African/American: Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs and the American Civil Rights Movement.

Many scholars, including Margaret B. Wilkerson, note that Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American playwright to explore, in her final work, Les Blancs, the African quest for freedom from European colonialists. Hansberry studied African history and read about uprisings in Kenya and other African nations before beginning Les Blancs to create a work that is obviously a well-informed examination of events in Africa. However, despite the play's inherent Africanness, readers must remember that it was written by an African American for an American audience. In this context, it is possible to view the play both as a condemnation of colonialism in Africa and, on another level, as a commentary on race relations in early 1960s America.

Frustrated by the inefficacy of one-sided "conversation" with representatives of the dominant ideology, both the Africans within the play and African Americans in Hansberry's society were being provoked to action. Hansberry held strong beliefs about the means by which African Americans should attain their civil rights, and these beliefs surface in the situations and characters depicted in Les Blancs. The play's setting, the fictitious African nation of Zatembe, provided Hansberry a safe distance from which she could critique American civil rights leaders' strategies and philosophies and allowed her a way to express her belief that the "ultimate destiny and aspirations of the African people and twenty million American Negroes are inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever" ("Negro Writer" 6).

Critical discussions of a text's meaning sometimes take into consideration authorial intent as well as the historical context in which the text was produced. The story of Les Blancs' creation is as complex as the play itself. Hansberry began writing it in 1960, creating several drafts but leaving the play unfinished at her death in 1965. Her literary executor and former husband, Robert Nemiroff, drawing on notes and detailed conversations he had with Hansberry before her death, completed another "preliminary draft" in 1966, and the play was first produced in New York in 1970. Nemiroff continued to edit the text until the publication of a revised edition in 1983. Determining authorship and authorial intention behind this play, which explores racial tensions, is a difficult process which is further complicated by the fact that Hansberry was an African-American woman, Nemiroff a white man. It may be impossible to know how much of Les Blancs in its present state was Hansberry's creation, and how much her original intent may have been changed, consciously or not, by Nemiroff's work.

What is known, however, is Hansberry's determination to use her work as an agent of social change. Speaking at a conference in 1959, Hansberry proclaimed that African-American writers must "address [them]selves to [any] dispute" about the" fundamental questions of society and the individual" ("Negro Writer" 3). Hansberry entered such a dispute when she wrote and titled Les Blancs ("The Whites," originally subtitled "The Holy Ones") in "immediate visceral response" (Nemiroff 32) to Jean Genet's Les Negres ("The Blacks: A Clown Show"), a play that examines black attainment of power and concludes that empowered blacks would be as susceptible to corruption as ruling whites are. Hansberry considered Genet's play "a conversation between white men about themselves," and, according to Nemiroff, she wished to write a play in which people of all ethnicities were equal participants in a much-needed "dialogue... whose purpose is neither procrastination nor ego fulfillment but clarity, and whose culminating point is actio n" ("Critical Background" 32-33).

The result is the story of Tshembe Matoseh, a young African man who returns home from his comfortable life in Europe to bury his father only to find that tensions between native Africans and European settlers in his homeland are explosive. Tshembe resists attempts to enlist him in the fight against European rule, but ultimately finds he cannot deny his responsibility to his people and to the cause of freedom. His decision is clearly a painful one, complicated by his tangled relationships with Africans and Europeans and by the interplay of the African and European within himself. In describing Tshembe's difficulties, Hansberry illuminates the struggle of all Africans and African Americans to obtain a measure of freedom.

Hansberry's exploration of Tshembe Matoseh's quandary was not without its critics:

I wonder how much Miss Hansberry knew or Mr. Nemiroff really knows about Africa? I think they were using Africa as an allegory of America .... It is obvious that they are trying to tell us something about America--and I think they would have done better to have told it to us straight. (48)

So wrote the New York Times' Clive Barnes in his review of the original Broadway production of Les Blancs on November 16, 1970. His question illustrates his own lack of knowledge about the playwright, for in fact Hansberry studied Africa and its struggles for independence in depth. Nemiroff writes that the playwright "was a voracious reader of everything in African studies she could lay her hands on," including Jomo Kenyatta's Facing Mt. Kenya, from which she adapted the fable of the hyenas and the elephants told in Les Blancs (28). Hansberry was a supporter of Kenyatta, the leader of the Kenyan "Mau Mau" uprising, and based at least some of the events and characters in the play on actual events in Kenya. Anne Cheney notes that Amos Kumalo, the leader of the resistance movement in Zatembe, "resembles" Kenyatta, who, like the character, studied in London for several years before returning to Kenya to lead the revolt (105). Cheney also argues that Tshembe is a "younger version of Kumalo/Kenyatta" : Like the cha racter and its model, Tshembe is intelligent, European-educated, married to a white woman, and ultimately drawn back to Africa (105).

