Diana Cooper-Clark unearths buried stories
WHEN DIANA Cooper-Clark was a little girl living on Swallowfield Avenue in St Andrew, she was a “voracious” reader. One day when she ran out of books, she randomly selected one of her father’s and went into her yard to read under a lignum vitae tree. The book was about the Nazi who kept the train running on time.
The Nazis were Germany’s Adolph Hitler’s World War II soldiers, who, among other things, exterminated Jews, gypsies, et al, who were taken to extermination camps by trains. It is said that more than six million Jews were killed in what is known as the Holocaust of which there were pictures of gruesome sights in CooperClark’s father’s book, which she spent several non-stop hours reading under the tree. When her family found her with the book, they promptly took it from her. They were worried that it would have upset her, she told a gathering at the Courtleigh Hotel and Suites in New Kingston on Sunday, November 13.
“But rather than paralyse me, it galvanised me,” she told the audience, which was there to hear her talk about researching and writing her book about the Holocaust, Dreams of ReCreation in Jamaica — Holocaust, Internment, Jewish Refugees in Gibraltar Camp, Jamaica Jews and Sephardim. Professor Diana Cooper-Clark of York University, Canada, presents a copy of her book, ‘Dreams of Re-Creation in Jamaica’, to the principal of the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, Prof Archibald McDonald, as Camille Bell Hutchinson, UWI Mona campus registrar, looks on.
Cooper-Clark’s book is the product of years of research motivated by what she read and saw in her father’s book. She had sworn to herself then “to bear witness for the rest of her life to answer two questions” – how and why the Holocaust happened – and she committed her life to answering these questions.
She said she did not have the “language” at the time to
describe what she had learnt from the book, but she knew that the murder of the innocent, racism and marginalisation were evil, and so she embarked upon a quest to find some “psychological” and “spiritual explanation” for the Holocaust. Thus, she read everything she could find about the Holocaust. And over the years, she, who teaches several
WITH JUST 20 days to go before the big day of Christmas, what have you been doing to take advantage of holiday promotions? You may be asking, “What can be done in twenty days?” You may be surprised! Here is a twenty-day marketing plan to get you blitzing for the holidays!
DAY ONE
Take digital pictures of your book as a stand-alone, as well as nicely decorated with a Christmas theme. You can use poinsettias, ribbons, candles, etc. Anything elegant and Christmas-y.
Take digital pictures of you holding the book, reading in a comfortable chair, with a glass of wine, cup of tea, and in comfortable garments (setting is important). Depending on the type of book, create a setting that depicts that with you and the book included.
In separate shots, get persons who have read your book to also have a similar but somewhat different setting so that it doesn’t look staged and ensure that you have their true testimonials either in written or video form.
When taking digital pictures and video, please use a high-resolution camera/phone. You don’t want blurry or pixelated output.
Decide on two to three major social media platforms that you will use. I would suggest LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Create hashtags for the promotions you will be doing. The key is to keep it simple, easy to remember, and fun!
Create an Amazon Author Central Page. This is important as this is where all your books, or book, you wish to promote over the next twenty days will be centrally focused, and all promos will be pointing in that direction, thereby leading to sales of your book
IIIIDAY 2 TO 6
Write two to three blogs per day and schedule them to be posted for every day or every other day thereby, including the writing days. In other words, spread them over the 20-day period. Keep the word count to 150-300 words and ensure that you use the pictures taken as associated images! Use
IHubspot’s blog generator to come up with ideas for blogs.
I Create shorter posts as teasers and use the links from the post to ‘read more’ and lead to where your book is published for example, on Amazon or our website, or Authorcentral.
Create tweets from the blog posts to be scheduled out everyday at least three times per day.
You will need a platform like hootsuite or tweetdeck or another of your choice to help you manage and schedule the posts and tweets, plus post to the social networks that you agreed on in day one using the hashtags as well as the pictures taken.
I Ensure that you interact with your audience during the 20-day blitz. If you don’t, you will lose the momentum and possible sale
IIA SIMPLE PLAN DAY 7 TO 15
Take advantage of Amazon’s freebies to authors to do promotions at no cost. Notice that so far, there is no cost to you to do this except time and maybe a larger SD card for photos and video. So check out what Amazon offers for authors and do all of them, including buying the printed version and getting the e-book at half price, discounts using a code, and much more.
