Deferral and the Dream
2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/10642684-8994140
ISSN1527-9375
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoSighted Eyes | Feeling Heart (2017), directed by Tracy Heather Strain, recounts the storied life and dissembled desire of insurgent playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry. My analysis of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart pulls on a thread tucked into the title of Hansberry's famous play. The concept and problematics of deferral not only punctuate the narrative of A Raisin in the Sun but hug the contours of Hansberry's life as an activist, outline the closeted confines of her sexual desire, and concretize with the impact of her untimely death. The phrase “a raisin in the sun” appears in the third line of the first stanza of Langston Hughes's poem “Harlem [2],” which is one of the eighty-seven poems that comprise Hughes's book-length serial poem “Montage of a Dream Deferred” (1994: 426).Harlem [2]What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry upLike a raisin in the sun?Or fester like a sore—And then run?Does it stink like rotten meat?Or crust and sugar over—Like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sagsLike a heavy load.Or does it explode?The dream deferred, or, more appositely, the refusal to accept deferral any longer, is the imperative that sears her famous play, her radical resistance, her love life—and deferral is what we are left with in the wake of her death. In my discussion of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart, I track the way this deferral, along with an attendant refusal to defer, reverberates through Hansberry's celebrated play and emerges in Strain's film. My analysis pays special attention to the inclusion of photographs and rare archival footage of Hansberry at her Croton-on-Hudson home. I consider the ways that, even though she cloistered herself, sumptuous visual evidence of Hansberry's refusal to defer her lesbian life is burned into the photographs and silent film footage captured in and around her upstate New York sanctuary.Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2017. Over the next several years the documentary was broadcast on PBS, exhibited at museums and colleges across the country, and screened at historic venues like the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem and significant locations like the Croton Free Library in Croton-on-Hudson, where Hansberry lived at the time of her death. Given that Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart is the first feature-length documentary film about Hansberry's life, it is noteworthy that very little buzz has surrounded this film. While the documentary had an impactful presence at film festivals with screenings at the Chicago International Film Festival, DOC NYC, and Festival International des Films de la Diaspora Africaine in Paris, the film has gained very little notoriety beyond the festival circuit. The general lack of knowledge about the first feature-length film that chronicles the life of one of the greatest African American playwrights is curious; it appears that while A Raisin in the Sun is world renowned, its playwright may not yet be a household name. As a PBS American Masters production, this documentary's primary outlet was television; Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart did not enjoy a theatrical showing like the documentary films that captured the lives of other Black luminaries from her generation, such as the twenty-first-century documentary about James Baldwin's life, I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Toni Morrison: The Pieces That I Am (2019), and Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (2019). While the obscurity of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart can be attributed to its sparse programming on PBS, the limited audience of film festival screenings, and the exclusivity of academic streaming services, which have been the primary platforms for accessing the film in the years after its release, the limited knowledge of and access to this film reflect and redouble the shroud of secrecy that surrounds aspects of Hansberry's life—namely, her sexuality. The film's treatment of Hansberry's lesbian relationships further compounds the dissemblance and mystery that haunts this facet of the playwright's legacy. Despite the murkiness that envelops Hansberry's sexuality in this film, Strain creates the cinematic space to appreciate the life and legacy of this dynamic and courageous Black woman playwright who is an underrecognized American treasure. A chance to screen Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart is a chance to hear the voice of an artist gone too soon, to learn about her life outside her famous play, and to spend time with a brilliant, pathbreaking Black woman playwright who was just finding a way to become her own.The title of Strain's documentary is an extraction from a quote by Hansberry that appears in the film. In an interview, she is recorded saying, “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which affect this world.” Hansberry's imperative to see, feel, and react to the miseries of the world as an activist, writer, and lover comes through in this documentary film. Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart captures the vicissitudes of Hansberry's magnificent life and the heartbreak of her untimely death. The traditional style of framing expert interviews is made exciting by the cast of Black celebrities and the expertise of scholars who knit together this illustrious story.The film moves chronologically, beginning with Hansberry's early life in Chicago. Family photographs, archival footage, and photographs of everyday Black life on the South Side of Chicago in the 1930s accompany the array of interviews, narration by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, and recitation of personal papers performed by Anika Noni Rose. The film incorporates archival footage of interviews with Hansberry herself as well as reenactments of pivotal moments in her life and the priceless home footage of her in Croton-on-Hudson. All of these elements come together to chart the trajectory of Hansberry's life as the youngest daughter of the prominent Black real estate broker Carl Augustus Hansberry. As the film recounts, Lorraine's father loomed large in his family and was a powerful figure in Chicago. He served as the secretary of his local NAACP chapter. He was a philanthropist committed to ending segregation, and to that end he created the Hansberry Foundation to resist racial discrimination with a $10,000 endowment.The documentary spends time exploring a monumental and terrifying moment in Lorraine's young life when her family moved from the South Side to a home in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, a white neighborhood under a racially restrictive covenant.1 Carl Hansberry would not be intimidated into moving out of the neighborhood by the pressure of white supremacist vigilantism; he and his family lived for several months under imminent threat of violence. Lorraine's memory of this period is distilled in a quote performed by Rose: “My memories of the correct way of fighting white supremacy in America included being spat at, cursed, and pummeled on the daily trek to and from school.”The interviews with Lorraine's sister Mamie and cousin Shauneille Perry, who, as it happens, is herself a playwright and theater director, convey family stories from Lorraine's early years.2 Mamie recalls one terrifying evening when the family was living in their Woodlawn home and a gang of white supremacists descended onto their property. Lorraine was nearly killed when a vandal threw a piece of mortar through their living room window; it narrowly missed her head. The stone was thrown so hard that it lodged into the wall on the opposite side of the window. Leading Lorraine Hansberry scholars Imani Perry and Margaret Wilkerson, given prominent voices in this documentary, describe how this harrowing chapter in the family's life left a lasting impression on Lorraine and became fodder for her landmark play. Eventually, a court order demanded that the Hansberrys leave their Woodlawn home, but Carl Hansberry appealed the order, which led to a hearing before the United States Supreme Court. Hansberry v. Lee (311 U.S. 32) was heard in 1940. Though Carl Hansberry won that case, racially restrictive covenants would not be made illegal until the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.3An array of interviews with scholars, family members, and theater producers convey Hansberry's biographical details before, during, and after her rise to prominence.4 They describe how she moved to New York City after spending two years studying at the University of Wisconsin. In 1950, when she was twenty years old, Hansberry moved to Harlem as an aspiring journalist full of radical ambition. She began working for Paul Robeson's Freedom, a Negro publication that was new to the scene. She met her soon-to-be husband Robert Nemiroff during this time. They were married in 1953, when interracial marriage was still illegal in many US states.5 Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun while living with Nemiroff in their Greenwich Village apartment at 337 Bleeker Street. These biographical threads are complemented by interviews with Hansberry's contemporaries and confidants, from the late Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, and Lloyd Richards to Sidney Poitier, Glenn Turman, and Harry Belafonte. These interviews weave together a behind-the-scenes narrative about the casting, production, and opening of A Raisin in the Sun. The prospect of launching the first play written by a Black woman to open on Broadway gave producers such pause and trepidation that they nearly missed the opportunity to stage this groundbreaking production.6 In fact, A Raisin in the Sun first opened in Philadelphia, because Broadway producers were not willing to take the risk on a play written by a Black woman. The run in Philadelphia was such a rousing success that Broadway was compelled to have a change of