In his book Hansberr's Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity, Steven Carter illuminates another tie to African history in Les Blancs. Hansberry, he claims, "expos[es]... the underside of [Albert] Schweitzer's mission at Lambarene through the portrayal of a similar mission by her character Rev. Torvald Neilsen" (114). Schweitzer has long been seen as a model of self-sacrifice, but Hansberry, after reading John Gunther's biography of the missionary, apparently came to a far different conclusion: that Schweitzer caused far more harm than good to the natives he purported to serve (115). Carter notes several parallels between Schweitzer and Neilsen, including a patriarchal--even contemptuous--attitude toward native Africans (113-14). Schweitzer, according to Gunther, believed that "'the Negro is a child'" (qtd. in Carter 114). Similarly, Hansberry's Reverend Neilsen, as Carter observes, condescendingly dismisses his people's desire for self-rule with a smile, saying, "Children, children...my dear children...go home to your huts! Go home to your huts before you make me angry. Independence indeed!" (Les Blancs 115). Hansberry's appropriation of Schweitzer's failings in the character of Reverend Neilsen underscores the increasing frustration of the native Africans in Les Blancs and sets the stage for their attempt at revolution, an attempt that mirrored events in several African nations.

Although Barnes was mistaken about Hansberry's level of knowledge about Africa, his basic point is well taken; the playwright may, indeed, have been trying to tell her audience something about America. Les Blancs is, as I have illustrated, a thoroughly African play that contains few references to the United States and only one American character. Those references to America Hansberry does include make powerful allegations about the state of American "civilization." Tshembe Matoseh, in response to questions from character Charlie Morris, an American journalist, wonders at the "marvelous nonsense" of Americans who think that "for a handshake, a grin, a cigarette and half a glass of whiskey...three hundred years [will] disappear--and in five minutes" (74). Later, Tshembe and Morris debate the usefulness of the concept of racism as a means of explanation for the events in Africa. Tshembe contends that

racism is a device that, of itself, explains nothing ... but it also has consequences.... you and I may recognize the fraudulence of the device, but the fact remains that a man ... who is shot in Zatembe or Mississippi because he is black is suffering the utter reality of the device. And it is pointless to pretend that it doesn't exist--merely because it is a lie! (92) In an attempt to deflate Morris's sense of superiority, Tshembe parallels natives' experiences in Zatembe with the black experience in America, demonstrating that the "device" of racism, so useful in the subjugation of blacks in a white power structure, is hardly unique to Africa.

Hansberry, then, drew few explicit parallels between the action of Les Blancs and the struggle of African Americans, yet it was clear even to Clive Barnes, who intensely disliked the play, that she was making a statement about America. Another critic concurs with Barnes's assessment of the play as, in part, a commentary about America: Philip Uko Effiong, in "History, Myth, and Revolt in Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs," posits that the play "raises thought-provoking questions about history, Africa, America, anger, and confrontation." Effiong further articulates the correspondences between Africa and America by noting that "the overdue African resistance [in the play] jolts the whites, who cannot comprehend the people's decision to overcome docility. just as America's white population was startled by the 1960s Civil Rights Movement" (280).

This connection between Africans and African Americans is key to an alternative reading of Les Blancs as a political and philosophical commentary on the emerging American Civil Rights Movement. That the politically active Hansberry was aware of the movement's aims and personalities is unquestionable; according to Carter, the playwright was involved in the movement as early as 1950 and by 1962 had expressed support for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) (ix). Hansberry began her career as a writer and editor for Paul Robeson's radical Harlem newspaper Freedom, for which she wrote pieces condemning racism in America and European colonialism in Ghana and Egypt, in 1951 (Keppel 188-89). In a Freedom article supportive of Ghana's fight against colonialism, Hansberry articulated her belief in the connection between Africans and African Americans by arguing that Ghanaians "'clearly see their struggles and victories in connection with black folk on the rest of their continent as well as in the Unit ed States' " (qtd. in Keppel 189-90).

