Essex Hemphill’s Voice Is Urgent

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 251, ‘Afterlife’

Forgive me, but lately I find myself unable to write anything that doesn’t sound like prayer, screaming or manifesto. Whatever hypnosis many Americans fall victim to in times of Democratic rule – or in times of an older, less fascist Republican party – doesn’t seem to have the same juice. We are awake and aware. Good. When Donald Trump was running for his first presidency, a friend’s then-partner – a smart and involved community activist – predicted his win in a room full of folks who couldn’t conceive it. She said we needed to hit rock bottom to wake up, that the American public needed to witness the inhuman wrath and stupidity of the man who would become the 45th president, to awaken to our country’s dire need for redirection. Maybe we missed the lesson the first time. Maybe we are too far down the road to turn around now. Now, at the bottom of America’s soul, is the perfect time for us to read the work of Essex Hemphill.

When I think of the power of Hemphill’s work, I think of his ability to write poems and prose of such magnificent love, transcendent beauty, glorious rage and unique clarity from what surely to him had to feel like rock bottom. HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis, lovers and friends dying all around him, dying himself – still, he wrote a poem like ‘American Wedding’ (1992), which is filled with so much power, so much kink (I mean, ‘I place my ring/on your cock/where it belongs’, is still one of the hottest things I’ve ever read) and such beauty, all under the dark umbrella of America where ‘Every time we kiss/we confirm the new world coming.’

In our America today, many of us are living under the threat of erasure. The government would like us to forget that trans people exist. The government would like us to stop saying words that make us aware that women, queers, Black people, people of colour, disabled folks, literally anybody but straight white men exist. The government would like millions around the world who depend on our assistance to die of AIDS. The government would like you to die. If Hemphill were alive, the government would like him to die again.

‘I have nothing to lose tonight,’ begins ‘American Hero’ (1992), and I think that might be a necessary condition for any hero in a nation founded in greed and genocide, which seems these days not far from those roots. Yet we are not dead yet. And if we die, let us leave behind something to empower the liberation of others beyond our own mortality. This March, New Directions released Love Is a Dangerous Word: The Selected Poems of Essex Hemphill, edited by John Keene and Robert F. Reid-Pharr, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. What better poet to help us gather our rage and our love in these times when we’ll be required to use both if we are to engineer a tomorrow where we are alive? What better reminder that the long road to freedom will also require community, pleasure, realness and action from every corner of our hearts? Or, as he writes in ‘For My Own Protection’ (1992): ‘I want to start/an organization/to save my life./If whales, snails,/dogs, cats/Chrysler and Nixon/can be saved,/the lives of Black men/are priceless/and can be saved.’

Hemphill’s work illuminates the essential unity of art, living and politics. For those of us living while dying, for those of us living under the threat of erasure by the government’s indifference or intention, there is no art for art’s sake. Art is a necessary ritual to survive the plagues of your ages, be they viral or electoral. ‘are we capable/of whatever/whenever?’ ‘For My Own Protection’ concludes. Hemphill is not writing poems simply for our pleasure, he is recruiting us as soldiers towards our collective liberation.

Hemphill was dangerous. Is dangerous. The danger he embodied saved lives, mine included. I am alive and somewhat sane because he wrote with such bravery and clarity, with every fibre of his being behind the pen. These next four years and the years beyond them will require us to embody the kind of loving out loud that Hemphill and fellow Black, queer and poz artists Marlon Riggs and Assotto Saint exemplified, the kind so many brave lesbians showed when they rose up and acted up for their queer siblings. May our love be dangerous to all who imperil us. May we be brave enough to be hazardous.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 251 with the headline ‘New World Coming’

Essex Hemphill’s ‘Love Is a Dangerous Word: Selected Poems’ is published with New Directions.

‘Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings’, an exhibition exploring Hemphill's impact through archival materials and contemporary responses to his work, is also on view at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, 17 May – 31 August.

^{Main image: Broadside for Essex Hemphill poetry reading (detail), 1992, ink on wove paper, 30 × 21 cm, designed by Ali Zaidi. Courtesy: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift of Dr. Ron Simmons}