1511901263_homepage_house1

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/sussan-deyhim-dramatizes-poetry-forough-farrokhzad-house-black/"></div>During a rehearsal at The Wallis, Sussan Deyhim is running through a scene with director Robert Egan, dramatizing the poem “The Wind-Up Doll” written by Forough Farrokhzad. Deyhim recites each line with a sharp staccato, her body jerks to mimic the rhythm of her voice:
One can be like a wind-up doll 
and look at the world with eyes of glass… 
a body filled with straw 
inside a felt-lined box, 
at every lustful touch 
for no reason at all 
I can cry out, 
“I am so happy!”
She pauses on a deadpanned smile. Egan suggests Deyhim slow the down the text even more; channel the specificity of the language; the pain of the moment, “Like those women felt with Harvey Wrinstein and Charlie Rose,” he said, turning my way. “Don’t put that in the article.”
It seems, at first, a melodramatic interpretation, but it resonates with the times, and Farrokhzad’s: Born in Tehran in 1935; a fiery, free-spirited girl who climbs trees, gets into fights, and challenges her brothers to stand-up pissing contests while enduring her military father’s endless tirades about men being men; women being women. She seeks refuge in books; and poetry becomes her love. At 16 she marries, and has a son, but as she begins publishing her poems in magazines and traveling in risqué literary circles, her marriage fails. Love affairs rekindle her wounded spirit, and she moves to Europe to study film, returning to her homeland to make an award-winning documentary film. She adopts a child from a leper colony, and publishes several collections of poetry. As in her life, her work often challenges female stereotypes and shocked the political establishment. She dies in a car accident at the age of 32.
Through her words and images, Deyhim’s <a href="http://thewallis.org/show-info.php?id=317">The House is Black</a> attempts to capture the drama and influence of Forough — as she is most commonly referred, like Cher, or Oprah, or Beyoncé — one of the most under-examined international literary feminist figures of the modern age during a limited performance at The Wallis in Beverly Hills, which closes February 3.
“It’s a miracle to put this project together,” Deyhim later says, “because here — it’s always more challenging to stir interest around an unknown poet. She’s very known in Iran, but it’s a challenge here to convince people, “We’ve got to do this!”
¤
JANICE RHOSHALLE LITTLEJOHN: How did you convince The Wallis to do this?
SUSSAN DEYHIM: This started four years ago. I really wanted to work with a contemporary Iranian literary figure. There’s a stereotypical aspect of looking at the Middle East as an archaic figure, either you’re a Sufi or you’re a mythological persona from an ancient masterpiece — all of which are fine. But when you have a country with incredibly dynamic, young, contemporary visionaries of artists and filmmakers and writers and political activists, you have to wonder, “Why are we not presenting ourselves in the way that we are living now?”
I created the visuals and presented it to Farhang Foundation and I said, “This is not something I can take to an American or European foundation. They don’t know who she is. They don’t know why they should care. You have to help me put this together.” And they’re not producers, they’re cultural presenters. But they trusted between me and Forough — everybody loves Forough — and I demo’d it, and they helped with a grant so I could put the skeleton together.
I ran into Kristy Edmunds, the artistic director of Royce Hall at UCLA — she’s a visionary and a feminist and a wonderful human being — and I said, “I’m doing this piece and I need an American figure to step in who will understand the importance of this projects. And she said, “Let’s workshop it.” She was immediately into it, and we gave it a residency period and shot all the visuals and presented it at Freud Hall as a work-in-progress. People really liked it, but my American friends said, “We don’t know her enough. You need to weave in a little more of her story.”
But I wanted to stay away from a linear narrative, and stay in the abstraction. And I thought, this is a really big responsibility I put on my shoulder to work with an artist that I really love. So I decided to stay away from my own aesthetic. I met Robert Egan many years ago through a common friend…and we both are good friends with my lighting designer, Anne Militello. Ann told him about the project and we met and really liked each other. I told him, “I really don’t want to turn this into a theater piece, but we need some narrative to introduce who she was and weave it into all the poetics.” Robert stepped in, and we created this woven narrative of her life, her personality and her journey into the whole abstract visual poetics. We then premiered it at Royce Hall, and then I took it to Chapel Hill University.
It came to The Wallis, because Paul Crewes (the theater’s artistic director) came to see the show, and I said to him, “I really want a second presentation in Los Angeles.” It took him a day and he came back to me and said, “I really want do this.” There is so much content here that is about now, and it’s okay to be theatrical when you have a reason for it. Then I lent myself to Robert’s theatrical experience. This is the complete version, and it’s a good version to present Forough.
What was your relationship with or introduction to Forough and her work?
Well she died when I was two or three, but in my generation — I went to a high school that was quite difficult — literature mattered. So I was aware of her persona, and my mother’s generation, my grandmother’s, they really liked her. There was no one who was so in pain, but such a trouble maker. She was such a perfect character that this contemporary, iconic figure, having the art, having the chops, having the vision, and enduring the suffering that she endured because of being an eroticist in that context. She and Nima Yooshij, these are the most important modernists of the linguistic aspect of Farsi. They really mattered because they not only tried something, but it worked. The poetry works, and it’s standing. So they became the torch carriers, the torch keepers, of something that was very challenging, and especially for Forough as a woman.
I sinned a sin all filled with pleasure 
wrapped in an embrace, warm and fiery 
I sinned in a pair of arms 
that were vibrant, virile, violent.

