Middle Passages

In Caryl Phillips' work, people are rarely at home. Caribbean citizens go to England in search of employment; British people tour the empire; Africans travel in the holds of slave ships to be deposited in West Indian plantations. Their displacement makes them uneasy storytellers and unreliable narrators, but it also heightens their awareness of their surroundings. They pay close attention, and even when they misinterpret what they see, their observations have a nervous, vibrant edge.

Phillips, a sort of permanent traveler himself, is well acquainted with the visitor's perspective of his fictional creations. The 35-year-old novelist was born in Saint Kitts in the West Indies, moved to England the same year, graduated from Oxford and now divides his time between London, St. Kitts and Amherst College, where he teaches writing.

"I never use the word home," he says. "I feel okay in the East Coast, I feel Okay in England, I feel Okay in the Caribbean. But at the same time I don't feel centered in any of those places. It used to be worrisome. As a kid I used to think there was some virtue in having a place, a town or street that you went back to that was your home. But I've come to terms with the fact that maybe for the job I do it's as well that I have a number of perspectives on things."

These multiple perspectives inform Cambridge, his fourth and best selling novel so far, recently reissued in paperback. A historical novel set in the early 19th century, the book narrates the journey of the Englishwoman Emily Cartwright to an unnamed Caribbean is land to look after affairs on her father's plantation estate. Part of the book is told from her point of view, part from that of an educated, African-born Christian slave named Cambridge.

Phillips says the book's tone differs markedly from what he'd originally intended. When he conceived of the two characters, it seemed obvious to him which would emerge as the more sympathetic. Emily, filled with the racist and imperialist nations of her nation and era, was to be "okay, but, you know, a bit of a dick head at the end of the day;" Cambridge's final section would respond with a triumphant, militant condemnation of her arrogance, "kind of 'oh me, oh my, what a terrible institution this is, how dare they?;'" Phillips says.

The reader expects this structure, even craves it. But Phillips refrains from easing the tension of the narrative, instead depicting two characters much more ambiguous in their views on race, slavery and one another. In the book's final version, Emily's bigotry is accompanied by doubt and fear; and Cambridge is not the anti-imperialist freedom fighter we expect, but a complicated man who resents not only his own enslavement, but also being forced to live among the "heathens" who are his fellow slaves.

Phillips says these characters ended up this way for reasons having to do with his own life and his concern for historical accuracy. He found himself growing more sympathetic with Emily because "two elements about her mirrored my own life. Women in the early nineteenth century in English society were incredibly marginalized; they were looked upon as little more than kids, basically, who you had to patronize and tolerate. To some extent as a kid growing up in England that's how I felt. The other thing was, [Emily] made a journey to the Caribbean. When I left college, that's what I did. I think subconsciously those two facts keyed me into something about [Emily]...I didn't like what she thought, but I pitied her in her isolation."

And the slave Cambridge, Phillips realized, simply could not accommodate contemporary conceptions of Black assimilation and resistance. "If you were a slave in the nineteenth century and you had the power of self-expression and self-insight that would be necessary to write the way Cambridge does, there was a good chance you'd acquired those skills from the Bible. [So] there was a damned good chance you were a dyed-in-the-wool Christian, and [that] you had a very strange and haughty and self-regarding view of yourself vis a vis the other slaves. You would think you were better, different."

This complexity of character makes Cambridge singular among historical novels, a genre usually so intent on showing the constancy of human nature, on proving that people "back then" were "just like you and me." Emily and Cambridge are indeed recognizable human characters, but they remain largely locked in the ideologies of their time. Emily considers herself a liberal even as she casually spews racist rhetoric; the proud slave Cambridge despises his African birthplace and views his own unconverted wife as a degenerate. Phillips' almost brutal insistence on historical accuracy renders these characters at once alien and sympathetic. It is this combination which makes Cambridge so disturbing and powerful.

The ornate language which uncannily mimics nineteenth century prose also contributes to this distancing effect. Nailing down the antiquated style presented some difficulties; an Edinburgh scholar of the time period's nonfiction checked Phillips' manuscripts for anachronistic syntax. The language produces an almost surreally understated voice that allows Phillips to write about the horrors of slavery in a eerie, muted fashion. As he says, "you've got all these massive dramas going on--people living in the most unbelievable poverty, people being killed--and [Emily's] writing about it as if it's very polite after dinner conversation."

The transatlantic wanderings in Cambridge echo the journeys in Phillips' other writings. In his work, people retrace almost obsessively the old routes of the triangle trade linking Britain to the Americas and Africa. For Phillips, these voyages are not matters of the remote past but pressing concerns for today; the facts of empire and slavery determined the political shape of much of the contemporary world.

He explored the European side of the issue in his single work of nonfiction, The European Tribe (1987), out of print until a reissue this year. Six years ago some labeled the book outlandish for contending that Europeans maintain tribal ethnic identities. Today, these essays seem prophetic of the bloody conflicts and surging nationalism there.

Phillips believes these problems will grow as the after-effects of European imperialism continue. Burgeoning African and Caribbean communities in the heart of Europe present a challenge to European national identities similar to the one that has raged in multiracial America since the first settlers arrived. "In European society generally, identity is very closely tied in with ethnicity. Europe has to come to terms with the fact that there are [former] colonies all over the world. When those people decide they want to come back and live in the mother country, they're told 'after all, you're not really Dutch' or 'you're not really French.'"

The issue of empire adds a complicating element to his reception in this country. American publishers, catering to a society which still insists on racially segregated literary traditions, tout Phillips as a part of a "new wave of young Black writers," along with novelists like Darryl Pinckney and Charles Johnson. But Phillips says he fits in more with other British writers who were "born in the old empire...People like Hanif Kureishi, Ben Okri and Salman Rushdie...In the last ten years or so a lot of British writers have had a fix from another part of the world and have changed the notion of what constitutes British writing quite radically."

Like these authors, Phillips has received increasing critical and popular attention, and while grateful, he's wary of getting comfortable with celebrity. "There's a tendency to make icons of writers, to turn them into cultural artifacts that you put on the mantle piece and you look at and you praise--in other words you make it clear to the writer that they've arrived and they don't have to write anymore." But he still seems a long way from becoming what he calls "a writer no longer writing." A new novel, Crossing the River, will be published in England in May, and he says he may try another nonfiction book in the future.

In the meantime, teaching at Amherst keeps him "grounded" and receptive to ideas that may provide the material for the passionate commitment writing a book requires. "An idea will only take you to tomorrow or to next week. Unless it becomes an obsession that's going to support you for two or three years, forget it. You never quite know when an idea has become an obsession. You can't make that change; there's no kind of alchemy you can apply to it. You just have to sit tight and hope."