heart; on March 11, 1959, A Raisin in the Sun opened at the Ethel Barrymore theater in New York City. In their retelling of the origin story of this production, the interviewed Black Hollywood legends describe how a bashful Hansberry handled her newfound influence and fame. Such stories told by friends, fellow playwrights, actors, directors, and producers pull back the curtain on the life of a reluctant star on the rise.After moving through the remarkable story of how A Raisin in the Sun came to be, the film connects the play's narrative with Hansberry's commitment to activism and Black liberation. The issue at the center of A Raisin in the Sun, what catalyzes the dramatic twists and turns in this play, is the peril of housing, space, and quality of life for a Black family, the Youngers, during the era of jim crow7 segregation. When the life insurance policy of the recently deceased patriarch of the Younger family returns ten thousand dollars, the family becomes fractured: Mama would like to purchase a house; Walter Lee, her son, would like to open a liquor store; Beneatha, her daughter, aspires to go to medical school and would like to use the money to that end. Walter Lee's wife Ruth and son Travis live in the small apartment as well. After Ruth discloses that she is pregnant, Mama makes the choice to buy a house in Clybourne Park, an exclusively white Chicago neighborhood. A representative of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association pays the Younger family a visit to their South Side apartment in order to persuade them to change their minds, to not move into Clybourne Park, and to accept instead a refund for the purchase of their home. The Youngers refuse. The play ends with the Youngers moving out of their South Side Chicago apartment and into an uncertain future in their new Clybourne Park home. The expectation of Black deferral for the sake of white comfort is the pressure that drives the action of A Raisin in the Sun.The family's concerted and collective resistance to that expectation indexes not only the biographical parallels of the Hansberry family's choice to move into the hotly contested space of the racially restricted Woodlawn neighborhood, it also reflects the writer's life as a radical activist. Like her father, Lorraine deplored segregation; but unlike her father, she was less convinced by the promise of the American Dream. Perhaps witnessing her father's struggle to achieve that dream activated a more radical tack in the journalist-cum–playwright, who was flagged by the FBI because of her political alliances and movement-building activities. To contextualize the racial and political climate out of which Hansberry was writing, Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart uses photographs and newsreel footage of the attacks by police on civil rights protesters in 1963 and 1964. These images show the police in Alabama using German Shepherd hounds and high-powered water hoses to attack, brutalize, and subdue the Black citizens who refused to comply with racist segregationist laws. The documentary includes photographs of Hansberry in action at protests with friends like Nina Simone, and sound recordings of her giving speeches on the utility of violent resistance to white supremacy. Strain focuses in on Hansberry's work in the movement after the acclaim of A Raisin in the Sun and recounts how the playwright used her newfound celebrity and influence to help raise funds for the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality. One such enterprise raised $5,000 to purchase the station wagon that James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer drove to Mississippi in 1964. These freedom fighters were abducted by police on a Mississippi highway and killed. The burned car was found days after their abduction, and their bodies were discovered several months later. This set of events was devastating for Hansberry. The cost of the refusal to wait, to prolong, delay, or defer a dream of freedom was born out in the lives and murders of freedom fighters who did not adhere to the tacit or explicit, violently enforced expectation for Black people to save liberty for another day.The photographs and archival footage not only historically situate the racial and political climate within which Hansberry existed, they also visualize the collective refusal to defer freedom that powered the civil rights movement. The scenes of Black resistance to white supremacy from the civil rights era included in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart carry an intensified meaning in the contemporary moment. The national uprisings and global protests that erupted in the summer of 2020 after the murders by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta have an incendiary tether through time and space with the civil rights protests of the 1960s in this country. In the summer of 2020, there were lynchings of Black men in California, Texas, and New York (Democracy Now! 2020), while KKK members were making themselves unabashedly visible in public places, and armed white supremacist