In that dim and quiet place of seclusion 
I looked into his eyes brimming with mystery 
my heart throbbed in my chest all too excited 
by the desire glowing in his eyes.
In that dim and quiet place of seclusion 
as I sat next to him all scattered inside 
his lips poured lust on my lips 
and I left behind the sorrows of my heart.
-Excerpt from “Sin” 
translated by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak
Not only in literature and poetry, but Forough was also a filmmaker as well…
Yes, when she lost the custody of her son because she wrote this poem called “Sin,” and her husband, who was in another smaller city in southern Iran accused her of not being a good mother and ended up getting custody of the child, she ended up in a psychiatric hospital. She left Iran to Rome and studied film editing. When she came back to Iran, she met her muse and lover, Ebrāhim Golestan, who was a major intellectual and filmmaker and writer, and she started editing for him.
The story behind The House is Black, it was brought to Golestan to do a documentary on the lepers’ colony and he said he didn’t have the time. Forough was really urging to do something interesting, and she went and did this incredible film. It’s an astounding journey, not only in terms of the cinematography, but the human content; the metaphoric aspects of it. It’s really one of the most amazing documentaries of its time — no matter where you’re from. I’m using excerpts from that piece — snippets from the documentary — and then delving into her different poems and weaving a narrative about the story of her life; the different layers of her life and her vision.
Around 1964, Forough had really solidified her voice in the modern Iranian art and literary scene, but was still challenged by living under the guise of her lover. 
She had a turmoil with her lover, the man she lived with while he was married to another woman living on the same street, and the times were open enough to say, “I’m doing this.” But she just was in turmoil with him. I think deep down, she hated being supported by a man. She hated that she was in a love affair with a man who had a wife and a family as much as everyone was adventurous, she doesn’t come from a place of wanting a man’s dominance — and Ebrāhim wasn’t dominant, they had a mutually passionate relationship — but she wasn’t making her money, and she wasn’t being the woman she wanted to be in terms of independence. Did some woman even exists like that at that time in Iran? Someone who could live off her poetry? That didn’t exist back then.
It rarely exists now.
Exactly. But being such an aware, forward-thinking person, she was always in turmoil. The rumor has it that they had this confrontation, like a fight, and she was in this very emotional state when she goes to visit her mother and said something to her mother about her death. It wasn’t a suicide, but was trying to avoid a school bus and ran into a tree. It was an accident.
There’s such a riveting story in this short life that she lived. How do you begin to know at what point in which to start—or was her film, The House is Black, provide that starting point to tell the story of who Forough was as an artist, a feminist and as a person?
My own work has been extremely personal and against the stream for all my artistic career, so I recognize what aspect of the work — their vision — is sacred. It’s the poetry — and with the poetry, you can’t bring it to prose. It has to remain poetry, and the aspects that are reality, the stuff of life. One of the reasons I have this whole visual component of the show is because I thought the words alone, especially in translation, would not be too difficult to translate because they’re really about us.
It’s not just her story. It’s the story of all the women before her, before me, who paved the way for someone like her to even exist, to even be able to say, “I’m just going to say it.”
It’s about a great era in Iranian literature and sensibility…where a lot of time and energy was spent on modernism — and the women were really, really active in that time — and all these interesting poets and literary people, painters; they’d get together and they spoke and exchanged ideas. There was partying going on. Big time. There were discussions about what was betraying the country and Westernization — and these are the godmothers and godfathers of everything that’s interesting coming out of Iran right now in cinema, literature and visual arts. This was the crowd.
So we really had to travel through different mediums to tell the story in a way that really navigates poetry and prose and storytelling; the cosmic vibration and the whole landscape. It really is very, very super textured piece.
It sounds like you’ve taken on quite a task with this.
