I met Geoffrey Philp through the New Voices Project. This is a group of poets, writers, and historians who are writing new work about The Holocaust, so that its lessons aren’t merely not forgotten but they are also re-examined and understood from a 21st-century point of view. The evil of the Holocaust is still alive, and this project helps us to see and recognize those forces that might lead to new horrors. New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, the book coming out in April 2023, has collected writing about these new lessons, and includes Philp’s poem about Jesse Owens, “Flying African.”^[1-2]

John Brantingham: So many of the poems and stories in New Voices really could not have been written at an earlier period of time. They explore ideas that have only been discussed recently. I’m wondering about Jesse Owens. In thinking and writing about him, what do you think his story teaches us in the 21st century? Does it reveal something that’s more relevant today and that we didn’t understand before?

Geoffrey Philp: Many of the new poems and stories that have emerged from the Sho’ah^[3] cannot have been written by survivors due to the long period of silence and shame surrounding the event. Time magazine called them the “Silent Generation,” and documented the effects of the Sho’ah on the survivors and their children.

Historians like Timothy Snyder teach that Hitler used methods he learned from studying American history, including denying basic human rights to African Americans in the US. This is evident in his implementation of the Nuremberg laws, which stripped Jews of their civil and human rights in Germany, rendering them as stateless as African Americans in the US.

John: In your poem, you write, “[Hitler] sat and joked with his captains / about the superior genes of their athletes.” There is a sense of separation and isolation. You are writing about the Holocaust, but also, I think, of the eternal problem of political leaders isolating themselves from people so as to make it easier to demonize them. Am I understanding what you are getting at? Where do you see this happening today?

Geoffrey: What Hitler was doing, as Aimé Césaire has pointed out in Discourse on Colonialism, was using the tactics of colonial powers and using these methods within Germany to create Others—many of whom came from a lineage of Jews that had settled in Germany from as far back as 321 C.E.

So, it wasn’t only the leaders who separated themselves from the Jews, but also the German population who remained silent during the Sho’ah.

Anti-blackness, as Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has asserted, is a foundational aspect of America and often goes hand in hand with antisemitism.

There are also warning signs in Florida of behavior reminiscent of Nazism, such as the ban on books about black history in schools, which are deemed potentially offensive to white Christian conservatives.

This means that any white, Christian conservative parent has the power to have these books removed from the school library, effectively denying the story of African Americans in North America. This demonstrates that it is not necessary to physically burn books; simply making them inaccessible is enough.

Violence and genocides occur when colonial practices are directed towards the citizens of the home country to create Others.

John: Limiting students’ access to information on black history is terrifying. It is not just the politicizing of history through false narratives of white victimization but the weaponizing of it. Do you think there might be a political endgame for those people who are doing it? I guess what I’m asking is this: Is the process of facism conscious, by and large, or unconscious? And I’m aware that I’ve asked such a broad question that it cannot be fully answered, but maybe you can give a little insight into this process.

Geoffrey: There is a political endgame. The surest way to control a group of people is to erase knowledge of their past. This has been going on for at least four centuries in Africa and the African Diaspora. As my hero, Marcus Garvey, said, “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”^[4]

John: Part of what I love about the Owens poem, too, is that it is about hope and strength. Owens continues to inspire because he was simply able to continue. His story is about the kind of grace that comes with courage. You show him as being a part of a tradition of courage passed down from his ancestors. I’m wondering if that’s a part of the mission of the poem, to show us that we are a part of a tradition of courage and should and can fight against the forces of intolerance and genocide.

Geoffrey: Jesse Owens drew his strength from the examples of his parents who were part of the Great Migration and a long line of ancestors who endured the hardships and indignities of slavery.

When you can tap into a tradition of courage, it strengthens you and you don’t feel isolated.

I suspect that this tradition of courage and resilience was a part of Jesse Owens’ drive. He could stand in the middle of Nazi Germany, collect his gold medals, and by his presence invalidate all the canards about black inferiority.

One of the things that I admire about Jewish tradition is the emphasis on education. Children learn about the courage of Esther when they are celebrating Purim or about the Maccabees during Hanukkah. So learning about history doesn’t have to be boring, especially when you are eating chocolate and spinning dreidels.

John: Well, that brings me back to a previous question. Do you think the erasure of history in schools in Florida is an attempt to derail that tradition of courage? How do we fight it beyond lawmaking? How do we help to continue that tradition of courage?

