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Essex Hemphill (1957 - 1995)
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 Ceremonies
: Prose and Poetry by
Essex Hemphill, Charles Nero (Introduction)
Ceremonies offers provocative commentary on
highly charged topics such as Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of
African-American men, feminism among men, and AIDS in the black
community.
"As a gay African American acutely aware
that he straddles two beleaguered subcultures all too frequently
themselves at odds, Hemphill--author of two previous volumes of
poetry and editor of the anthology Brother to Brother --strives to
bridge the gap in this collection of strongly felt, surely drafted
poems and essays. Often explicit, the poems range from hauntingly
erotic lyricism--``I am lonely for past kisses, for wild lips
certain streets breed for pleasure''--to the belyingly dulled
cadences of a dramatic monolog in the voice of a ``Colored nurse''
complicit in the notorious Tuskegee Institute syphilis
experiments. The essays also roam wide and deep. Whether Hemphill
is persuasively comparing the reasoning of a psychiatrist's
antihomosexual polemic to the soon-hollow rush of cocaine or
describing his grandmother's reaction to his poems--``Essex, do
the au thorities know what you're writing about?''--he makes
passionate common sense. This is urgent, fiercely telling
work." -- Thomas Tavis, San Francisco P.L.
"There are some extraordinary poems here.
'Family Jewels,' for instance, is concise and powerful, and
exemplifies one of Hemphill's most persistent themes: the outsider
confronting the dominant culture. . . . Hemphill is also capable
of producing love poems that, although quieter, are just as strong
as his overtly political pieces. 'Black Beans' extols lovemaking
as a means of surmounting the strain of economic hardship. . . .
The prose pieces--a mix of essays and memoirs--often mirror, or
expand upon, the themes of the poems. 'Miss Emily's Grandson Won't
Hush His Mouth' is a moving story about Hemphill coming out,
through his poetry, to his 85-year-old grandmother. . . . Some
readers, I am sure, will be disturbed by {Hemphill's} candor. But
this is exactly the kind of writing we need--it shakes you, wakes
you up." -- David Trinidad - Voice Literary
Supplement
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By Essex Hemphill
Excerpt:
Your powerful, sky-soaring, heart-piercing,
soul-stirring words will forever resonate with commitment,
integrity, and responsibility. Thank you for your poetry and
essays, woven as they were of courage and precision, love and
bravery. You gave us living, fire-breathing words capable of
healing, tearing down, building up, braving the long nights and
languishing days. You gave us words we could use wisely. Words we
could depend on. You gave us, simply, your life as a lesson to
guide our own lives through this maze of destitution and despair
that some would call a country, a nation, a home. You gave us
words to counteract the myths that would seduce us to our deaths.
You gave us words to bridge our differences and point us to a
collective power instead of a singular, selfish glory. You gave us
words to teach us how to define ourselves and love the persons we
defined. Words cast like life ropes, like spells, like mirrors for
us all to face and name what we see reflected back...
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From Standards
Excerpt:
Essex Hemphill passed away on November 4, 1995
of AIDS-related complications. We continue to feel his presence in
his words, and to feel his strength in his legacy of activism and
artistry. His passing has been met with many efforts to
memorialize the importance of his life and works, as well as by
new controversies within the lesbigay communities. These pages
celebrate the vast importance of Essex Hemphill's figure as a
Black gay man, a noted poet, a person living with HIV, and a
family member, within all the diverse communities he loved and
honored...
This site includes internet access to some of
Essex's most influential and memorable poems,
no longer available in print.
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Remembrance of final days and interview.
by Chuck Tarver
As I mentioned on glbpoc, a close friend of mine
was one of Essex Hemphill's caregivers. I'd known how critical his
condition was for quite some time and even had the chance to see
him on two occasions toward the end of his life.
During the final months of his life he was
hospitalized several times, confined to a wheel chair, suffered
nerve damage and would often suffer from bleeding. In spite of his
weakened condition his spirit remained strong. On one occasion he
traveled to Washington, DC by train to spend time with his family.
On another he got himself aboard Philadelphia para-transit to go
downtown and file a complaint against a former lover who had taken
to harassing him...
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From Pew
Fellowships in the Arts
Born April 16, 1957, Essex Hemphill began
writing at age 14. Mr. Hemphill's writing explores dangerous
territories -- estrangement, isolation, homophobia, denial, fear
itself. His bold, assertive poems call to be read aloud and it is
little surprise that he once observed, "...that poetry
doesn't solely live on the page. Poetry is meant to be
heard." His poems reflect upon the intersection of eroticism
and athleticism; or self-acceptance and racial denial; or even the
banal ubiquity of Barbie doll propaganda in youngsters' lives...
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A. Boxwell, USAF Academy
Excerpt:
At the outset of her book Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women, Donna Haraway reminds us of the perdurability of
troping the organic single human body to conceive of a whole
collective as a "body politic." Haraway analyzes
how establishment science deploys the trope in studies of
dominance in the natural world to legitimate the political
principle of domination in the human body politic. What she dubs
the "union of the political and the physiological" is
exploited by Essex Hemphill to structure his longest, most complex
and deliberately provocative poem, "Heavy Breathing"
(published in his final collection, Ceremonies, in 1992).
Hemphill's multiple identities as the leading African-American,
gay, and HIV-positive public poet and spokesman (from the
mid-1980s until his death from the complications of AIDS in
November 1995) enabled him, in "Heavy Breathing," to
engage in elaborate metaphorical play between individual and
political bodies. This poem powerfully draws out the metaphoric
connections between the HIV-afflicted gay man and a sickened and
untreated America racked by violent convulsions...
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By Robert W. Anderson
Issues of identity are crucial in today's
society. Thinking back over the last two years, two events stand
out as critically important. The first is the death by dragging of
James Byrd, Jr. in Jasper, Texas. The second is the death by
beating of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Each of these men
was slain for who they were perceived to be, for how society
constructed them racially and sexually. Both serve as reminders to
our communities that hatred is still alive and well, and that the
discourses of hatred have material effects upon living persons.
Also, each of these events has served to crystallize the
African-American and gay communities, respectively, in
solidarity--and, in part, in solidarity with one another. The gay
community has expressed both its outrage and its grief at the
brutal murder of Matthew Shepard, but outrage and grief are
nothing new to either the Black community or to the gay community.
The history of anger and grief over AIDS has been significant in
the gay community for almost two decades. Furthermore, each of
these men were killed due to their perceived identities--they were
chosen by their assailants for who they were, identified by their
attackers as "Other."
The poetry of Essex Hemphill addresses many of
these themes...
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