“The Earth Vex”: A Blistering Warning from the Archipelagos

Geoffrey Philp’s Archipelagos is a collection steeped in the blood of ancestors. It bears witness to the brutal, intertwining histories of the Caribbean but also retains a sense of hopefulness that dances off the page and keeps us enraptured. Like the sea itself, these poems can be gently cresting waves or as brutal as tsunamis, raging with the injustice of centuries of oppression.

Philp’s collection is concerned with our struggle to thrive in the face of climate disasters and the crushing hands of tyrants, past and present. This collection is a warning, haunted by a sense of apocalyptic dread: we are on the brink of climate disaster and our policies and politics replicate past tyrannies. If we ignore and silence the horrors of history, we will not be able to survive the future. The epigraph reads, “The Earth vex,” a quote of Bob Marley’s from a 1979 interview, and Philp lays out the multitude of issues the earth is vexed about. The title poem, “Archipelagos” (dedicated to Derek Walcott), cautions, “At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise / and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean” (15).

The poems flow from the historical past and Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean to the contemporary issues of climate change and racial injustice facing Caribbean and African American people. These are narrative poems, and the collection is bookended by the resurrection of historical figures such as Columbus (9) and the Admiral (51). Philp plays with a variety of poetic forms, including in a poem made of Haikus titled “Haikus for the End of the World” (23). Philip repurposes this form to deliver a message—it turns out there is still reason to be hopeful at the end of the world. His short form here captures bittersweet urban scenes; dispossessed homeless men search for cigarette butts, yet they also read books, finding “newfound treasures.” The “murder of crows” who taunt a “schizophrenic girl” and steal her bread are juxtaposed with the bright flowers of the poui tree “that burn a bright yellow / sentinels of hope” (23). There are also several poems in the collection composed of two- or three-line stanzas. The poetic voice is condensed, sometimes sparse, and it continually tests, cajoles, and at times addresses us directly: “if you followed . . .” (41).

Geographically, the collection crisscrosses the United States and the Caribbean, subverting stereotypes of the Caribbean as paradise; in Martinique, for example, “the sun spreads like a rash” (9). The first poem, “Colonial Discourse, After Aimé Césaire,” is in five blistering sections and immediately embroils us in a desperate grappling with history. Replete with the voices of the dispossessed, the poem details the ravaging of the Caribbean archipelago by European powers: “Columbus and his crew, spurred by fever, / scoured streams, lakes, rivers for traces of gold” (9). French sailors bludgeon schoolchildren and rape their mothers, Amerindians die in vast numbers from European diseases and are driven off their lands or killed, Africans are enslaved and forced to live and die in the cane fields for over two centuries while Europe prospers. In this five-part poem sequence (9–13), we follow the journey of a flea across time and space, as dictators are re-erected and given voice. The poet-narrator watches the world through their ruthless, hungry gaze and scathingly exposes their hypocrisies and wrongdoing:

“At the brink of dawn,” Leopold II paused
to admire the blood oranges in his greenhouse
in Laeken, and felt an itch in his groin,
like when on his fiftieth birthday in London
he was accused of consorting with ten
to fifteen-year-old girls. (11)

Leopold II has for years been

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . clawing
out his piece of Africa while conning kings, presidents,
philanthropists about his progress in spreading Christianity,
and “bringing light, faith, and trade to the dark places
of the earth.” (11)

Philp’s focus here is accountability and bearing witness to the crushing of Black and Brown minds and bodies. In section 5 the flea meshes Frantz Fanon’s and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s theories of Negritude against the backdrop of the WWII and a Kaiser’s dream, until Césaire himself squashes the insect, acknowledging that “there was so much he had to unlearn” (13).