It’s so much, but it really is really beautiful. [Deep exhale.] Never again. Never again. [She laughs.]
But I’m so happy to have done this piece. It’s also a little bit the story of my life, because I am not a popular figure in my own culture. I have humongous fans in the intellectual youth culture, but I have decided that life is not long enough for pleasing everyone. It’s just the way it goes — and I think Forough knew that. If I were going to use a language to speak out to my culture, to the culture here…the core message is: “Don’t put me in a box.” I am a genie, and I have my ways of getting out of that box; stagnancy. So she and I, and what I’m saying through her language, is also something that I would say if I were a poet.
I told my mother: This is the end. 
Before you know it, it shall happen. 
Let’s send my obituary to the papers.
Salaam strange loneliness. 
I concede this room to you because 
black clouds always are prophets 
of new purifying verses, 
and in a candle’s martyrdom lies a resplendent secret 
that its last and tallest flame grasps.
Let us believe, 
let us believe in the dawn of the cold season. 
Let us believe in the ruin of imaginary gardens, 
in idle inverted scythes, 
in confined seeds.
Look how it snows…
-Excerpt from Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season 
translated by Sholeh Wolpé
Were there poems that you included in this work that really resonate with you?
All of the poems that I’m using were the ones that I thought represent or saying something that I have a personal relationship as well. But the ones I love most are the last two: &#8220;Another Birth&#8221; and &#8220;Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season&#8221; — that’s a masterpiece; absolutely profound. There are so many deep poems, mature poems — for her age — and the last one was published after she died. I decided with our literary scholar, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, to stick with these last two because you can hear how her language has grown, her confidence; staying away from judgement and the obligations of society and letting it all completely function on the poetic level.
There is another amazing scholar, Farzaneh Milani, who is a very important feminist scholar whose work I studied — she has a fantastic book Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers and Words Not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement, about the history of feminism in Iran — and last year, she wrote a book about the letters and the life of Forough with Ebrāhim.
There’s a really big responsibility in editing a poet, or any literary artist. And I have Ahmad — if I can’t trust him, then… [she trails off, throwing up her hands]. So we sat down, and I asked him, which of the poems represents the essence of her eroticism, which is the essence of her political writing, which is the essence of her existentialist writing — so we really talked a lot. Then we narrowed it down. Then we talked more, and it was a lot of time spent. It was done with a lot of mindfulness.
Then Robert came into the picture as a dramaturge, and we went through it again with him: “What is she saying?” “What are we saying?” “Why are we using this?” “Is this translating?” “What is lost in translation?” “What is found in translation?” So it was a real process and conscious caring of a poet who is not here; she has no one to defend her, and her muse is a prominent person, but in his late 90s. So we relied on illuminated literary figures from Iran, and I’m confident that we’re not violating anything that she would not want. We just know too much.
You mentioned earlier that this has been so much work, and never again will you take this piece on. But once you have done all this work — the research, the commitment to the storytelling and all of that — is it easy to just let it go?
There is the artist thing — the creation — and then there’s world out there — the promoters, the artifice of what the time wants and who’s the star — who’s going to sell 500 tickets; 2000 tickets. People are always doing the same shows at the same theaters…it’s just this bug in society. Then after you do this amazing piece you have work with promoters and agents; this is way too big in scale to do this again, and way too time consuming. I do have a lot of other things in mind that I want to do. But the most important thing is that the piece was done at Royce Hall, it’s at The Wallis, and then it’s going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (March 10) as their first multimedia project. Hey, that is not too bad.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/poetry/sussan-deyhim-dramatizes-poetry-forough-farrokhzad-house-black/"></div>

