Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry
A review of Imani Perry’s Looking for Lorraine, a biography of the life of Lorraine Hansberry.
“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”
Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry (2018). Published by Beacon Press.
I never had heard about Lorraine Hansberry and her legacy until I started working at New Perspectives Theatre Company in New York City, where I was tasked with handling the database of historical female playwrights and conducting research on who to add to it. I was absolutely stunned at who Hansberry was and what she did, despite dying at a really young age (she died at 34). As I was doing all of this research about women playwrights, I saw my local library had a copy of this book, and I wanted to really understand Hansberry more because while I’d read some Wikipedia pages on her and her work, I didn’t really know who she was as a person.
We often forget about Black women in the narrative of fighting for rights, especially in the arts, and that makes me glad I’m read this. We forget about women as a whole, but we really don’t do Black women justice for what they’ve done on this planet. And this is why this is a crucial biography to read, because Hansberry was a remarkable woman. We’ll dive deeper into that as we get into the book review, because there’s so much she did from a young age.
With that said, let’s jump straight into it.
Content
Straight off the bat, in the opening ten pages of the biography, I liked what I saw. Now you might be thinking, Ashley, that’s way too soon for you to be like this is a great book, but immediately Lorraine is placed in the context of her middle class intellectual family. The book starts off really strong by grounding her in where she came from. Her father, a college professor, has found a loophole in the system starting from a young age in Hansberry’s life. A spiteful white man, who doesn’t like the community of white people he’s in, sells his house in a white neighborhood to a black family. That is Hansberry’s family. White mob violence and anger then ensues, and that sets the scene for the rest of Hansberry’s life and work. This case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which rejected the restriction. I found this construction of events to be extremely powerful, because from the get-go, readers are placed into the reality of the time in which she was growing up in (early 1940s). We know about racism against Black Americans, but do we know what happened to Lorraine Hansberry? Now we do.
Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago in the 1930s, to a family that hosted local activists and leaders. Lorraine would become a leader herself from a young age, helming the leadership of clubs for more privileged Black children. At college, while attending UWM, she began to attend Communist clubs, until she dropped out and moved to New York City. It was here she worked at a Black-owned newspaper and began to write drama. She was a warrior, an activist, and a closeted lesbian married to a man, and her success was cut short by her death at the age of 34.
This biography explores all the nuances of the extraordinary life she lived, showing the readers who she was and what she went through .It explores the nuance of her family, the people around her, and environment. I found that it was an excellent reconstruction of events for someone who knew nothing about Hansberry’s life in detail, although I knew all of the basic major events in it.
Writing
The problem I generally have with biographies is that at times, they can be too dry. I didn’t think that with this biography, probably because it doesn’t follow a completely linear path. It has portions in which Lorraine’s future thoughts would be injected into the narrative of her past, allowing a clean break and smooth transition between past and future. I also felt that the pacing was done quite well—this could’ve been a giant biography, full of unnecessary fluff, but, instead, we find ourselves with a slim 200-ish page biography. Perhaps it helps that she died tragically young, but I thought this biography definitely did its job. Some bios go over-the-top and are painful to read at times (as much as I love Nancy Milford’s biographies, I will admit, plowing through them was kind of painful. It took me awhile to go through the Edna St. Vincent Millay one).
Overall Thoughts
I think this is a really good read if you fit within one of these categories of interest: civil rights, African American studies, women’s studies, queer history, and theatre history. Lorraine Hansberry’s life fits within all of these categories, and so you’ll find a neat pocket of information within any of those topics packed within here. I highly recommend this biography not only because of that, but also because Lorraine is often a forgotten figure in history. She’s remembered for her play A Raisin in the Sun, but many forget about her as a gifted intellectual individual making a change within the world she lived in. And this book honors that—so I recommend people read it to shed light on a beautiful soul that was snuffed out too soon.