militias were welcomed by police at Black Lives Matter protests. These horrific realities make perfectly clear that the terror of anti-Black racial violence that Black protesters fought in the mid-1960s is still being battled two decades into the new millennium.8 The refusal to defer resistance to white supremacist violence that mobilized the protests of jim crow segregation during the civil rights movement had been reawakened in recent years by the state-sanctioned murders of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Eric Garner, Mike Brown, and Tamar Rice in 2014, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott, and Freddie Gray in 2015, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016. Tony McDade, a Black trans man, was murdered by the police in Florida two days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Black trans people who are murdered receive very little attention outside the queer community; by the summer of 2020, the year had already seen twelve trans people of color murdered: Dustin Parker in Oklahoma, Neulisa Luciano Ruiz in Puerto Rico, Yampi Mendez Arocho in Puerto Rico, Monika Diamond in North Carolina, Lexi in Harlem, Johanna Metzger in Maryland, Serena Angelique Velazquez Ramos in Puerto Rico, Layla Pelaz Sanchez in Puerto Rico, Penelope Diaz Ramirez in Puerto Rico, Nina Pop in Missouri, Helle Ja O'Regan in Texas, Dominique “Rem'mie” Fells in Pennsylvania, Riah Milton in Ohio, Jaune Thompson in Colorado, and Selena Reyes-Hernandez in Chicago (Human Rights Campaign 2020). The terror of white supremacy, lethal anti-Black police tactics, and transphobia is at a fever pitch, and the national and global movement that is building to combat this complex of violence has commenced. We refuse to delay, defer, or comply any longer. The black-and-white newsreel footage that appears in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart of Black men, women, and children being beaten, attacked, and violated by police is indelibly tied to our contemporary moment. We are inextricably linked. We are living in the legacy of those freedom fighters’ collective refusal, at any cost, to defer freedom.Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart then weaves together Hansberry's movement-building work as a radical civil rights activist, her covert lesbian writing and love affairs, her struggles with writing her second play—The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window—and her debilitating battle with cancer. By including both visual and sonic representations of excerpts from her short stories and personal papers, the documentary balances Hansberry's marriage to Nemiroff with the playwright's growing acceptance of her love for women. We learn that Hansberry explored her lesbian identity even while married. During this time, she used pseudonyms, had clandestine relationships, and chose to move out of the city for more privacy. While Hansberry and Nemiroff were married, and even after their separation, he supported her in this facet of her life and aided in her dissembling by making public appearances with her. Rose recites a journal entry in which Hansberry commits to paper a truth about her sexual desire and her marriage: “Bob and I have been getting divorced for years now. Meanwhile we remain the closest friends either of us have, I suppose. I know that what I have always known, before consciousness even, that most important it has to be her. I mean the woman. It apparently simply will not be the man for me.”Though they had been leading separate lives since 1957, Hansberry and Nemiroff officially separated in 1962 when she moved to the home that she bought in Croton-on-Hudson, forty miles outside New York City. While the traditionally shot and conveyed biographical elements of Hansberry's life are illuminating, the most visually compelling aspect of Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart comes through in the footage of Hansberry at her Croton-on-Hudson home and on a road trip in a fabulous convertible car. In a cinematic tenor that runs counter to the staid documentary film conventions used to recount the details of her public life as an acclaimed playwright and radical Left activist, these intimate, quiet, pastoral scenes open up pockets of private life that were as full of bliss as they were rife with loneliness. Shot with what appears to be a Super 8 camera or perhaps Super 16, the frames of vibrant color with rich black undertones depict a carefree Hansberry. There is footage of her at her Croton-on-Hudson home training her dog, a German Shepherd named Shaka, among the autumn foliage. On another occasion she gazes intently into the camera's lens, then turns away. As seen in figures 1 and 2, there are shots of her posing for the camera before jumping into the driver's seat of her swanky convertible. Figures 3 and 4 show that Hansberry was in the company of women on an out-of-town excursion.In this section of the film we see a blond woman walking on the beach, smiling at someone behind the camera. Is Hansberry the person behind camera? There is footage of