Deferral and the Dream

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 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. 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