Hansberry's public support of freedom movements in Africa and America, and the connections she sees between them, support the idea that Les Blancs is in part a statement about America. This reading, however, should not be seen as a negation of the play's statement against colonialist rule in Africa, but as a means of extending that statement to American society and examining ways in which Hansberry may have sought to reconcile often divergent philosophies within the American Civil Rights Movement.

These philosophies also diverge within the main character of Les Blancs, Tshembe Matoseh. Many critics have noted similarities between Tshembe and Shakespeare's Hamlet. Among these similarities, asserts Carter, is that "both Hamlet and Tshembe take a long time to perform their duties," because they "have ... great difficulty determining what their commitments are and how they should be performed" (103). Like Hamlet, who knows life would be easier should he abandon his responsibility to his father and his people, Tshembe initially resists attempts to engage him in the fight for Zatembe's liberation, instead "long[ing] to be in a dim little flat off Langley Square, watching the telly" with his European wife and their child (Les Blancs 79). Pursued by the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit, an African woman who wordlessly urges him to fight, Tshembe attempts to deny his destiny: "NO! I WILL NOT GO! It is not my affair anymore! . . . I don't care what happens here-anywhere! I am not responsible! It is not my affair!" (81). Ultimately, however, Tshembe must surrender to the persistent spirit who, he says, "gaze[s] up at me from puddles in the streets of London; from vending machines in the New York subway. Everywhere. And whenever I cursed her or sought to throw her off. . . I ended up that same night in her arms!" (80).

Tshembe's reluctance to lead his people, and his concern for his family, are mirrored in David J. Garrow's description of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s struggle with the mantle of leadership thrust upon him during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1956. King, according to Garrow, "had not wanted to be the focal point of the protest," and argued that "he as an individual was not crucial" to it (56). King later recounted the difficulties of a particularly troubling evening during the protest, during which he had received several threatening phone calls:

"I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born.... And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted, and loyal wife who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me or I could be taken from her. And I got to the point that I couldn't take it any longer. I was weak." (qtd. in Garrow 58)

Like Hamlet and Tshembe, King was ultimately unable to deny his sense of responsibility to those who demanded his leadership, and he also surrendered to a spirit at work within him: "'I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world" ' " (qtd. in Garrow 58). King and Tshembe coura-Geously--albeit reluctantly--accept the roles of revolutionary leaders.

In one sense, then, Tshembe Matoseh reflects Hansberry's admiration for those like King who, despite great personal risk, resolve to guide their people in the struggle for liberation from oppression. Hansberry's support of King's philosophy and strategies, however, was not wholehearted, as the playwright demonstrates through the religious attitudes of Tshembe and his brother Abioseh, a Roman Catholic preparing to enter the priesthood. Abioseh rejects the religion of his father and brothers in an attempt to work his way into the power structure he believes will ultimately rule his country. He assumes European involvement in Zatembe to be inevitable, as will be the inclusion of native Africans in the government: "The West will compromise because they must....And then, my brother, it will be our time! Black men will sit beside the settlers. Black magistrates, black ministers, black officers!" (Les Blancs 110). Tshembe is incredulous at what he sees as his brother's naivete and accuses Abioseh of selling his soul to the enemy, becoming a member of a "cult... which kept the watchfires of our oppressors for three centuries" (61-62).

the Christian church returned to Africa under the banner of the Cross--conquering, killing, exploiting, pillaging. raping, bullying, beating--and teaching white supremacy.... The black man needs to reflect t hat he has been America's most fervent Christian--and where has it gotten him? (374-75)

This distrust of the dominant religious structure mirrors developments in the American Civil Rights Movement. Although the Movement's origins and support were rooted in black churches, the ideology presented within those churches was European, not African, in origin. Hansberry's representation of Abioseh's misplaced faith in the power of the church to promote equality may in part reflect some American activists' growing unhappiness with the presence of religion in the battle for civil rights. As Clayborne Carson notes, the SNCC eventually "moved from [King's] conventional liberalism toward their own distinctive radicalism, which was more secular ... than King's Christian Gandhianism" (118). Perhaps the most vehement condemnation of Christianity was issued by Malcolm X, who argued in his Autobiography that