Geoffrey: It is an attempt to derail the tradition of courage. This is why Marcus Garvey sided with the Irish, who had also been subjected to similar practices in Ireland—the outlawing of their language and the heroes of the Easter Rising. Garvey formed alliances with Éamon de Valera and named the meeting place of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Liberty Hall, in honor of the Irish Struggle against colonialism.

---

Publisher’s Footnotes:

Links below were retrieved on 4 April 2023.

1. Details about the New Voices Project (“the book, the enquiry, and the mission”) are available at:
   https://newvoicesproject.org/
   
   
2. Two of Philp’s poems, “Flying African” and “Archipelagos,” appear in Acalabash Caribbean Poetry Portfolio no. 13 (27 October 2022):
   https://acalabash.com/acalabash-caribbean-poetry-portfolio-no-13/
   
   
3. As described by Wikipedia, “‘The Holocaust’ is the name commonly applied in English since the mid-1940s to the systematic extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany during World War II. ...The biblical word Shoah, also spelled Shoa and Sho’ah, meaning ‘calamity’ in Hebrew (and also used to refer to ‘destruction’ since the Middle Ages), became the standard Hebrew term for the 20th-century Holocaust as early as the early 1940s.”
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Holocaust
   
   See also the article by Zev Garber, Emeritus Chair of Jewish Studies at Los Angeles Valley College, “The Slaughter of Six Million Jews: A Holocaust or a Shoah?” in which he discusses the meanings of each term and what “they reveal about how we view the respective roles of God and the Nazis in the Jewish genocide”; at TheTorah.com (11 April 2018):
   https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-slaughter-of-six-million-jews-a-holocaust-or-a-shoah
   
   
4. Quotation is widely attributed online to Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), a Jamaican-born political activist and the leader of the Pan-Africanism movement, but I was unable to locate the original source.
   
   

Geoffrey Philp

was born and raised in Jamaica, and relocated to Miami, Florida when he was 20 years old. He teaches creative writing at Miami Dade College and has a Master of Arts in English from the University of Miami. The author of eight books of poetry, two novels, two collections of short stories, and three children’s books, he’s currently working on a graphic novel for children, My Name is Marcus.

His poems and short stories have been published in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, World Literature Today, The Johannesburg Review of Books, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, Bearden’s Odyssey Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden, Crab Orchard Review, and Rattle: Poets Respond.

Philp is a recipient of the Luminary Award from the Consulate of Jamaica (2015) and a former chair for the 2019 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry, and he’s featured on The Poetry Rail at The Betsy, an homage to 12 writers that shaped Miami culture. In 2022, he was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal for outstanding merit in literature.

Author’s website: www.geoffreyphilp.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Fragment of the Quilt by Geoffrey Philp in Rattle: Poets Respond (27 June 2020). “After living 60 years of my life as a Black man from Jamaica and taking a DNA test where I discovered my Jewish ancestry, I am astounded by the endurance of Nazi propaganda and the need for constant vigilance.”

John Brantingham

was the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks (east of Fresno, CA), and now lives in Jamestown, New York. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder, and the author of 21 books of poetry, memoir, and fiction including his latest, Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press, 2020) and Kitkitdizzi (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022), the latter a collaboration which features artworks by his wife, Ann Brantingham.

John’s poems, stories, and essays are published in hundreds of magazines and journals. His work has appeared on Garrison Keillor’s daily show, The Writer’s Almanac; has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize; and was selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions anthology series for 2022 and 2016.

Author’s website: www.johnbrantingham.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ A Walk Among Giants by Kendall Johnson, a review of John and Ann Brantingham’s book Kitkitdizzi: A Non-Linear Memoir of the High Sierra, in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 16, January 2023)

⚡ Finnegan’s (Fiancée Goes McArthur Park on His Birthday) Cake, flash fiction by Brantingham in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 9, August 2021), which was subsequently selected for publication in The Best Small Fictions 2022 anthology

⚡ Objects of Curiosity, a collection of his ekphrastic poems (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020)

⚡ For the Deer, one of two haibun by Brantingham in KYSO Flash (Issue 8, August 2017)

⚡ Four prose poems in Serving House Journal (Issue 7, Spring 2013), including A Man Stepping Into a River and Poem to the Child Who I Almost Adopted