinity, money, class issues, slavery, Africa and colonialism and more.
For some excellent essays and exegeses and commentary (one by Hansberry herself), see comments. I was deeply moved. I have read it before (just once) and seen it once but no longer remember that production. Now done rightly it seemed to me the equivalent in strength of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. At mid-century in the US there were a number of plays exploding the realities of American culture, the “American experience” as PBS glibly calls one of its (good) series. Williams’ plays shows us what sex is like, its premises; Miller shows how class and money work, and here Hansberry, race.
I’m not discounting earlier plays, e.g., Lilian Hellman’s plays on lesbianism and the politics of war (Watch on the Rhine, The Children’s Hour), Sam Shephard’s True West exposing the results of the macho male hegemony, but in the 1970s the impetus turned to the new independent film industry and for a while there were remarkable films. Arthur Miller talked and wrote about the turn to psychological -fantasy angles as a strong retreat and I believe he’s right. He also said that films were killing live theater and there’s a truth to that.
I was most impressed by how many things in that play are still so. Yes black people can now some of them get decent jobs, but many have none at all. Ta Nehisi-Coats’s essay on how for over a century the way local economics are structured and allowed to be practiced prevents black people from having accumulation of money is relevant. $10,000 from the father’s insurance policy and irreplaceable. The bombing and destruction of a black person’s home who dared to move into a white neighborhood.
The most disquieting aspect of the continual police murders of black people at the rare of a couple of week is that they continue.
There would today be guns in play as there are not in this 1959 play
The qualified happy ending of the play to have its full bite shows why sometimes it’s not just irrelevant but necessary to know the autobiography. Hansberry’s family moved into a white neighborhood, and the white home owners association went to court to have them thrown out on the grounds the white man in the play cited: people have a “right” to form what communities they want. Wikipedia article writes: The restrictive covenant was ruled contestable, though not inherently invalid.”
I end on the reality too that Hansberry as she became more active was surveyed, harassed, probably hounded by US agencies —
She died at 35 (!) of pancreatic cancer. I agree with James Baldwin that this hounding and the strain of being alive in the US at the time helped bring on that cancer and her very early death.
Elaine also included a worthwhile YouTube telling of Hansberry’s life: remember as you listen to the words (the play tells people “we are just as complicated” as they — meaning white people) that the popular TV show about black people in the US was Amos ‘n Andy:
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Baraka, Amiri. “A Raisin in the Sun’s’ Enduring Passion.” ‘A Raisin in the Sun’; and The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. Lorraine Hansberry. Ed. Robert Nemiroff. New American Library, 1987. 9-20. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 62.
Bigsby, C. W. E. “Lorraine Hansberry.” Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-66. C. W. E. Bigsby. University of Missouri Press, 1968. 156-173. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 62.
Bower, Martha Gilman. “Her World Divided in Half’: The Aborted Search for Self in the Life and Plays of Lorraine Hansberry.” “Color Struck” Under the Gaze: Ethnicity and the Pathology of Being in the Plays of Johnson, Hurston, Childress, Hansberry, and Kennedy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. 87-112. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 192.
Brown, Lloyd W. “Lorraine Hansberry as Ironist: A Reappraisal of A Raisin in the Sun.” Journal of Black Studies 4.3 (Mar. 1974): 237-247. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 192.
Brown-Guillory, Elizabeth. “Black Women Playwrights: Exorcising Myths.” Phylon 48.3 (Fall 1987): 229-239. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Deborah A. Stanley. Vol. 96
Hansberry, Lorraine. “Willie Loman, Walter Younger, and He Who Must Live.” The Village Voice 4.42 (12 Aug. 1959): 7-8. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Matuz and Cathy Falk. Vol. 62.
Shyma, O. P. “Women in Lorraine Hansberry’s Plays.” Indian Views on American Literature. Ed. A. A. Mutalik-Desai. New Delhi: Prestige, 1998. 107-111. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 192
Usekes, Cigdem. “James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry: Two Revolutionaries, One Heart, One Mind.” Obsidian: Literature in the African Diaspora 9.2 (2008): 12+
Wilkerson, Margaret B. “Lorraine Hansberry: A Research and Production Sourcebook.” African American Review 33.4 (1999): 710+.
Wilkerson, Margaret B. “Political Radicalism and Artistic Innovation in the Works of Lorraine Hansberry.” African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader. Ed. Harry J. Elam and David Krasner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. 40-55. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 242.
From Elaine:
Insightful article on a topic rarely addressed: the very real psychological consequences for blacks of living in a racist society. Apparently suicides rates are up for blacks, even for children in elementary school.
http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/how-legacy-slavery-affects-mental-health-black-americans-today? akid=13338.238088.JG1tup&rd=1&src=newsletter1040052&t=15
Elaine
Thank you. I thought Hansberry’s play was especially good for showing us the damage done to black (“colored”) people in the US. Though not as terrifying or excruciatingly thwarting, I identified with the characters because class in the US and low status is terrifically damaging too. All the more because it’s denied this is so. That’s one of the links between Hansberry’s play and Miller’s and Williams’s. Ellen
Elaine; “In this vein, Bernie Saunders links today’s violence by the police to economic inequality. What is happening is serious. I love the speech in A Raison in the Sun by the Nigerian Asaigai, who goes through the cycles of social change, mentioning periods of retrogression. I’d say we are in such a period. Interesting too that Hansberry’s play was written in 1959, just before the civil rights movement and second wave feminism took off. Looks like we are in for some really big changes in the not too distant future.”
Just on the comment in the on-line column on Saunders’ first silence: he is said to have reacted badly and then made up for it. I deplore this kind of automatic condemnation of someone if they don’t within a few split seconds launch out into some kind of response that the reader wants. In fact it seems Saunders did not respond because he wanted to give a more thoughtful explanatory comment which would not be subject to misrepresentation and used against blacks. Many people reading political comments stay silent while they infer from whatever you write or say the most reactionary inferences if you give them the least chance.
The way political commentary works today — with instant videos going out on the Net — leaves little time or room for thoughtful response. The writer of the column did not stop to see that but went with her he reacted badly. She means he was made to look bad; yes, he opened himself up to that. I remember how Trollope hated campaigning in the 1870s; he’d loathe it today.
Ellen
[…] of traits (as the male characters are) they could appear in Lorraine’s Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun, Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls who have considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf […]
[…] I had when a teacher of undergraduates regularly taught James Baldwin, once tried Richard Wright’s Native Son and once Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (very painful experiences), as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. […]
The more years go by, the more the relevance and timelessness of this black family’s problems — basically endlessly impoverished and stopped from improving themselves by entrenched racism all around them — stays true. One thing I did notice for the first time is how this family is obsessed over money – as are the characters in Death of a Salesman and others of these “ravaged” family classic-American plays.
I think money is the true topic of them all. And that to me no longer wears well — there are other elements in our existence at the core of the tragedy of human life.