Philipp Khabo Köpsell’s Fanfare for the Colonized begins among the broken materials of empire. Marble, maps, ink and a ruler are the instruments through which people far from a conference table were made to live with decisions taken upon it. The poem does not leave the past sealed in a museum. Its sounds move between the language of official conquest and the land, labour and lives that language attempted to hide. In Köpsell’s work, the future first requires an argument with the words that made the past appear orderly.
The Berlin-based poet and spoken word performer was raised in Göttingen and has German and South African heritage. His 2010 collection Die Akte James Knopf: Afrodeutsche Wort- und Streitkunst takes apart one of German popular culture’s most familiar images of a Black child. The 2014 anthology Arriving in the Future, edited with Asoka Esuruoso, makes a different kind of intervention: it gathers Black writers whose experiences of Germany cannot be reduced to one national story. Between the two projects, Köpsell uses poetry and editing to contest the right of any single image to speak for a community.
Institutions have described Afrofuturism as one of his subjects, and he has spoken publicly about it. But his position is more searching than a label suggests. Writer Masiyaleti Mbewe recalled a conversation with Köpsell in which they questioned whether the term carried too much of a United States-centred frame for the futures they wanted to imagine. Pan-African futurism, in Mbewe’s account, offered a language of solidarity attentive to differences among Black lives. That tension belongs in any reading of Köpsell’s poems. Their future is a contested space, not a destination already named by somebody else.
A case file against an image
Die Akte James Knopf translates roughly as The James Knopf File. Its title gives a well-known fictional figure a dossier. Michael Ende’s Jim Knopf was created for a children’s book; Köpsell’s James is an adult in a country where the sentimental image of a Black child does not protect a Black man from racism. The publisher’s description calls the book an account of Afro-German cultural identity, everyday racism and colonial continuities. Its form is a mixture of poetry and political satire. That mixture matters. The poems do not merely explain that a stereotype is false. They turn the stereotype into evidence about the society that enjoys it.
The cover stages the transformation. As literary scholar Sarah Colvin observes, an adult figure wears clothing recalling earlier illustrations of Jim Knopf, with a baseball bat over his shoulder and a face that refuses the expected cheerfulness. The childlike costume and the grown man’s stance do not combine comfortably. Their mismatch asks the viewer to notice how an image can stay young and harmless while the person it supposedly represents must live through adulthood, danger and anger. It is an argument conducted through clothes and posture before a poem has been opened.
Colvin reads the collection as both poetry and a dossier about the production of racialised knowledge. The legal undertone of a “file” is useful here. A file is assembled from fragments: records, testimony, official categories and evidence that may have been ignored. Köpsell’s poems collect ways in which Black lives have been described by others, then disturb the confidence of those descriptions. The reader encounters a voice able to imitate the sales pitch, the institutional verdict or the familiar story and turn its terms against it.
One poem, Filmemacher, addresses the commercial appeal of stock Black characters in film. Colvin’s close reading describes a speaker who accuses mass media of producing another racial image whenever a Black man appears. A catalogue of expected roles follows. The form is important: the repeated types begin to sound less like the description of people than the inventory of a business. A supposedly imaginative industry turns out to be recycling what it already knows how to sell. Köpsell lets the rhythm of accumulation expose the poverty of that imagination.
Humour sharpens the poem’s criticism. It can allow an audience to recognise a familiar absurdity before it understands the violence that keeps the absurdity in circulation. The joke is not at the expense of the person reduced to a role. It is aimed at the machinery that keeps offering the role and expecting gratitude for its visibility. Colvin notes how market pleasure and racialised injustice meet in the collection. Köpsell’s satire refuses the idea that inaccurate representations are simply mistakes awaiting a correction. They can be profitable. They can also be pleasurable for the audience taught to expect them.
Another poem concerns Oury Jalloh, who died in police custody in Dessau in 2005. Colvin discusses the poem as an example of how an official account can conflict with the questions raised by a death. Köpsell’s irony unsettles the authority of a verdict rather than offering an invented resolution to the case. The poem’s place in the collection joins the everyday cultural image to institutions with far more direct power over a life. What a society is prepared to believe about a Black person can matter at the level of an illustration, a film casting decision or an official explanation.
The work of an “archive” is therefore not only to preserve what happened. It is to keep an account open when the available language tries to close it. Köpsell’s James does not return to the child’s island as a sign that all is well. He moves through Germany with the memory of how a story about him was made, who took pleasure in it and what that story could not protect. The collection demands that readers meet the adult figure rather than the comforting version they have carried in their minds.
Poetry as a test of action
Köpsell’s poem when time was of the essence questions the usefulness of writing while crises unfold. Colvin’s study identifies the poem’s imagined road between Mapungubwe in southern Africa and the Harz mountains in Germany. The route connects geographies that are sometimes treated as separate parts of a divided identity. On that road, the poet worries over time spent working on beat and rhyme when fire, hunger, disease and racist politics require an answer. The worry is built into the poem’s own activity. It has to use crafted language to ask whether crafted language can help.
