Dreams Deferred

As a sophomore in High School, I participated in a theatre group that toured local high schools performing classic Black American theatre pieces. At some point that year, we took up Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun. The title of the play is a nod to a poem written less than a decade earlier called “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, that depicts the idea of deferred dreams.

The short poem is filled with food analogies. The first, calls on raisins, the dried form of grapes. Grapes, and their inherent connection to wine, have an ancient history symbolizing, joy, abundance, fertility, and promise. I think that both Hansberry and Hughes looked at the deferment of dreams as a method by which one could sabotage what would have otherwise been a bountiful harvest, denying the immediate fruits of one's labor and the promise of future enjoyment.

Since High School, I've deferred many things in my life, waiting for the perfect time that never comes. In 2015, I sat on the bed of my closest friend and filled an orange spiral notebook with dreams of this food blog. It’s taken me eight years to build the confidence to do this. Over the next few weeks, I plan to publish my collection of food writing, photography, and video that have taken up far too much space in every phone I've owned in the last (almost) decade. My archive is not a collection of my best work. Instead, it documents the journey I had to take to begin. In this, I feel that I have gained a few valuable perspectives on deferred dreams.

If I were asked today, “What happens to Dreams Deferred”, I would say that dreams left unattended are like popsicles, Melting into the circumstances of our environments they often will look different when you return.

I’d suggest that life will defer dreams enough and that perhaps the goal of the dreamer, should be to remain in action.

Finally, I would say that dreams don’t require justification.

Back in that high school theater club, along with scripted works we studied the comedic genre of improvisation. In which there is an agreed rule of “yes… and”. This rule states that an improviser should almost always accept what another improviser has stated ("yes") and then expand on that idea("and"). The best parts of improv are when you are forced to abandon where you thought a plot was headed and elaborate on an idea that you never would have conceived. Dreams are often like improvisation, where we begin with a destination in mind, but along the way, encounter pivots that require a simple, “yes… and”.