In this archipelago of poems, Philp’s observations seep into one another; they connect or clash, offering always a profound meditation on the abuses of power. There is a cyclical quality to the poetics here, with repeated and echoing phrases. Each of the five sections in “Colonial Discourse” cycle start with the line “At the brink of dawn,” a quote taken from Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. The urgent appeal to “rise up” and keep rising against oppression also reverberates though the work. In “Anthem for the Woke,” the poet-narrator entreats us, “Rise, once again, and free yourselves from the lies / that keep us cowering in the dark. Rise, change your fear / from a plague of doubt into a power that liberates” (50), and in “Still, I Rise” (after Maya Angelou),

Still, I rise above the hot zones
that spread across America, like the heatwave
in the eighties when thirty-two deaths a day
from an act of God was a national tragedy. (21)

These echoes signal the inevitable repetition and continual return of repressed traumas, despite the call to arms and hope. The legacies of enslavement and colonialism leave their bloodstains on the present, while racism continues to flourish in twenty-first-century America, where Philp fears for his son in a country “where black skin is despised like an incurable disease— / the darker the hue, the greater the sin, / and the only cure is a bullet or a noose” (“The Archangel’s Trumpet,” 41). The poet’s scathing, all-seeing eye interrogates the Black Lives Matter movement, the killing of George Floyd, the toppling of Edward Colson’s statue in Bristol, UK, and the government responses to the Covid pandemic, which allowed the most vulnerable to suffer. In “America 2020” he writes simply, “America, you’ve lost your way” (43).

Even the sea connecting his archipelago is a place of unease and potential threat. Philp rarely places himself as poet in the center of his work, but in “Trigger” he exposes his vulnerabilities, fear of the ocean and the possibility of his own demise by “disappearing under the waves” (22). This more intimate, personal confession, after a series of more dense, political poems, allows the reader a much-desired glimpse of the poet himself. The narrative voice is often didactic; it teaches, prompts, provokes, and asks disturbing, unsettling questions. It refuses to forget or be hushed. These are poems that get under your skin, that stay with you long after reading to trouble and disrupt, but they also let in the light. While there is a sense of mounting fury as one reads through the collection, in the midst of charting reoccurring states of oppression, Philp urges us to not lose faith.

In one of his most profoundly moving poems, “The Archangel’s Trumpet” (also quoted above), Philp tells us that if we have “followed the frescoes on the ceiling / of the Sistine Chapel,” we may have reached the conclusion that “there are no black angels in heaven.” “Maybe, [we] are right,” he tells us. “Our seraphs / and cherubs would rather help Yemaya / protect her children from the wolves” (41).

But in those moments when we put aside
our mortal concerns . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
when we have grown tired of hiding
grimaces behind selfies and mug shots,
we unfurl wings that cover backs
scarred by the spite of downpressers,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
and re-join the hymns that we knew before
our feet landed on the sand, on the auction
block, before we had forgotten how to fly
and lift our voices to [the] sky. (41)

This poems soars with an emancipatory sense of hopefulness; we are urged to blow our trumpets with pride, to uncover mutilated wings and see ourselves in the iconography of Christianity—Black angels escaping from the hands of “downpressers” and reveling in freedom song: “‘Blow your trumpet, / Gabriel, Blow your trumpet louder; I want / dat trumpet to blow me home to my new Jerusalem’” (41–42).

The message at the heart of this searing collection is as clear as the notes from the archangel’s trumpet and are summarized in the collection’s parting words. Before we can use our blemished wings to fly, we must fight the ongoing destruction of our people and planet through the decolonization of the mind—for this, Philip returns to Bob Marley: “‘We must emancipate ourselves from mental slavery’” (“The Admiral, “53). Follow this book on its onward march toward liberation—still heavy with the chains of history, you will be lifted toward the sky.

Emily Zobel Marshall is of French Caribbean and British heritage and grew up in North Wales. She is a professor in postcolonial literature at Leeds Beckett University. Her research specialisms are the cultures and literatures of the African diaspora, with a focus on the folkloric trickster figure and Caribbean carnival cultures, and she is widely published in these fields. She develops creative work alongside her academic writing and is the author of the poetry collection Bath of Herbs (Peepal Tree, 2023).

Marshall’s Bath of Herbs is reviewed by Geoffrey Philp in this issue of sx salon.