Hansberry herself believed religion was a crutch, a means by which humans can create answers to as yet unanswered questions (To Be Young 195-97), and this belief is reflected in her near-dismissal of both Christianity and the native religion of Zatembe in Les Blancs. Preparing for his father's funeral, Tshembe dresses in traditional clothing and paints his face with yellow ochre, rituals in which he admits he does not believe. He is willing to enact these rituals out of respect for the traditions of his father, however, and condemns Abioseh for abandoning them. For Tshembe the impious remembrance of native traditions and beliefs is far less offensive than Abioseh's appropriation of European religion, which he likens to the selling of his brother's soul, a priestly robe the receipt (Les Blancs 62). Tshembe's attitude toward Christianity, then, aligns Hansberry with those who were uneasy with its often prominent place in the Civil Rights Movement.

Another aspect of the Movement with which Hansberry seems to have been uneasy was King's strict adherence to nonviolence. In a letter to one of her readers, the playwright sees King's movement "as a reflection of the sense of tactical reality which a desperate people constantly demonstrate," and argues that many African Americans, herself included, "have no illusion that it is enough" (To Be Young 221). Hansberry believed instead that

Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. ... they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps--and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. (222)

This philosophy closely corresponds with Malcolm X's exhortation to fight racism "by any means necessary" (373), a maxim Hansberry includes in a key scene in which Tshembe must decide whether to lead the revolutionary forces. He is initially reluctant to embrace violence as a catalyst for change, even informing the spirit that haunts him that he has "renounced all spears" (Les Blancs 81). He places his hopes for peace on his former mentor, Amos Kumalo. Kumalo's attempt to negotiate with the Europeans, however, ends in his arrest and imprisonment, and Tshembe resigns himself to the fact that violence is the only means of communication their oppressors have left open to the revolutionaries of Zatembe. When he finds that Abioseh has betrayed their kinsman Ngago, a leader in the liberation movement, Tshembe knows he must kill his brother to ensure his own safety and the success of the movement. Tshembe's choice illustrates the level of sacrifice Hansberry believed was needed for true change to occur and demonstra tes the profound commitment she brought to the idea of liberation.

Hansberry's acceptance of the necessity of violence, however, does not signal her complete support of Malcolm X and his philosophies; the two sharply diverged on the issue of white involvement in the cause of liberation. Malcolm, before his conversion from the Black Muslims to a more traditional sect of Islam, regarded all whites as "blue-eyed devils" bent on the destruction of African Americans. Hansberry, however, did not "blindly worship one group to indict another" (Haley 279) and believed modem Africans and African Americans are bound not only to each other but also, inextricably, to Europeans. Hansberry demonstrates this belief by filling the play with characters who are socially, biologically, and spiritually tied to European traditions, and she uses these links to illustrate the difficulties faced by her African characters and their African-American counterparts. In Les Blancs, the European (and thus the American) is not evil solely on the basis of his or her nationality. Madame Neilsen is one such sy mpathetic character; her friendship with Tshembe and his family is genuine, as is her love for her adopted home of Zatembe.

In addition to the presence of complex and often sympathetic European characters such as Madame Neilsen, the spirit that haunts Tshembe and urges him to fight for his people's liberation is underscored by European history. "When you knew her," Tshembe explains of the spirit to Charlie, "you called her Joan of Arc! Queen Esther! La Pasionara! And you did know her once, you did know her!" The revolutionary spirit that draws Tshembe home has its roots in European culture, a connection Charlie misses because that spirit "is dead now for [Europeans]" (Les Blancs 81), who have become so ensconced in positions of power they have forgotten the concept of revolution.