Hansberry sitting on a park bench next to a woman with short brown hair. Later, that same woman looks into the camera and makes silly faces. Perhaps Hansberry is the one holding the camera at that moment as well. Through the juxtaposition of still and moving images, and the accompanying narration, it appears that Hansberry acted as both cameraperson and subject in the archival footage and photographs taken during these freewheeling excursions. Because the provenance of this footage, the exact locations and names of those captured on film with Hansberry on a road trip and seaside adventure, are all secreted, this footage begs for exploration and cinematic experimentation. Strain's treatment of this exciting footage fixes these scenes into a linear trajectory of Hansberry's life and offers very little information about the footage itself. Without more details about these scenes, it is unclear how to reconcile this visual evidence of her life as a lesbian.These scenes of outdoor play, road trips, and intimate quiet bring to mind the freedom captured in the footage of Audre Lorde gliding through a street market and dancing at a house party in Berlin, in the film Audre Lorde—The Berlin Years (2012). These scenes rub up against images of James Baldwin strolling through the narrow cobblestone streets in Saint Paul de Vence in James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989). The intimacy of Black queer documentary film from the mid-twentieth century and beyond brings forward a quiet, intimate interior that cuts through and upends the imperative to defer oneself, one's joy, and one's desire for the sake of a collective freedom that is bound up with a deferral that lies at the heart of Black respectability politics. Deferral of any part of one's freedom, these scenes convey, is no freedom at all. The film emphasizes that Hansberry was surrounded by white lesbians, that she was isolated and did not have a Black gay community. Yet the film shows us that James Baldwin called on her to meet with the US Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1964 to confer about the so-called Negro problem. Was Baldwin not a part of her Black gay community? Did she know Audre Lorde? We know, from reading Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde 1983) that Lorde was hanging out in lesbian bars in Greenwich Village during the 1950s and 1960s. If the film had been more interested in exploring Hansberry's lesbian life, perhaps her queer future would have entered the frame. If the film had truly embraced her as a Black lesbian artist, then her legacy on that front could have had a place in this film. It would have been incredible to bring together Black queer artists working contemporarily who recognize Hansberry as their Black queer foremother, as a lesbian elder and a visionary ancestor, so that they could pay homage to her in the film and discuss the playwright's impact on their practice. This particular cinematic journey will have to wait. Deferral truly steals joy, vision, and connection.The scenes of Hansberry on her road trip and at her Croton-on-Hudson home connect with the documentary's revelation that she led a secret life of writing sapphic short stories under the pseudonym Emily Jones and that she contributed letters to the lesbian publication The Ladder.9 Strain superimposes archival footage of Hansberry lying in bed gazing into the camera and looking up to the ceiling, then adds an image of one of Hansberry's letters as it is read by Rose: “January 9th. I am drunk on Canadian Club and Darvon. Have been wrestling with the third act for days now. It is a stone wall. Have been seeing D.S. She was here. Made soup for me, love to me. But no matter what do not finish the play. I really must concentrate on it with all of my might. It is so terribly hard.” This quote begs the question, who is D. S.? The film dances around the answer. Though Hansberry's lovers remain occluded in this film, one of her lovers must be the one who has access to this private, tender, desirous part of her life. The mystery with which Strain imbues Hansberry's love life fortifies a sense of stealth rather than openness. The change in tone in this segment of the film, the downward shift in pacing, is issued in part by the character of the archival footage itself; yet Strain's treatment of this material exacerbates its cryptic quality. The film moves from imparting explicit details about Hansberry's public presence and some facets of her personal life to using raw archival footage in unknown locations with unidentified people. The choice to maintain a furtive cinematic posture inevitably reproduces a sense mystery about Hansberry's lesbian life. The audience is left wondering who she loved, or if she ever fell in love with any woman. The most telling information in the documentary about someone who captivated Hansberry's romantic interest appears in the visualization of a section from one of her annual lists of likes and hates, dated April 1, 1960 (fig. 5).As the juxtaposition of figures 5 and 6 make salient, Strain does not reveal the entire document