The (Ir)Representability of the Belated Traumatic Wound in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

Abstract

The dissociation of the traumatic moment from memory makes articulating the traumatic experience problematic. Henceforth, trauma becomes an inexplicable wound that can be narrated in a myriad of ways, yet none of which has a closure. The traumatized subjects are in need for expressing their pain, especially that telling one’s story and finding witnesses to the experience is therapeutic in the case of trauma. Thus, writers strive to represent their personal trauma and/or their collective one through various techniques to convey the experience as authentically as possible. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is a remarkable endeavor to articulate the author’s own traumatic childhood experience, as well as the broader trauma of African American people who have suffered so long because of slavery and its aftermath. This paper argues that Hansberry’s A Raisin addresses trauma and represents it through four major techniques: the choice of drama as a genre, the mode of genuine realism, intertextuality, and symbolism. To realize this purpose, the study explores the play in light of the theoretical framework of trauma studies, starting from its outset with Freud’s essential concepts, and moving to Cathy Caruth’s and Shoshana Felman’s integral contributions to the field.