The Lateness of Being? Essex Hemphill.
(Essex Hemphill--top left--from a photo by Rotimi Fani-Kayode).


As a poet, Hemphill faced, as he saw it, a triple exile. And there was a fourth exile made from trying to make sense of the three. Simply, Hemphill was an exile because he was black—he belonged to a minority ethnic group symbolically governed from the WHITE house. He was an exile because he was gay—he lived on a daily basis under the laws of heterotyranny. Finallly, he was a radical(black gay) poet—Hemphill would have said raDICKal—no publishing house was likely to put his words into print freely. Hemphill’s existence, like Red Annie who speaks these words to the USA, was founded on a hard struggle: Am I more black than gay? Am I more gay than black? Am I more a poet than black and gay? How does the black poet speak to the gay audience? How does the gay poet speak to the black audience? The permutations build a complex sense of identity in crisis--all of which were imposed by patriarchy upon Hemphill.

By adding “late” to “black gay poet”, unintentionally, the publicity blurb suggests that death too is a hard fact of existence—for Hemphill. This attaching of “late” to poets is becoming quite fashionable, but why?

Would we say the “late Shakespeare”? Well, no, because his death is a well-known fact.
What about, then, the “late white gay poet Thom Gunn”. That sounds ridiculous. Again, the phrase is a kind of tautology because everything stated is well known.

So, what is that “late” supposed to say about Hemphill? He just died? Well no he didn’t: it is some 10 years since his death, so the “late” is not an obituary notice.
He died from AIDS? * Is it the nature of the death that is important? Certainly, that would make sense as it was Hemphill’s gay-black status that placed him wide open to such a virulent and opportunistic disease. Yet, the “late” only contains this sense if a person knows the biographical facts—not much point in telling what is already known.

But this still begs a question, for me? Hemphill is a great poet—as good as Ginsberg, whose work exists in the present tense. His work is not dead and attributed elegiacally to a dead poet. Ginsberg is Ginsberg. Why can’t Hemphill be Hemphill?

This use of “late” is a form of modern, linguistic nonsense. It does not belong to Hemphill in some existential sense. It belongs to him in one sense only: the critical world has been late in its recognition of a significant gay, black, poet.


* Marechera, like Hemphill died of AIDs... and in the mid 1980s, 40% of Zimbabweans were HIV+. Interestingly, this is not always mentioned about Marechera, but always mentioned about Hemphill. Heterosexual AIDs is best not mentioned whereas homosexual AIDs always has to be mentioned. There is also a tendency, now, to speak of Marechera as "late"...but this is from a different angle, as if critics would like the bad boy of African literature to take his ghost elsewhere. Perhaps, it would make more sense to speak of the living poetry of Hemphill and make sure the ghost continues to haunt.

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