Sussan Deyhim Dramatizes the Poetry of Forough Farrokhzad in &#8220;The House is Black&#8221;

hansberry

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/lorraine-hansberry-sighted-eyes-feeling-heart-talking-filmmaker-tracy-heather-strain/"></div><blockquote>“I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and — I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations.” –Lorraine Hansberry </blockquote>
Six years after her critically-lauded, award-winning A Raisin in the Sun made history on Broadway, playwright Lorraine Hansberry died at the age of 34 from cancer. For many, this is the beginning and end of Hansberry’s storied life — who, in 1959, became the youngest American playwright, the fifth woman and the only black writer to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for “The Best Play of the Year.” Notable, but certainly not a life of much consequence to rate a cinematic biography. 
Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain, however, was interested in telling a different story about Hansberry; a champion of the human spirit — a woman born on the Southside of Chicago during the depression after the first World War, who grew up privileged and yet was not spared the scars of the racial and political hysteria of her times; an artist-activist whose life and work were influential to civil rights, feminism, and the gay and lesbian movements. 
“I always saw sparks of that fire in her — it scared me from time to time because this was in the &#8217;50s,” recalls actor Louis Gossett, Jr. who was among the original Broadway cast of A Raisin in the Sun, which starred Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. “There was some kind of something like a TNT Turner Classic Movie mystery the way she behaved. She was Stella Dallas. Something was going on with her, and I didn’t know what was inside.”
Weaning down a four-hour rough cut of Hansberry’s story, Strain chronicles the extraordinary life of a rebel and champion of the human spirit in the two-hour AMERICAN MASTERS <a href="http://www.thirteen.org/programs/american-masters/">Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Hear</a>t, premiering Friday, January 19 at 9:00 p.m. ET/PT, coinciding with the 53rd anniversary of Hansberry’s death.
¤
In the past few years, we’ve seen documentaries of artists such as Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, and James Baldwin — all contemporaries of Lorraine Hansberry. With each of these documentaries, including this one, I’m struck by this sense that the work and the words of our artistic ancestors are speaking to us now. Having worked on this film, what is it that Lorraine is saying to us? 
I think Lorraine Hansberry is saying to us now what she’s always been saying, that it is our responsibility to make our country live up to its ideals. She felt very strongly about that, and it started in her childhood…That was ingrained in her, and kind of the driving force in her life, and she used art in the end — she sees what happens to her father and tries journalism – and decides to use art and theater.
I think of her as someone, sure like every other African American who waivers between hope and despair, she was ultimately hopeful. She had faith in the human race, with that quote, “I think the human race can command its own destiny and that destiny can embrace the stars,” and the idea it seemed to us that this was somehow convey through her father and that she did really believe that it was possible to make change.
I have given you this account so that you know that what I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessment of the true nature of life—but, rather, my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that destiny can eventually embrace the stars&#8230;
There’s an underlying theme in the film of “embracing the stars” that begins with a reenactment of Hansberry laying on the grass with her father looking up at the stars (“I never did learn to believe that anything could be as far away as that. Especially the stars&#8230;”) In re-reading Robert Nemiroff’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, stars are also a prevalent theme throughout Hansberry’s plays, poems and personal narratives. How then did you come to Hansberry’s quote “sighted eyes / feeling heart” for the title of the film?
At one point our collaborator, Sue Schultz, was really interested in Embrace the Stars, and the current Lorraine Hansberry estate’s current trustee is Joy Gresham, but I met her mother (Jewell Handy Gresham Nemiroff, who took over the estate following the death of her husband Robert Nemiroff – Lorraine Hansberry’s ex-husband and literary executor) fortunately before she died, and I believe that was something she was thinking about.
What I tried to do was to think about what, fundamentally, was the story we were telling, and it was the story of an artist-activist. So “embrace the stars” wasn’t incorporating that artist-activist journey, it was just kind of reaching for greatness. And so, “one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world,” to me was the thing she got from her family.
We have Shauneille (Perry), her cousin, and her sister (Mamie Hansberry) both reinforcing these ideas in their interviews saying that if you were given a lot you were supposed to do things to uplift the race. That, to me, connected better with the narrative that we were telling, and that narrative was decided upon because I felt frustrated that people didn’t know about Lorraine Hansberry, in general. But if they did know Lorraine Hansberry they thought of her as this kind of bougie integrationist person that wrote this play promoting integration — you know how people like to diminish people to stereotypes.
So if you are one to think [Martin Luther] King and Malcolm X were in two separate places while most of us realize they were more closely on the same page — let’s go with that scenario — people would say, &#8220;Oh, she was a King person,&#8221; as opposed to being this radical who was probably closer to the side of Malcolm X. When we get to the town hall and someone’s coming in to get you, you have every right to gett’em and kill them, and people have told me that they’re very surprised because they didn’t know Lorraine Hansberry thought like that.
It isn’t as if we got up today and said, ‘What can we do to irritate America?’ It is because that since 1619 Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote — everything. We’ve tried it all. There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted and now the charge of impatience is simply unbearable. The whole idea of debating whether or not Negroes should be able to defend themselves is an insult. If anybody does ill in your home or community, obviously you do your best to try and kill’m! 

