Track Mangoes

Exegesis on a poem by Hughes--

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

That which lesbians and straight women have in common, I feel, are those things which, I also feel, code female behavioral patterns most adeptly. Women, then, are like bakers when it comes to relationships. They like to spin a pastry of community and keep it warm.

Women are capable of a kind of intimacy that only gay men can even come close to understanding. It's an intimacy that revolves around chatting and polydrama. Their stunningly honed perceptive tools, a result of the fact that they Are smarter than men, become self defeating, often, leading to this pastry syndrome. The bun gets stickier, warmer, sweeter, until its frosted and dripping.

In "A Dream Deferred" Hughes reaches out to the male reader, a fellow suffering of the female travail. "What happens to a dream deferred?" he asks the reader in a mellow yet direct tone. In this way, the narrator winks at the reader with a male gaze as if to say You Know Just What Dream I Mean. It's the dream of love while maintaining autonomy. It's the dream of making two things, both incompatible, functional.

The narrator then begins to compare this dream to food items. Perhaps the dream looses all it's substance and possibility leaving behind the pathetic carcass of a "raisin in the sun." This desire, this dream, perhaps it freezes, more like sweet that crystallizes, dusted of dirt and gnats. Or perhaps it simply begins to go sour and stink. Either way the dream gets older and as it does it beings to deteriorate.

Time, for the narrator, increases the impossibility of the dream. The dream is self defeating, self destructive, like a maze with no exit.

And like a maze with no exit the poem ends exactly how it had started: with a question. The poem is cyclical, in that way, yet the final word cuts the reader off. The abruptness of the final word makes the last question mark feel like a slap in the face after one has been starring at something for an extended period of time. SLAP and then back to the begging. Men are Sisyphus and women are the rock that they must push up the hill, but women are also that force that makes his foot slip, the inertia that rolls the rock down the hill and the open sore after the rock has trampled the reader all together.

The contiguous desires for individuality and and the need for outside support In Order To achieve such autonomy negate one another. The poem circles around and at the beggining the reader realizes just what exactly Happens to that Dream Deffered: that is, the more it is deffered, which is all that can be done with it, the more it must Be deffered.

Maple syrup, when it gets old, crystallizes. It crusts over with sweetness. Women spin pastries of home and house and men are the raisins of these pastries, dried up in the dampness of the very womb from whence they came and where they desire to return.