The Theater World Has Never Understood Lorraine Hansberry
If you remember A Raisin in the Sun as a play about a family that decides to buy a house, you might be surprised that the author thought its crucial line was about African decolonization. Lorraine Hansberry’s favorite character wasn’t Lena Younger, the stalwart widow who wants to use her husband’s life-insurance payment to move her family out of a cramped apartment on Chicago’s South Side. Nor was it Lena’s daughter, Beneatha, Hansberry’s playfully mocking portrait of her own skeptical young-adult self. It was Joseph Asagai, a Nigerian intellectual who courts Beneatha and helps her place her family’s struggles in relation to African freedom movements. “He gives the statement of the play,” Hansberry told Studs Terkel when Raisin opened in Chicago, her hometown. Asagai counsels a clear-eyed faith in progress, however nonlinear; self-determination precludes cynicism. “He knows that first, before you can start talking about what’s wrong with independence, get it. And I’m with him.”
Rather than a champion of the American dream,, and Soyica Diggs Colbert’s intellectual biography, —the subversive intent of Hansberry’s art and activism has long been underestimated. Early reviews of which debuted in 1959 and made Hansberry the first Black woman with a show on Broadway, were quick to domesticate her. “Housewife’s Play Is a Hit,” one headline proclaimed, describing its author as attractive but inexperienced, a former department-store clerk with no previous publications. was perceived as daring enough for the FBI to dispatch its agents to gauge whether it promulgated propaganda (perhaps in part because it attracted large Black audiences). They decided it didn’t pose a threat. This, Colbert implies, was a misreading.