but includes glimpses of what Hansberry listed under “I Like,” which appears on its front page. She also includes items from the lists titled “I Am Bored to Death With” and “I want,” which appear on the back (fig. 7). This fragment of Hansberry's list of likes does offer a possible answer to one of the film's riddles. In the journal entry from January 9, she wrote that D. S. had visited her and made love to her. Does D. S. refer to the Dorothy Secules who is listed on Hansberry's list of likes? Who is Dorothy Secules? Is she one of the women who are recorded in the archival footage of Hansberry on her road trip?When Hansberry's list is examined in its entirety, much more information is uncovered. This archival document captures the desire and adoration and upset that she carried with her. As figure 6 reveals, Hansberry wrote that she liked her husband most of the time; she also liked “Dorothy Secules eyes” and “Dorothy Secules,” and further down the list, “My homosexuality,” “the way Dorothy talks,” “charming women,” “and/or intelligent women.” Adjacent to the list of likes on this document, Hansberry also listed things that she hated. Interestingly, her homosexuality also appears under that column. Aside from her homosexuality, Hansberry notes that she also hates “sneaky love affairs,” “silly women,” and “my loneliness.” The items that comprise her list of hates move from heartbreak, television, and stupidity, to physical pain, worry about death, and “what has happened to Sidney Poitier.” On the back side of this document, what figure 7 shows, Hansberry writes, among other things, that she is bored to death with “A Raisin in The Sun!” “being a les,” “ ‘Lesbians’ (the capital L variety),” “silly white people,” and “The Great American Money Obsession.” Her list of wants is only three in number, yet the documentary shows only the first two: “To work,” and “To be in love!” The third item reveals more about the particularity of her desire: she also wanted “Dorothy Secules (at the moment).”Even in this list that reveals Hansberry's feelings about herself, an element of deferral exists. The documentary film puts off revealing that Dorothy Secules played a very important role in Hansberry's love life. Hansberry not only liked her and her eyes, she also wanted her. Strain holds back and obscures this detail about Hansberry's desire, and it is unclear why this directorial choice was made. To know that Hansberry was not simply interested in writing sapphic stories and that she did not just have amorphous lesbian longing but that she had a desirous relationship with a woman whose name was Dorothy Secules, or D. S., makes material her Black lesbian desire. Strain handles Hansberry's love affairs in such a way that her film actually prolongs the deferral of recognition of Hansberry's life as a lesbian.The impetus of this film to cloud any specificity about Hansberry's sexuality may stem from the Hansberry estate's history of maintaining this approach. Though the estate donated the playwright's archive to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 1998, a restricted box existed within that collection. The contents of that box, which include Hansberry's personal papers and essays documenting her lesbian life, would not be accessible until 2013 (Mumford n.d.) The deferred access to the restricted box exemplifies the kind of archival deferral that estranges Black queer historical figures from their own history and community, generations after their deaths. While the archival process is not discussed in Sighted Eyes | Feeling Heart, the film does remind viewers that homosexuality was criminalized during the 1950s and 1960s: those who were found to be gay during this time could lose their jobs and their families and be arrested by the vice squad for committing crimes of indecency and sodomy.10 The stakes of being an out lesbian were high for women during this era, but for Hansberry, her fame and standing as a beacon of Black respectability and triumph in the Black community complicated her ability to express her sexuality. This history certainly contributes to the estate's—and by proxy, the film's—anxiety over revealing details about Hansberry's lesbian lovers. Despite the axiomatic, tacit if not overt pressure to deny her sexual desire, Hansberry did not defer this aspect of her own life. The impulse to restrict her sexuality from the realm of public knowledge carries with it a protective stance that is encumbered by a sense of shame that Hansberry did not seem to hold herself but that rather was projected onto her legacy by her estate. This kind of archival deferral disconnects her from her legacy and denies subsequent generations of Black queer artists the opportunity to recognize her as an ancestor who forged a path that they now trod. The expectation to defer Black joy that is at work in Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is also present in this documentary film, in the restricted access to the playwright's archive and in Hansberry's life as a Black luminary. Unlike Audr
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