That question prevents the poet from claiming an easy heroic role. Writing a verse cannot directly replace shelter, legal action or a safe street. Yet the poem’s anxiety also reveals why abandoning language would be a concession. Public crises arrive already described by institutions, headlines and habitual phrases. If those descriptions decide in advance who is credible and who can be mourned, language is part of the terrain on which action takes place. Köpsell’s verse tests whether a differently made sentence could alter what someone is prepared to hear.
The spoken word form brings that test into a room. Berlin Biennale’s programme describes Köpsell combining Afropolitan poetry, activist messages and theatrical elements in performance. These are not three separate layers placed one after another. A line can be an argument on the page and a bodily event when performed. Timing, volume and the pause before a punchline determine when the audience recognises itself as the subject. The listeners cannot read backward at their own pace; the poet controls an encounter in shared time.
The collection moves between German and English. The switching belongs to a writer whose work and community cross borders, but it also interrupts a demand that one national language contain the whole account. Köpsell said in a public discussion cited by Colvin that he uses languages interchangeably. A poem may allow two registers to stand beside each other without translating every difference away. For an audience accustomed to assuming that German public speech belongs to a single kind of speaker, the very ease of the switch is an intervention.
The purpose of the multilingual form is not to demonstrate cosmopolitan polish. The poems concern precise conditions in Germany, from mass media to policing and colonial memory. English can bring other traditions of political address into contact with German words; German can keep the critique directed at the society whose cultural habits the poet knows. The relation between languages keeps a line from being filed as merely local or merely imported. It insists that Black German speech is already part of the language’s living repertoire.
An arrival made by many voices
The title Arriving in the Future could sound like a promise that history will do the work on its own. Its edited contents and public presentation suggest a more active meaning. Köpsell and Asoka Esuruoso assembled an English-language anthology of poetry, stories and essays by Black writers in Germany, published in 2014. An editorial project cannot speak in the same singular voice as a poem. Its form is the arrangement of other people’s voices, the opening through which readers encounter them and the space left between them.
At a June 2014 book presentation in Bayreuth, Esuruoso and Köpsell presented the anthology alongside spoken performances by other artists. The festival programme brought a book of poetry, stories and essays into a room with several performers, while the book itself gathered writers with different histories and relationships to Germany. A book can circulate quietly from reader to reader; a shared presentation makes its plurality audible to people occupying the same room.
Köpsell’s own Fanfare for the Colonized appears in a published anthology excerpt. It returns to the 1884 Berlin Conference through materials that can be pictured and heard: marble, a map, ink, a ruler. Those objects offer a way of making an imperial decision concrete without treating the conference as merely the work of powerful individuals with names in a textbook. The poem’s sounds link the marks drawn in a room to land taken, labour compelled and violence done elsewhere. The future cannot arrive cleanly while the effects of those marks are treated as finished history.
The fanfare in the title also makes a claim about ceremony. A fanfare normally announces a ruler, a victorious army or the beginning of a public occasion. Here it announces those whose lives were described by colonial powers but whose perspectives were excluded from the official account. The poem turns an instrument of honour toward people denied it. Its lines do not need a technological image to alter the direction of time. They require readers to hear who is allowed to commemorate, and whose knowledge is made to sound like a footnote.
The anthology’s plurality is equally important to its idea of arrival. A phrase such as “Black German experience” can be useful in naming a history, but it can also become another single portrait if left unexamined. Writers in an anthology can disagree, vary in genre and speak from different relations to Germany. In the anthology’s own description, its editors reject the idea of one Black German community and describe writers with different backgrounds and agendas. The book’s plurality is a scene in which more than one person can make a claim on belonging.
Köpsell has worked in theatre as well as poetry. Ballhaus Naunynstraße records his dramaturgical and public programme collaborations, including a contribution to Simone Dede Ayivi’s Performing Back. The connection shows how arguments about who can be seen and heard pass between poems, performances and institutions. Dramaturgy shapes the conditions under which a voice reaches an audience; editing shapes them on the page. Köpsell’s practice moves through both kinds of arrangement.
In a Ballhaus conversation with other Black cultural workers, he said that after years of addressing Black identity in his poetry he wanted to move beyond circling the same conversations. This is an artist’s statement about fatigue with a narrow set of expectations, not a retreat from the realities that produced them. An audience can demand that a Black poet keep explaining who he is and never ask what new forms he might make. Köpsell’s wish to change the conversation is itself a future-facing demand: room to write without being assigned the same opening argument every time.
The debate over the word Afrofuturism belongs here. Mbewe’s account of their conversation emphasises that a shared Black future cannot erase differences in geography and access. Köpsell’s poems and editorial work give that concern a practical shape. The German archive must be reopened on its own terms; the colonial map must be read alongside the people it tried to make invisible; a group of writers must be permitted different tones and histories. A future made from these acts is not an image of consensus. It is a space where the number of people authorised to speak keeps growing.
The adult James on the book cover and the many voices of Arriving in the Future answer each other. One refuses a singular fiction that has survived its usefulness to the person it portrays. The other gathers writing that no single figure could contain. Köpsell’s work holds those movements together: to contest what has been said about Black life in Germany, and to make room for what Black writers can say next.