Besides the rebellious side of Hansberry, there was a playful side. Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry’s former husband, wrote that she considered herself one of “the odd-balls, the hapless funny ones” who likened herself to “Dinny Dimwit of the comic strips.&#8221; There are glimpses of this in the documentary, but not a strong sense of her whimsy. Was that something that was incongruent with the narrative you were wanting to establish?
I was really aware that she was playful, she liked to make fun of herself; that she had all these clowns around her place. But all the things you see in the documentary, we didn’t have access to those when we started. We gradually got access to things or found things, and so we didn’t see the home movies until late [in the production]. So I did try to incorporate that playful side at least through the home movies because you could see her personality.
But there is other work coming out. Margaret Wilkerson’s book should be coming out soon. Imani Perry’s coming out with a book (Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry on September 18, 2018, Beacon Press); Soyica Colbert’s coming out with a book. Tricia Rose has written about Hansberry, so this is just the beginning and I hope this inspires a lot more research because she’s so complicated and she’s integrally part of the major movements during her lifetime: the Great Migration, the Great Depression, World War II, post-war, civil rights, feminism, gay and lesbian, anti-colonialism — that’s a lot to try to take on.
In exploring your own work as a storyteller, it seems as if are some thematic threads between projects like I’ll Make Me a World, on which you were a producer, or Unnatural Causes that led you to Hansberry’s story. Would you say that’s accurate?
Lorraine Hansberry, of all the things that I’ve worked on, is one of two stories that I personally wanted to tell. The second one, which is part of I’ll Make Me a World, about the black ballet dancers of the ‘50s and ‘60s — that was my idea. It’s interesting because I don’t think I’ve really thought about it, but I’m really drawn to stories about African Americans in situations that are allegedly new and unusual or outside of where we’re supposed to be. That’s representative of situations I’ve been in myself and sometimes my parents. I was a competitive gymnast — and completely too tall for it — in the 70s when I was a teenager. My parents met at Howard, and my mother was one of two women in her class who were studying architecture. She ended up leaving college to get married, like a lot of women did in the ‘50s and go with my dad to Japan where I was born. My dad is a retired civil engineer and he was an officer in the Navy in Japan.
I’ve been encountering people and thinking about the alleged fish out of water, because I don’t think there’s place that’s off-limits for African Americans. I think that if you’re drawn to the classical arts then you should do it if you’re talented, like Raven Wilkerson in I’ll Make Me a World. Most of the things that I’ve worked on have been pieces where someone has said, ‘Would you like to work on this?’ I didn’t generate the ideas.
But I’ve been blessed to work on a variety of documentaries that have actually laid the groundwork for the Lorraine Hansberry project. I worked on The Great Depression series as an associate producer. The first American Experience that I directed, Building the Alaska Highway was set during World War II, so I got to research about African Americans during that period and this idea of the “double victory” and then Unnatural Causes on infant mortality; there was a piece Lorraine published in The Village Voice about low birth weight babies even back then. We’re talking about it again because of Serena Williams sharing what happened with her, and Lorraine was talking about it in the ‘60s as an issue.
Which makes this film — and the others I mentioned earlier — so timely. These were artists were not only speaking to the times in which they lived but were very prophetic about the times we’re living in now.
The fact that those films came around finally made people hear what we were trying to do and understand, &#8220;Hey look at how successful these were, and how popular these were…&#8221; And the interesting thing, Lorraine Hansberry is credited, according to Nina Simone, for politicizing her. Nina Simone wasn’t so much a political person until she encountered Lorraine Hansberry. She and James Baldwin had these great conversations about things and, even in our film, Amiri Baraka is talking about how Lorraine already had a kind of analysis about society, that economic piece, that he didn’t have at that time. A lot of people really looked up to her.
Sadly, Maya Angelou died when we were in the middle of our Kickstarter campaign because we were looking for connections and I found something that Maya Angelou has written in one of her books about how she was performing at some club in The Village one night — and I don’t know which one it was — but Lorraine Hansberry was in the audience and she was so nervous, and I found that so interesting!
