My Poetry Corner February 2024 features the title poem “Archipelagos” from the poetry collection Archipelagos by poet and novelist Geoffrey Philp, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2023). Born in 1958 in Kingston, Jamaica, Philp left the Caribbean Island nation in 1979 to attend the Miami Dade College in the United States. After graduation, he studied Caribbean, African, and African American literature. As a James Michener Fellow at the University of Miami, he studied poetry with Kamau Brathwaite and fiction with George Lamming.

Philp is the author of seven books of poetry, two books of short stories, a novel, and two children’s books. In 2022, he was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica for outstanding merit in literature. That same year, he also received the Marcus Garvey Award for Excellence in Education. A retired Miami Dade College professor, he lives in Miami, Florida.

The publisher Peepal Tree Press describes Philp’s poetry collection Archipelagos as “a call to arms that opens out the struggle for human survival in the epoch of the Anthropocene to remind us that this began not just in the factories of Europe but in the holds of the slave ships and plantations of the Caribbean…. Philp’s powerful and elegant poems span past and present and make it very clear that there cannot be a moral response to the climate crisis that is not also embedded in the struggle for social justice, for overcoming the malignancies of empire and colonialism and the power of global capitalism—the missions of the West that always had and still have at their heart the ideology of white supremacy and a capitalism endlessly voracious for the world’s human and natural resources.”

The collection opens with a five-part poem “Colonial Discourse, After Aimé Césaire,” a poet, author, and politician born 1913 in Martinique, a Francophone Caribbean Island nation. “[This poem] portrays the violence of colonial Othering, narrated through the perspectives of mass murderers Christopher Columbus, King Leopold of Belgium, and Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler,” Philp said. “Their deliberate dismissal of those they considered “lives not worthy of life” mirrors the dehumanizing logic of empire.”

The featured poem “Archipelagos,” the third poem in the collection, is dedicated to Derek Walcott (1930-2017), a Saint Lucian poet and playwright who was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. The title poem is an impressive 42-line sentence that unites the colonial past and present history of the Caribbean and the Americas into one narrative (pp. 15-16).

At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise
and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean,
like when Hurricane Maria whipped the Atlantic
into a ring of thunderstorms that advanced
in the way Auerbach described her vision of terror:
“Wooden huts torn away from their foundations
were carried away, women and children were tied
to the ceiling beams, but no one could see a tangle
of arms waving from the roof, like branches
blowing in the wind, waving desperately toward
heaven toward the river banks for help”;

  

Hurricane Maria was a Category 5 hurricane that devastated the northeastern Caribbean in September 2017; the deadliest hurricane to strike Puerto Rico, Dominica, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Quotation from “Yizkor, 1943” by Rachel Auerbach (1903-1976), born in Ukraine, was an Israeli writer, essayist, historian, Holocaust scholar, and Holocaust survivor. Adolf Hitler’s dehumanization of the Jewish peoples is highlighted in Part IV of “Colonial Discourse” (p.12): The Fuhrer approved the use of Zyklon B, so the troops wouldn’t suffer / like one soldier, haunted by the “brown eyes” / of a six-year-old who, after fleeing the bunker / where her parents had been murdered, hugged / his thighs and he stabbed her with his bayonet.

and a man, chest-deep in the surge that snatched
his family from his arms in seas swelling 
before him, like Columbus and his crew
imagined Leviathan, “whose mere sight
is overpowering,” who “looked down on all
that is haughty.” But wasn’t it pride, greed – 
those sins we’ve forgotten, for they remind us
of what we could have become instead of what
we’ve settled for – that extended our reach,

The Biblical quote is from the Book of Job 41:9 and 34, New International Version.The role of the Christian Church in colonialism is not overlooked in Part III of “Colonial Discourse” (p.11) when King Leopold II, after years of clawing / out his piece of Africa boasts about his progress in spreading Christianity, / and “bringing light, faith, and trade to the dark places / of the earth…”

like the virus with its crown of spikes,
around the waist of the world to the polar
ice caps, melting into the ocean that’s rising
one inch every three years in Miami,
where leatherbacks lumber out of the water
to lay their eggs as carefully as I swaddle
my grandniece in a blanket, scenes my daughter
remembers in the same breath with the bumper
sticker on the first car I owned, “Save the Whales,”
the protests where we marched before she could walk, 

The virus with its crown of spikes refers to the coronavirus that sparked the 2019 global pandemic. The leatherback sea turtle is the largest turtle in the world, weighing from 750 to 1000 pounds (340-453 kilos), and has the widest global distribution of any reptile. It is listed as endangered under the US Endangered Species Act of 1973.

the war she inherited along with my grandmother’s
hair – that simple country girl from St. James,
home to Sam Sharpe and the Maroons who fought
redcoats, whose bayonets were stained with the blood
of Africans kidnapped from huts under the growl
of the harmattan’s sweep over the Sahara
to the rim of the Cape Verde Islands, garlanded
by trade winds that complete the circle and begin
a new alphabet of catastrophe – hurricanes that stagger
like a betrayed lover barrelling through the islands
until its rage is spent on the sands of our beaches
littered with masks and plastic bottles.

Samuel Sharpe (1780-1832), born in St. James, Jamaica, was the main instigator of the 1831 Slave Rebellion. “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery,” Sharpe said. In 1834, two years after Sharpe’s hanging, the British Parliament passed the Abolition Bill and in 1838 abolished slavery. In those days, the British soldiers were called redcoats.

The Jamaican Maroons are often described as enslaved Africans and other persons of African descent who ran away or escaped from their European colonial masters or owners to acquire and preserve their freedom.

The harmattan is a very dry, dusty, easterly, or northeasterly wind on the West African coast, occurring from December to February. In the second poem of the collection, “Oya Awakened,” the poet connects this dust-bearing wind from the Sahara that fuels Hurricane Irma (September 2017) as she heads towards the Florida Keys with the slave trade (p. 14): And as we waited / in the candle-lit dark, the storm / surge reached over the seawall, / winds howled through our shutters / like the wails of Africans trapped / in the hold of slavers that followed / the same route as these hurricanes.

In drawing parallels between atrocities of the past and climate injustices of the present, in which small island chains in the Caribbean and worldwide are more vulnerable, Philp forces us to look anew at what humanity has become. In “Colonial Discourse” (Part V, p.13), the poetic persona Aimé Césaire wondered what a new world without old masters / would resemble… / There was so much he had to unlearn.

For me, unlearning old ways of being and doing is an ongoing process.

To learn more about the work of the Jamaican poet Geoffrey Philp go to my Poetry Corner February 2024.