Many white Americans shared this lack of understanding of the necessity of revolution during the Civil Rights era. For them, the fight for liberation ended nearly two hundred years before with the nation's independence from England. Hansberry argued in 1959 that many Americans were not only blind to African-American disenchantment, they labored under several illusions set forth in popular culture, among them that "people are white. Negroes do not exist" ("Negro Writer" 4). Constantly fed these illusions, many whites failed to see that, as the playwright argued, "our people ... languish under privation and hatred and brutality and political oppression in every state of the forty-eight" (10). Little Rock Gazette editor Harry Ashmore, describing the early days of the Civil Rights Movement in the oral-history anthology Voices of Freedom, agrees:

Most people were not recognizing the depth of this [impending struggle]. They were still whistling, they were pretending there's nothing really going on, the black people are satisfied with what they've got, the system's working. (qtd. in Hampton xxvi)

That the system wasn't working became apparent in the United States with increasing protest activity on the part of African Americans, including the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 and the March on Washington in 1963.

Despite the dominant society's ignorance, willful or not, of African and African-American dissatisfaction, Hansberry refuses to issue a blanket condemnation of that society. She focuses instead on illustrating the complexities that inevitably occur when two vastly different cultures--and ideologies--confront one another.

Hansberry demonstrates the intricacies of the relationship between Africans and Europeans in Les Blancs as Tshembe realizes his people's need for revolution and decides to fight for his homeland, yet still cannot bring himself to denounce all things European. He has been educated in the West and is married to a European woman with whom he has a child; his brother Eric is half-European; and Madame Neilsen, Reverend Neilsen's wife, is a maternal figure to the brothers. Pressed by American reporter Charlie Morris, Tshembe refuses to become a stereotype: "I shall be honest with you, Mr. Morris. I do not 'hate' all white men--but I desperately wish that I did. It would make everything infinitely easier!" (Les Blancs 78). Indeed, as Carter notes, Tshembe reveals his admiration for Europe to Madame Neilsen as he says that "Europe--in spite of all her crimes--has been a great and glorious star in the night. Other stars shone before it--and will again with it" (125).

Hansberry, too, found much to admire in the society that oppressed her people, opining that America is "a great nation with certain beautiful and indestructible traditions and potentials which can be seized by all of us who possess imagination and love of man. There is ... a great deal to be fought in America--but, at the same time, there is so much which begs to be but reaffirmed and cherished with sweet defiance" (To Be Young 129- 30). The playwright, although writing about ethnic conflict in Les Blancs, refuses to surrender the discussion of Zatembe or America to binary oppositions of black and white, good and evil.

One character in Les Blancs who embodies the complexity of Hansberry's viewpoint is Madame Neilsen, a European who embraces African tradition. She has spent the better part of her life in Zatembe, and she has developed an affection for both the land and its native people that even her husband, who purportedly serves them, has not. She is a maternal figure to Tshembe and was a friend of his mother, Aquah, from whom she learned the pattern of the tribal drums. Madame Neilsen considers Zatembe her home and understands that revolution is inevitable; she urges Tshembe to do his part despite the fact that, as a symbol of colonialism in Zatembe, she will most likely fall victim to the revolutionary forces.

Madame Neilsen can be interpreted as representative of many white liberals who supported the work of the American Civil Rights Movement. Her sincere interest in and support for the freedom movement in Zatembe echoes the commitment of white liberals in the United States, a commitment that Hansberry noted in a 1964 forum titled "The Black Revolution and the White Backlash":

We have a very great tradition of white radicalism in the United States, and I've never heard Negroes boo the name of John Brown.... Some of the first people who have died so far in this struggle have been white men and I for one would be prepared to accept the leadership of the person who gives that much devotion. (8)

The possibility of true devotion on the part of whites to the cause of liberation, however, does not preclude the possibility that the "blue-eyed devil" might exist. Tshembe's youngest brother Eric is the product of an unholy European and African union, the result of his mother's rape by a colonizer, Major Rice. Although Rice, like Madame Neilsen, considers Zatembe his home, his connection to the land has not developed through balanced relationships with its people, but from a sense of entitlement: "This is my country, you see. I came here when I was a boy. ... Men like myself had the ambition, the energy, and the ability to come here and make this country into something. They had it for centuries and did nothing with it" (Les Blancs 71). Rice's disdain and lack of understanding for those who can legitimately claim Zatembe as their spiritual home illustrates his privileged position as one who, by virtue of his status as a white man, may claim a home anywhere he chooses. Because he is a European, Rice believes himself superior to those he rules, and this superiority allows him to make a home in the midst of a community filled with people he neither understands nor respects.