But you’re right, there is something between these people, and it’s why I think history is so important; it’s important, in particular, for African Americans to know their history and realize we come from people who have been interested in all sorts of things: intellectuals, artists, thinkers…I really love that period and the people who came of age in the aftermath of World War II. I find them so interesting, and so full of hope about our society. They were groundbreakers. And I look at how heartbroken some must be now. I’m sure they never would have imagined that certain things that are going on, namely in our society overall, but specifically for African Americans.
Bob and I have been getting divorced for many years now, meanwhile still remain the best friends either of us has. I know what I’ve always known, before consciousness even, that it will always be her; I mean, the woman. It is never the man for me.
Speaking of groundbreaking, in her personal life, Lorraine fell in love with and married Bob Nemiroff, a white, Jewish man, in 1953 when interracial marriage was illegal in half the states in country; and, later, albeit privately, began identifying herself as a lesbian even though love, ultimately alluded her for much of her life. And it seemed to be that way, too, with Maya Angelous, Nina Simone…
…and James Baldwin.
Yes. And Baldwin even wrote following her death: “Her going did not so much make me lonely as make me realize how lonely we were. We had that respect for each other which perhaps is only felt by people on the same side of the barricades, listen to the accumulating thunder o the hooves of horses and tread of tanks.” Hansberry, as you’ve depicted in the film, also writes of her loneliness, which has made me wonder if love was ultimately the sacrifice she and her contemporaries had to make for their art and their activism in the Movement at that time.  
Well there was a woman that she dearly, dearly loved and I don’t know why that relationship didn’t work out; that person is known for being really smart and I think that the reason she and Nemiroff stayed connected on a sort of intellectual level — and I won’t say just intellectual, he helped take care of her even after they separated, and helped manage her financial things and he, of course, produced The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window — but I think she was looking for someone who was challenging intellectually as well as someone she just loved as well, that’s the sense I get from her papers. But she did seem to be lonely a lot. But I like to provide this caveat that these are her private journals, and I’m sure we’ve all had pity party weeks where if you were to write it down it might seem like, ‘Oh my gosh!’
Watching this documentary and thinking about, say, having read Octavia Butler’s personal journals — which were exhibited last summer at the Huntington Library — that, here again is a great writer, but love — or at least romantic love — alludes her.
I think it’s very challenging to be an African American writer. There’s a quote at the end of the film with James Baldwin saying: “Every artist, every writer under the hammer, but the black writer lives under something much worse — the strain can kill you.” Because there are people who are good at words, they’re called upon to be spokespeople. To write, as you know, you have to sit there; you have to be by yourself and be productive. The phone rings—and nowadays we have email and other things to interrupt us — with: &#8220;Can you do this? Can you do that?&#8221; And I think there’s this tug between knowing you can eventually convince people or sway an audience or rally the troops with your words and sitting down and trying to get what’s in your head out. I think it’s a challenge, and love — it’s hard to fit in everything in a life.
And speaking of sway, Baldwin once said that Lorraine Hansberry could get through to anyone except for Bobby Kennedy, who was attorney general to JFK. You highlight that critical meeting in 1963 in your film, and it really is one of the more tugging, dramatic scenes of the documentary.
I’m so glad you felt that way because we really did try to make that moment that way. Without saying it explicitly, that’s part of our story. Here she was, a chance to speak as close to the president as it can get, and here’s this hyper-verbal lady and she can’t get through. Can you imagine — and Margaret Wilkerson said this in one of the two interviews we did with her, but it’s not in the film — thinking you’re going to climb a hill, but it’s a mountain?
&nbsp;
<h6>Header image: Lorraine Hansberry wearing scarf and sunglasses sits in red car. Frame grab from home movie. Courtesy of Lorraine Hansberry Properties Trust.</h6>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/lorraine-hansberry-sighted-eyes-feeling-heart-talking-filmmaker-tracy-heather-strain/"></div>

Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart — Talking to Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain

Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart — Talking to Filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain

phoebe-robinson

youcanttouchmyhair

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/receipts-interview-phoebe-robinson/"></div>By <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/janice-rhoshalle-littlejohn">Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn</a>
Amid the swell of white noise from the chattering, packed, standing-room only crowd of diverse hipsters at Skylight Books awaiting Phoebe Robinson, a conversation between two women sitting in the row behind me stands out — though it took no effort to eavesdrop. “Phoebe’s saving my life right now,” one stridently said. “Yeah, she tells it like it is,” the other replied, “like how you’d talk to your best friend.” <a href="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/receipts-interview-phoebe-robinson/#more-2455" class="more-link">Read more</a>
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/events/receipts-interview-phoebe-robinson/"></div>

We Have the Receipts: An Interview with Phoebe Robinson

Lajja Mistry is a multimedia journalist from India. She received her master’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California. Her work is mainly focused on stories about culture, gender, and the South Asian experience. She is interested in features, profiles, and long-form visual narratives. She is also an avid photographer and is the photo-social editor for Annenberg Media, where she is a regular contributor. Her work has also been featured in the Los Angeles Times and Ampersand.

Lajja Mistry

Madeleine Schulz is an Australian-born, Los Angeles–based writer (with a few stops in between). She has a BA in English with a politics minor from King’s College London. She has a dual master’s degree in global media and communications from USC and interns at and writes for&nbsp;Flaunt&nbsp;magazine.&nbsp;

Madeleine Schulz

Haley Griffin received her master’s degree from the University of Southern California, studying Specialized Journalism: The Arts. Earning both a scholarship and fellowship, Griffin worked under the advisement of Professor Su Jung Kim as her personal research assistant. Additionally, Griffin is the music editor and a contributing writer to the university’s arts magazine, Ampersand LA.&nbsp;

Haley Griffin

Cat Moore is the director of belonging at the University of Southern California and an award-winning innovation fellow disrupting a national loneliness crisis. She’s also a speaker, writer, and consultant across sectors, partnering with leaders to create their own belonging ecosystems that prioritize people over profit.

