Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry
by Essex Hemphill

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Book Reviews of Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry

Book Review: An Unselfish Gift
Summary: 5 Stars

A DC native, Hemphill includes many of his experiences coming-of-age and living in the nation's capital all of which are detailed and brought to life through his rich and deeply-profound poetry. My favorites include "Heavy Breathing" -- which addresses the need we have for love and the misguided steps we sometimes take along the way. In the poem, he talks about his experiences roaming the halls of bathhouses "in search of Giovanni's Room" and the fatal killing of a middle-aged woman in a public park. In addition, I was struck by "In the Life." The poem, with its calming yet reassuring tone, is a gay man speaking to his mother about his lifestyle -- "Mother, do you know I roam alone at night? / I wear colognes, tight pants, and chains of gold, as I search for men willing to come back to candlelight / I'm not scared of these men though some are killers of sons like me. / I learned there is no mercy for men of color, for sons who love men like me." His poetry is rich with detail and his experiences are ones you can feel even if you've never experienced them for yourself. It's an adventure uninhibited by structure or convention.

Like many SGL brothers, I was introduced to Essex Hemphill when he appeared in Marlon Riggs groundbreaking PBS documentary "Tongues Untied." Many of the poems found in Ceremonies appear in the documentary including his famous poem "Homocide" -- "Grief is not apparel. Not like a dress, a wig or my sister's high-heeled shoes. It is darker than the man I love who in my fantasies comes for me in a silver, six-cylinder chariot."

With all of his words, I found identification and a narrative voice that reflects me and my experiences. Hemphill speaks with erudite intelligence, but none of it is pompous or hard-to-ascertain. Ceremonies challenges the conventions of what it is to black, what it is to be gay, what it is to be both and how one operates in such parameters. It touches on subjects that are still not addressed in the mainstream, even by countering the "sacred cows of gay culture." Hemphill exposes the hypocrisy and the cogs in the homo-hate machine fostered by the white-centered, patriarchal gay mainstream media. ("We have to be there for one another and trust less the adhesions of kisses and semen to bind us.")

The prose of Ceremonies is on-target and carefully assembled. From his deconstruction of the popular "homosexuality-as-antiblack" rhetoric being pumped by certain prominent black intellectuals (with the gem, "If Freud Were A Neurotic Colored Woman") to his graphic accounts of an out-of-the-closet exchange by two middle-aged black men on a public bus (with its shocking finale). Hemphill's book is definitely a page-turner. I found myself re-reading many portions over and over, not wanting to put it down.

The accounts are not only identifiable to just black gay men, they are profoundly human and transcendental. His words give voice to the marginalized, the misunderstood and the unspoken, muffled denizens of our era. I strongly recommend this book to any person who is "in the life" or anyone who would like to hear the selected experiences of SGL black men in contemporary America vocalized in a fascinatingly powerful way. Hemphill succumbed to AIDS complications in 1995, but his ideas and gifts continue giving in this and other works. A must read.

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