For Tshembe, however, the idea of "home" is a far more complicated one. He is well-educated, reasonably wealthy, and, to an extent, Europeanized; as he notes to Madame Neilsen, "It seems your mountains have become mine." Still, Tshembe cannot deny his status as a citizen of Zatembe: He attempts to maintain the appearance of his father's religious rituals, spars with Morris and Rice about a newly imposed curfew for natives, and berates his brothers for referring to freedom fighters as terrorists. Nonetheless, he is reluctant to involve himself in the country's internal struggles more fully. Tshembe's status as a man without a true home is confirmed when he is pressed by Madame Neilsen about whether, indeed, Europe is now his home. Tshembe replies, "I think so. I thought so. I no longer know" (126).

Eric's status as a person of mixed European and African heritage continues this theme of uncertainty and uneasiness within the play. Eric more readily identifies with his African heritage, undoubtedly due to his rejection at the hands of the Europeans: His mother was left to die in childbirth by the man who established the mission, the saintly Reverend Neilsen. As Madame Neilsen explains to Tshembe, "To [Reverend Neilsen] it was clear: the child was the product of an evil act, a sin against God's order, the natural separation of the races" (152). At the same time, Eric finds comfort and kindness in the attention of European doctor Willy DeKoven--but even that relationship is a destructive one, as DeKoven supplies Eric with alcohol. Eric is the physical embodiment of Tshembe's struggle; he must decide which part of himself--the European or the African--he will fight for. When Eric announces he is joining the revolution, Tshembe demands of him, "Which part of yourself will you drive into the sea?" (107).

Each of these characters is caught between two worlds, neither fully African nor fully European. Their experiences mirror those of African Americans who, generations removed from their homeland, are not at "home" in Africa or in an America that is often sharply divided along ethnic lines. African Americans, particularly those like Hansberry who were born into the middle class, have no means of claiming a spiritual home. Hansberry's family was forced to live in the ghettoes of Chicago's South Side despite their relative wealth, and Hansberry was often ostracized by poorer classmates; as a child she was attacked for wearing a white fur coat to school during the Depression (To Be Young 63). Hansberry's apparent privilege, however, did not enable her to become part of the dominant white culture even after her family moved into an all-white neighborhood several years later--an experience she would in part recount in her first dramatic work, A Raisin in the Sun.

The divisions between white America and African Americans were more apparent in the early 1960s when Les Blancs was being written, but their continuing existence is confirmed by audience and critical reaction to the play in 1970, when it was first produced. Robert Nemiroff describes the extreme reactions to the play:"...to read the reviews...was almost to come away with the feeling that the critics had attended different plays--or, in any event, had come out marching to the sound of quite different (Congo) drummers" (131).

Part of the disparity of opinion about the play no doubt resulted from varying interpretations of its ending. In the final scenes of Les Blancs, the audience learns that Reverend Neilsen has been killed by resistance fighters and sees Tshembe kill his traitorous brother Abioseh within the walls of the mission. Tshembe is now committed to leading the revolution. His commitment is encouraged by Madame Neilsen, who tells him Zatembe "needs warriors" just before she is shot and killed and Eric tosses a grenade into the mission, destroying it (Les Blancs 126). Some critics, including Variety's Hobe Morrison, viewed this ending as a call to genocide. Morrison wrote that the "conclusion seems to boil down to ...revolution and the ghetto slogan, 'kill whitey' "(qtd. in Nemiroff 133). Another reviewer, John Simon, argued that the play "does its utmost to justify the slaughter of whites by blacks" (qtd. in Nemiroff 131).

These interpretations, however, have been discounted by subsequent critics, including Margaret Wilkerson, who argues that in Les Blancs Hansberry "does not advocate violent revolution, but uses the theatre as a medium for a passionate encounter with the consequences of our heroic as well as our foolish actions" (13). For Tshembe this "passionate encounter" brings despair: As he holds the dying Madame Neilsen, Tshembe "sinks to the ground, gently sets her body beside that of [Abioseh] and, in his anguish, throws back his head and emits an animal-like cry of grief" (Les Blancs 128). His tormented reaction to the death of a European woman (indeed, the wife of the man who oppressed and belittled the people of Zatembe) would seem to negate the idea that the play endorses the genocide of Europeans. Hansberry takes great pains to demonstrate the complexities of the situation in Zatembe; it is unlikely she would abandon these complexities to, as Morrison put it, "boil [the play] down" to the rather simplistic solutio n of killing all whites.