Cat Moore

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn is the 2022 L.A. Press Club SoCal Journalism Awards (Race &amp; Society) finalist for her LMU Magazine article “Crowning Achievement,” highlighting the issues Black people face in the workplace for wearing naturally textured hairstyles. The previous year, Janice was selected as a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation 2021 Summer Writers Nonfiction Fellow. A former columnist for the Associated Press, Janice has been published in more than 60 consumer and trade publications including the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, Shondaland, Essence, EMMY, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she was a senior editor and director of special projects. In addition to her work in journalism, Janice is an author, editor, screenwriter, and social justice advocate. She is an alumna of Loyola Marymount University and the University of Southern California where she received an MA. She’s currently the associate director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC where she is also an adjunct instructor at the Annenberg School’s Specialized Journalism graduate program.

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

At Home in Los Angeles

"We all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top." — Hunter S. Thompson

Food & Drink

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency." — Virginia Woolf

Memoir &amp; Essay

Young, Restless, Gifted, and Black: Exploring the Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry with Imani Perry

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn

Biography &amp; Autobiography

“Don’t Take Away the Flavor”: Exploring the Here and Now of L.A. with Lynell George

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

“I Didn’t Live a Manageable Life”: A Conversation with Imani Tolliver

"I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry." — John Cage

Poetry

Wade in the Water: An Interview with Monica A. Coleman

"You always admire what you really don't understand."
— Blaise Pascal

Religion

Make ’Em Laugh

The Personal is Political: A Conversation on Race, Love, and “Loving”

"There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education." — Will Rogers

Film

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil

Cultural Studies

<h4>Ron Arias is the author of The Road to Tamazunchale, The Wetback and Other Stories, and several non-fiction books, including Five Against the Sea , Healing from the Heart with Dr. Mehmet Oz, Moving Target: A Memoir of Pursuit, and White s Rules: Saving Our Youth One Kid at a Time with Paul D. White. He lives with his wife in Hermosa Beach, California.</h4>

Ron Arias

<h4>Tom Lutz is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His latest book is&nbsp;<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Born-Slippy-Tom-Lutz/dp/1912248646/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=born+slippy&amp;qid=1574435254&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Born Slippy: A Novel.</a></h4>
For more, go to <a href="https://www.tomlutzwriter.com/">tomlutzwriter.com</a>

&nbsp;

Tom Lutz

Laurie Winer is a Los Angeles Review of Books founding editor.

Laurie Winer

Radio Hour: Ron Arias "The Wetback and Other Stories" plus Monica Coleman's "Bipolar Faith"

Evan Kindley is senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.

Evan Kindley

Radio Hour: Evan Kindley and Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn

Equal Means Equal: A Wake-Up Call to Women

Beyond Blackness and Whiteness: Activists of Mixed Race Speak Out

"Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." —Woody Allen

Television

Dear Hollywood (White) People: Let Rumi Be Brown

Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn is the 2022 L.A. Press Club SoCal Journalism Awards (Race &amp; Society) finalist for her LMU Magazine article “Crowning Achievement,” highlighting the issues Black people face in the workplace for wearing naturally textured hairstyles. The previous year, Janice was selected as a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation 2021 Summer Writers Nonfiction Fellow. A former columnist for the Associated Press, Janice has been published in more than 60 consumer and trade publications including the Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, Shondaland, Essence, EMMY, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she was a senior editor and director of special projects. In addition to her work in journalism, Janice is an author, editor, screenwriter, and social justice advocate. She is an alumna of Loyola Marymount University and the University of Southern California where she received an MA. She’s currently the associate director of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC where she is also an adjunct instructor at the Annenberg School’s Specialized Journalism graduate program.