Author pulls back curtain into life of a hope-hungry family
Cover of the book “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry. PHOTO | DIANA NGILA
What you need to know:
A Raisin In The Sun is a story for all generations. Those who fought for independence, the generation that steered the nation with the dizzying hope of the future and their children, who have since forgotten whence they came from.
Born in 1930 as the last of four children to Chicago parents, a young, gifted Lorraine Hansberry grew to become a respected writer and playwright in New York.
Her work, A Raisin In The Sun, was the first African American work to be shown at Broadway in the 1958/59 season, when the book was copyrighted and published.
Hansberry’s literary style mixes the colloquial English of the time and the intellectualism of the college-educated, fusing humour to the story of the Younger family; a family torn between post-slavery rebirth and optimism of the future.
The story reaches a crescendo when “Mama” receives a $10,000 insurance cheque that divides the modest family along the lines of how to spend it, with her son Walter seeking to invest it in a liquor store against his mother’s and wife’s wishes.
The money obtained through the hard work of her husband, an equally modest man, who died poor in the house he moved his ageing wife into when he married her decades before. Then enters Beneatha, the college-going eclectic and brilliant daughter who in one of the scenes left “to become queen of the Nile”.
Hansberry uses her to explore inter-sibling relationship and assimilation of the African, Asagai her friend from Nigeria, who her brother Walter doesn’t take a liking to.
Walter’s wife, Ruth, tries to help her troubled husband tenderly, while struggling with the conception of a second child amidst financial worries and the shrinking space of a two-bedroomed apartment.
Something Mama does the same leading to a fever pitch argument where she says, “Once upon a time freedom used to be life – now it’s money.”
A Raisin In The Sun is a story for all generations. Those who fought for independence, the generation that steered the nation with the dizzying hope of the future and their children, who have since forgotten whence they came from.