Furthermore, Hansberry was both a realist and an optimist, viewing the world with what she described as "sighted eyes and feeling heart" ("Negro Writer" 12). As Wilkerson argues, "Hansberry's 'sighted eyes' forced her to confront fully the depravity, cruelty, and utter foolishness of men's actions, but her 'feeling heart' would not allow her to lose faith in humanity's potential for overcoming its own barbarity" (10). Just as Hansberry refused to surrender the dialogue between those of different ethnicities to binary oppositions, she rejected the notion that humans were doomed to destroy, rather than communicate with, one another. She believed "the human race does command its own destiny and that destiny can eventually embrace the stars" ("Negro Writer" 12), further supporting the idea that Les Blancs' conclusion is not one that advocates genocide.

Besides sparking debate as to its meaning, the play's conclusion also demonstrated ideological divisions in American attitudes toward the Civil Rights Movement. African-American critic Clayton Riley addressed some of these divisions in his New York Times review. Les Blancs, he wrote, polarize[d] an opening night audience into separate camps, not so much camps of color, of Black and White, although that, too, was part of it. The play divides people into sectors inhabited on the one hand by those who recognize clearly that a struggle exists in the world today that is about the liberation of oppressed peoples, a struggle to be supported at all costs. In the other camp live those who still accept as real the soothing mythology that oppression can be dealt with reasonably--particularly by Black people--if Blacks will just bear in mind the value of polite, calm and continuing use of the democratic process. (3)

Riley's interpretation of the audience's response indicates the play's reception as a statement about an America in the throes of the Civil Rights era. The "camps" within the audience to which Riley refers could just as easily refer to factions within the Civil Rights Movement and within America as a whole: those who did not understand African Americans' call for equal rights, those who advocated patient nonviolence, those who believed in immediate forceful revolution, and those who felt myriad different degrees among the three.

Another explanation for such diverse reactions to Les Blancs may be that the audience was unprepared for such a radical statement from the author of the popular but often misunderstood A Raisin in the Sun, which was Hansberry's most well-known work. In Raisin, Hansberry explores the trials of an African-American family in Chicago who must decide how to spend an insurance settlement after the death of the father. Family matriarch Lena Younger wants to move from the ghetto to an all-white neighborhood against the wishes of her son, Walter Lee, who argues the family should buy a liquor store. Walter Lee soon loses a large portion of the money, and a man from the white neighborhood offers the family a payoff to stay away. Although Walter Lee struggles with the decision, at the play's close the family prepares to move into their new home in the white neighborhood.

Many audiences interpreted this outcome as a "happy ending," but Ben Keppel, in The Work of Democracy, argues that this was not "the script Hansberry believed she had written" (202). The playwright witnessed firsthand the mixed results of working within the system to enact reform when her father fought a court battle to move his family to a white neighborhood. Although he won in court, the neighborhood's reaction was hostile: A brick thrown through the Hansberrys' window barely missed Lorraine, and her mother spent at least one evening "patrolling [the] house all night with a loaded German luger, doggedly guarding her four children" (To Be Young 51). Hansberry's father, embittered by the experience, later planned to move the family to Mexico, where "for the first time in his life he felt very free"- but he died before he could complete arrangements for the move (Cheney 8). Lorraine Hansberry understood that the Younger family's struggles were just beginning, but, as Keppel notes, "the critical establishment o f 1959 read Hansberry's text as fundamentally a confirmation of, rather than a challenge to, the American ethos" (202). This widespread misinterpretation of Raisin, according to Keppel, led Hansberry to write Les Blancs, a play she "envisioned as [its] successor" (216).

This assertion, and the reading of Les Blancs I have outlined, prompt a question: If Hansberry intended the play as a successor to Raisin, or even as a more general statement on American race relations, why set the action and characters in a fictional African nation? Why, as Barnes asks, didn't Hansberry "tell it to us straight"?