Reading and making sure you set this up may take you some time. However, if you get this activity done in a shorter time, use the remaining time to create more content to push out to your audience via the social media management platforms and your website
Use this time to also create
IIgiveaways and contests for your audience. A platform such as Rafflecopter is really cool to work with, and there’s a free plan, so take advantage of it.
DAY 10 TO 20
This may be the only time you really spend some money, and it wouldn’t be a lot. I would say around US$30.00 for an ad campaign with Linkedin preferably. I would hold back on doing ads with Facebook. It’s more social and for being viral, but LinkedIn has professional communities that you want to target and to increase your book’s visibility.
Create more videos at this time and post on YouTube and make sure that you put in a text description with a link back to your book, authorcentral, giveaway, contest, and post. Facebook offers Facebook live video. I say, go for it! This is live interaction with your audience and you can share the link and giveaways or you can combine a giveaway with Facebook live. Play around with the idea to make it fun. It’s Christmas after all! Make it a party!
Now, some of you reading this may think it’s too much work, while others may go for it. What do you have to lose? Whip yourself into action for the next 20-days, starting today. You may get at least one book sold, and many eyes would definitely have seen and /or heard about you and your book. I know you will see results. Just be consistent, believe, have faith in your work, and have fun with it. The other thing is that this outline of a simple marketing plan for 20-days may seem linear, but many activities are happening
IIat the same time, so there is some juggling involved, but take your vitamins, have a drink of your favourite beverage, and tell yourself that you can do this!
I would be excited to hear the results you get from applying this.
Feel free to email me and/or invite me to get involved in the blitz. Consider it my way of giving back to you, my readers, both new and those who have remained loyal over the years.
Wishing you well!
I courses in English and the humanities departments at York University in Toronto, Canada, has evolved into a committed Holocaust scholar and researcher.
Yet, she said that there was “no one reductive essential answer” to her questions of how and why the Holocaust had happened. “The Holocaust was painful. How do we get a language to describe it?” she asked. “It is a mockery of reason; it is beyond rationality. it is beyond the language. It is a betrayal of the language,” she asserted.
And while she could not find a “language”, she stumbled upon “extraordinary” anecdotes and narratives about the Jamaican connection to the Holocaust. About 1,500 World War II Jewish refugees were housed at Gibraltar Camp, established on lands near August Town in St Andrew, where a section of the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies is located.
Cooper-Clark’s interest in the camp was piqued by a 1994 article titled ‘From Lisbon to Jamaica: Study of British Refugee Rescue During the second World War’, written by Paul R. Bartrop, an Australian Holocaust scholar and researcher who had met two former Gibraltar Camp refugees and travelled to Jamaica to research Gibraltar Camp.
Apart from the article, Cooper-Clark said there was absolutely no significant academic material about the camp, “no sustained scholarship” about Jamaica’s connection to the Holocaust, and that is how her book came about.
It is a composite of CooperClark’s own perspective about the Holocaust, commentaries, reflections, and poignant narratives by some of the camp survivors whom she met through various means, some exhaustively, others serendipitously. Their stories are the focus of the book. Some had never told their stories before they did so to Cooper-Clark.
VERY VALUABLE
While policy documents, historical data, scholarly research, etc, are “very valuable to ground the context of the work, without the personal stories, rather than the public ones”, she said her work would have been a “history without heart”, “abstractions and generalities with no life”, as well as “statistics, dates, policies, and numbers with no soul”.
So she got the some of the Jewish refugees to open upon their heart and soul and unearth their stories, and the stories of the 17 survivors in the book are the stories of the last witnesses to the Holocaust, she said. In the audience was Inez Baker, a Dutch Holocaust survivor who lived at Gibraltar Camp, her two sons; and a nephew. They were in Jamaica on a Gibraltar Camp reunion programme organised by Cooper-Clark and Ainsley Henriques. Inez’s story is told in the book.
“Their stories need to permeate the centres of historical and Holocaust consciousness so that their testimony can penetrate the silence of ignorance or guilt and resurrect lives lost and lived,” Cooper-Clark writes in the book, which also discusses the relationship between the Jewish refugees and the Jamaican Jews.
In her presentation at the Courtleigh, she, who is not a Jew, said we must never forget Jamaica’s role in the Holocaust narrative. It is a story that was “invisible” and “marginalised” up until recently, she said. Cooper-Clark’s seminal piece of work has certainly shed much light on the littleknown story of Gibraltar Camp. It is a very interesting and educational publication.