Deferral and The Dream: Visualizing the Life and Loves of Lorraine Hansberry

Sighted 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...