It is possible that Hansberry uses an African setting as a means of providing her a comfortable distance from which to critique the strategies and philosophies of popular Civil Rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Hansberry was painfully aware of the possibility of misinterpretation of her texts (as Keppel illustrates with Raisin) and of her philosophical statements. She was once misquoted as saying she was "not a Negro writer--but a writer who happens to be a Negro," a statement that continues to be reprinted despite its obvious contradiction of Hansberry's lifelong belief that her ethnicity shaped her work in fundamental ways (Kaiser and Nemiroff 286-87). Perhaps wary that direct statements she made about race relations in America might be drastically misinterpreted as well, Hansberry may have sought to distance herself from that possibility by distancing herself, through the play's setting, from those she wished to criticize.

Another possible reason for the play's African setting is Hansberry's desire to demonstrate the similarities between African and AfricanAmerican struggles for equality. As Keppel notes, the African character in Raisin, Asagai, was considered outside the audience's realm of experience and "either ignored or devalued. One critic, for instance, dismissed the African subtheme as 'impotent chatter' " (Keppel 182). Hansberry may have been frustrated by this dismissal of what she deemed an important relationship; setting her next work in Africa would ensure that the African connection to her own society could not be ignored so easily.

Finally, Carter argues that Hansberry wished to combine African and European elements in her work in order to further her dramatic vision:

"Hansberry felt no compunction whatever about drawing upon the dramatic forms and traditions of all cultures to further the presentation of her own heroic social vision" (16). As previously noted, Hansberry drew on her knowledge of events and cultures in Africa (including tribal religion and folktales) and combined it with references to Hamlet and the Roman Catholic Church, among other European influences. The result is Tshembe Matoseh's struggle to determine which of his families and homelands is most deserving of his loyalty and to what extent he will give himself to the liberation movement that is erupting in Zatembe. It is the story of Africa's fight for independence and identity.

On another level, however, Les Blancs is also Lorraine Hansberry's "heroic social vision" of the African-American fight for civil rights, a battle with which the playwright was well-acquainted and deeply concerned. Hansberry's assertion that the lives of Africans and African Americans are "inextricably and magnificently bound up together forever" ("Negro Writer" 6) and her public and private writings about the American Civil Rights Movement underscore a reading of Les Blancs as a critique of that movement and its leaders. This reading of the play conforms with Hansberry's fervent support of the liberation of all people from oppression, and it offers her readers a means of exploring the very human connections between people of differing ethnicities and ideologies.

Joy L. Abell is a Writing Colleague in the Writing Center at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. She assists the Director with administrative duties, mentors peer consultants, and works one-on-one with students on their writing.

Works Cited

Barnes, Clive. Rev. of Les Blancs. New York Times 16 Nov. 1970: 48.

"The Black Revolution and the White Backlash." National Guardian 4 July 1964: 5--9.

Carson, Claybome. "Rethinking African-American Political Thought in the Post-Revolutionary Era." The Making of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. Ed. Brian Ward and Tony Badger. New York: New York UP, 1996. 115-27.

Carter, Steven. Hansberrys Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1991.

Cheney, Anne. Lorraine Hansberry. Twayne's United States Author Series 430. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

Effiong, Philip Uko. "History, Myth and Revolt in Lorraine Hansberry's Los Blancs." African American Review 32 (1998): 273-84.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Haley, Alex. "The Once and Future Vision of Lorraine Hansberry." Freedomways 19.4 (1979): 277-80.

Hampton, Henry, Steve Fayer, and Sarah Flynn, eds. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam, 1990.

Hansberry, Lorraine. Les Blancs. Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry. Ed. Robert Nemiroff. New York: Vintage, 1994. 49-172.

----. "The Negro Writer and His Roots: Toward a New Romanticism." Black Scholar l2.2 (1981): 2-12.

----. To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Adapted by Robert Nemiroff. New York: Penguin, 1969.

Kaiser, Ernest, and Robert Nemiroff. "A Lorraine Hansberry Bibliography." Freedom ways 19.4 (1979): 285-304.

Keppel, Ben. The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. With Alex Haley. New York: Grove P, 1965.

Nemiroff, Robert. "A Critical Background." Hansberry, Les Blanos 27-35.

Riley, Clayton. "A Black Critic on Les Blancs: An Incredibly Moving Experience." New York Times 29 Nov. 1970: 3+.

Wilkerson, Margaret. "The Sighted Eyes and Feeling Heart of Lorraine Hansberry." Black American Literature Forum 17 (1983): 8-13.