A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

so glad I finally got around to reading this. ( )

Well, I can honestly say that I enjoyed the book tremendously!

My favorite version of the play was with Sidney Poitier, so, while reading, that's the cast I kept picturing (as I could best remember them all).

Throughout the play, and the book, the one person that really agitated me most, was Walter Lee. In the first two acts, Walter Lee was bothersome, annoying, just plain disrespectful and stupid. But by act three, he totally redeemed himself and proved that he is the wonderful, father, son, and brother you had hoped him to be.

My favorite character of the whole book and play has always been Mama. Her wisdom, her love and her working so hard to keep the family together and happy. I adore that about her.

I liked Ruth because she stuck by Walter Lee through everything..even when he was being the jerk. She loved him and you knew it, even in her disappointment.

I liked Beneatha, she was smart and always thinking. She could be a bit preachy sometimes but I think many times, she meant well. She stood up to her brother and was just as stubborn and bullheaded as he was. And I liked that she thought for herself during a time that it was thought that women should just get married, have babies and do "woman's work"..She tried to step outside that box and do her own thing!

This will be a book that will be bought and put on my bookshelf as soon as possible and one classic that I will always love!

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As I was typing my initial review, and got to my last few words, my Kindle shuts down...It was so much better written than what I can do now because I was going by how I felt then and once it was done, I had forgotten a lot of what I said...Sigh
( )

Originally posted at https://reallifereading.com/2017/02/03/back-to-the-classics-a-raisin-in-the-sun/

Don’t laugh, but for the longest time, I thought this play/musical had to do with erm, farming. I’d heard of it, but have never seen the play or the musical or the film.

It takes its name from this Langston Hughes poem.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like 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 sags
Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

– Langston Hughes, Harlem (Dream Deferred)

What an amazing poem.

A Raisin in the Sun is a story about a black family living in Chicago’s South Side – Walter and his wife Ruth, their son Travis, Walter’s mother and sister Beneatha all live together in a small rundown apartment.

“Weariness has, in fact, won in this room. Everything has been polished, washed, sat on, used, scrubbed too often. All pretenses but living itself have long since vanished from the very atmosphere of this room.”

Walter’s father has recently died, and they’re waiting for a life insurance cheque of $10,000. Walter plans to invest that in a liquor store with some acquaintances. But his mother puts most of it into a new house – one in an all-white neighbourhood. Unfortunately their soon-to-be new neighbours want none of that, and a representative arrives offering to buy them out. This man who asks the family:

“What do you think you are going to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you just aren’t wanted and where some elements – well – people can get awful worked up when they feel that their whole way of life and everything they’ve ever worked for is threatened.”

The plot echoes Hansberry’s own experience. When she was 8, her father Carl Hansberry bought a house in a subdivision restricted to whites, and their neighbours got an injunction to have them vacate the house. Carl Hansberry challenged the ruling, bringing about the case Hansberry vs Lee.

This play set many precedents. After difficulty securing funding, a location, the play opened on March 11, 1959, and A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, with a black director, and a black cast (except for one minor character), including Sidney Poitier. What a feat for that time, when theatergoers were mostly white. According to a 1999 New York Times article, Hansberry once told a reporter that Broadway’s perception of black people involved ”cardboard characters, cute dialect bits, or hip-swinging musicals from exotic scores.”

A Raisin in the Sun ended up playing for 19 months on Broadway. Hansberry won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play, and the 1973 musical was adapted from the play. It really was a play that made history.

As James Baldwin said in his introduction to Hansberry’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, published after her death:

“…I had never in my life seen so many black people in the theater. And the reason was that never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of black people’s lives been seen on the stage. Black people ignored the theater because the theater had always ignored them.”

A true American classic. ( )

I love this play. It is one of my favorites. This wonderful play is about a hardworking family which accurately depicts the struggles, joys, and dreams of an average African-American family. This book should be read for its clear and precise writing.

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry Despite that this is a classic that would have been relevant in almost any American Lit class, of which I've been in several between high school and getting an English degree, it only hit my radar on account of Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home. That book talks about this play, and it's point on the commentary produced about the play is best summed by this quote:

Audiences easily grasp A Raisin in the Sun’s statement about the relationship between blacks and whites and their battle over space. However, little attention is paid to its clear statement about women’s roles in the struggle for equality.

Personally,  I would urge any new readers to remember to think of this as they read it. I certainly had both running through my head, and they are distinct within the play. They are woven together brilliantly. The differences in the generational aspirations also provide tension and remind the reader that the black community in America has endured a lot and that each generation had set an entirely different goal towards equality to achieve. Though I am not black, I can relate a bit to those generational differences. I only realized recently how much of my indepedence I've taken for granted that have come from having access to the pill. Just because I have access, that doesn't mean that fight is over, other women still don't. Also, I still don't have absolute equality and women are overall still in a larger struggle. I feel like the story of the play sits in a similar place. The children grew up with things that the parents didn't have and couldn't grasp their parents aspirations. But the children know that there is still so much further to go and the parents are tired and happier with what they've achieved than the children can realize. And on and on it goes for all our intersections. The women of this play still have more battles to wage on multiples fronts. 
 
I enjoyed reading the play for all these reasons and that it was genuinely entertaining. I love Ruth and Mama and their relationship. I don't find that kind of relationship with in-laws in much literature or in talking to many people, and I hope it's not lost.  ( )