Week 3 Question #3

The speaker begins with the announcement "I will always be there", and yet later he says "I am the invisible son" (line 32). How can these two statements be reconciled? (554)

Reading the autobiographical information about Essex Hemphill, the author of the poem “Commitments”, prior to reading the poem gives the reader an insight into the possibilities of what the poem text might mean since part of the meaning of any poem comes from the writer. In this case the author is a black gay man. Hemphills choices of writing styles for this poem include diction and imagery. Each stanza is written so that the reader must interpret the text non-literally. Additionally, each stanza gives the reader an image to “see” what the writer is depicting.
The poem is about the narrator’s life, in particular his life with his family. The first line of the poem “I will always be there.” Is his way of saying he will be there for all of the family gatherings, he will always be there for his family. But will they be there for him? In the first two stanzas we see that the narrator attends a family gathering and a family barbecue. In the next stanza he says “my arms are empty” after saying that “the smallest children are held by their parents” in order to tell the reader how he longs to have a baby of his own in his arms. Then “the unsuspecting aunts expecting to throw rice at me someday” is his way of letting the reader know that the relatives do not know that he is gay. Again the author tells us after the holiday family gatherings that the narrator is still childless when he writes “My arms are empty in these photos too.” In the sixth stanza sympathy of the reader for the narrator grows as he says “I am always there for critical emergencies, graduations, the middle of the night.” But, no one is there for him. No one knows he is gay, everyone thinks he is happy but as the last stanza begins “I am the invisible son.” He believes there is no one in his family who sees him for who he really is inside, they only see the one who will always be there but they do not see his pain. The family does not see how he longs to be married and have a child. The family does not see how he longs to be accepted. He, the person he really is, is invisible.