Letters, Lists, and Conversations
The Lists of Writer Lorraine Hansberry
She was human, imperfect, frequently deeply lonely, but brilliant and ever-searching.
This week, I came across an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum from 2014 titled Twice Militant: Lorraine Hansberry’s Letters to “The Ladder”. Focusing on author, essayist, and activist Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), you may recognize her from her best-known work as the award-winning playwright of A Raisin in the Sun.
Writer Alexis Clements covered the exhibition for Hyperallergic, detailing Hansberry’s handwritten lists that she wrote each year to herself on her birthdays:
We have the rare chance to see the more personal side of Hansberry’s intellect through a series of lists she wrote each year recounting her likes, dislikes, regrets, hates, points of pride, and things she should like. After seeing those typewritten letters, deeply political but tinged with the personal, we see in these lists the deeply personal tinged with the political, this time written in her own hand.
Clements concludes: What these lists show is that she was human, imperfect, frequently deeply lonely, but brilliant and ever-searching.
Here are some excerpts from Hansberry’s “Myself in Notes.”
In 1959, at the age of 28, a few lines:
I like
Conversations with James Baldwin
…
To be alone when I want to
To watch television very late at night
…I want
To work
To be in love
…
From “And at 29:”
I hate
…
My loneliness
My homosexuality
Stupidity
…
Jean Genet’s plays
Jean Paul Sartre’s writing
Not being able to write
Death
Pain
…
Being hung over
Silly women
as silly men
…
In 1961, at the age of 31:
I like
the fact that I started keeping these notes when I was 23
…
In 1962, at the age of 32:
I regret
That love is really as elusive as everybody over 30 knows it to be
….
My consuming loneliness
All the friggin’ hurts in this world
That a certain lady let my letter be read!
The shallowness of the people who have come into (and lately been expelled from) my life.I like
69 when it really works
The first scotch
The fact that I almost never want the third or even the second when I am alone. Praise fate!
The inside of a lovely woman’s mouth
The way little JW looks in the movies
Her coquettishness
Her behind—those fresh little muscles
Parts of the lingering memory of a betrayerI am proud
that I am losing some of those fears
that I struggle to work
hard
against many, many things
and on my own
of my peopleI should like
…
to be utterly, utterly in love
to work and finish something
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