I am too full of dreams!
“This of course is why I don’t produce a goddamned thing — I am too full of dreams!”
— Lorraine Hansberry
I just finished reading Imani Perry’s “Looking for Lorraine” and I cried as one does when reading a book with such kind words (and by one, i mean me). the subtitle, aptly fitting, describes Lorraine’s life as “radiant and radical.” i love those words in relation to one another.
Lorraine Hansberry, like many freedom fighters and artists who have come before her, was far ahead of her time, in craft, in ideology and in spirit. she died of pancreatic cancer at the tender age of 34, and i am left thinking of all she had left to give and all she continues to contribute.
it was Lorraine that Nina Simone was thinking about when she composed ‘Young Gifted and Black’ in 1969. it is a homage to one of her dearest and closest friends.
“Although Lorraine was a girlfriend — a friend of my own, rather than one I shared with Andy — we never talked about men or clothes or other such inconsequential things when we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution — real girls’ talk.” — Nina Simone
there are especially poignant themes in the book that i find myself returning to. the first is Lorraine’s inexplicable devotion to pan-africanism, to an understanding that freedom anywhere is direct a result of freedom everywhere. she wrote a letter in defense of Jomo Kenyatta after he was put on trial in 1954. she publicly decried Patrice Lumumba’s assassination in 1961. Lorraine believed and pursued a politic that required the unfettered destruction of american imperialism.
“We may assume that Mr. Lumumba was not murdered by the black and white servants of Belgium because he was 'pro-Soviet' but because he was truly independent which, as we seem to forget in the United States, was at the first and remains at the last an intolerable aspect in colonials in the eyes of imperialists" — Lorraine Hansberry
the second, is her use of the quotidian, that is, the idea that the ‘every day’ is canonical and the subject of our collective and greatest work.
“Lorraine habitually worked through her ideas, memories, politics and passions by writing vividly imagined fictional scenes” ..[It was familiar to her] “in the sense of coming from a people for whom there was poetry in everyday expression” —Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine
“Sweet Lorraine” Baldwin would call her, left us with so many words to find home in and often believed that home was where we are.
“I would often stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle of a laugh. That marvelous face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade” — James Baldwin
and i’ve been thinking so much about this very point, about this time-honored reverence to the mundane, the ordinary, the day to day. the stories that are and can be found in our daily experiences, our bad days/bad years/good days/good years. our arguments, our struggles, our dreams, our laughs three am in the morning staggering down the steps, hungover, after a sweet night with a sweet friend.
the art is in, the art is of, capturing and articulating the complexity of our lived reality.
“We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man”
But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall...
— Gwendolyn Brooks “kitchenette building”
anyways, here are some other readings that touched my heart this week:
Nina Simone: To Be Young, Gifted and BlackJazmine Sullivan - Our Story to TellDick Gregory on the Miles Davis biopicAudience at Umm Kulthum concert in Egypt 1956
