crossing the river essay

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Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River and the Chorus of Archival Memory

2017, Commonwealth Essays and Studies

Starting from the vocal nature of Crossing the River, the article looks at Caryl Phillips's archives housed at the Beinecke Library and thereby attempts to retrieve the voices that did not make it into the book, but which are nonetheless important pieces in the writers's imaginative universe. This article will refer to three thematically linked radio plays as well as an early draft of the third section of the 1993 novel.

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This paper deals with Caryl Phillips, a contemporary British author of Caribbean descent, whose work, both fiction and non-fiction, testifies to his interest in music, both thematically and formally: countless references to music can be found in the titles of his books, in scenes involving musical performances, in the use in the narrative of musical terminology, but also in intriguing structural analogies with musical forms. My proposal is to analyse the influence of music in Phillips’s novel Crossing the River (1993; London: Vintage), which has been described as his most jazzy text. Very much like jazz -- which is for the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite “a cry from the heart of the hurt man”-- Phillips’s writing gives a voice to the victims of history, to shattered individuals in pain whose tragic fate is viewed at once as personal and collective. The novel not only illustrates the thematic overlaps between his narrative and the issues addressed in the lyrics of the African American musical tradition, such as discrimination and family disruption, but also exemplifies the author’s formal musical influence through the recurrent and creative use of meaningful variations in rhythm and of repetitions, which are again focal constituents of jazz. Throughout the novel, especially in the sections framing the narrative, the continual modulation of purposeful words such as “listen”, the variation of rhythm through punctuation and stressed/unstressed syllables, the reiterated elements, create a sonic pattern that goes over and over in the readers’ mind. My contention is that Phillips’s musical language crucially contributes to the emotional impact of his lyrical prose, which generates in the readers mixed feelings of sympathy and disorientation and prevents them from forgetting the characters’ stories which resonate long after closing the book.

Lamar Journal of the Humanities, 2017

The main focus in this article is to show why Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River can be considered a jazz novel and specifically how its rhythmic quality is achieved. The article also seeks to develop an informed understanding of Phillips’s use of music in a way that reflects its significance in the postcolonial context.

CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research - Zenodo, 2013

The present paper is an attempt to examine Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River from postcolonial perspective. Caryl Phillips is one of the most reflective international writers, who continuously deals with problems of blacks .Caryl Phillips' Crossing the River is one of the most interesting postcolonial novels ,shortlisted for the Booker Prize that presents evidences of grim reality of the blacks, their shattered families, and struggle for survival. Phillips not only voiced the problems of marginalized but also made a personal crusade for equality through his writings. As we know, various talented writers have enriched contemporary postcolonial English literature. However, Caryl Phillips' contribution to English fiction is realistic, formal, and thematic. He is one of the few genuinely sensitive and creative writers .He has achieved international status among post-colonial Black British writers who belong to second generation and have opened new subject for British writers. The vexing question of belongings is literally at the heart of Caryl Phillips' writing. Mostly he prefers issues about the legacy of Atlantic slave trade and its consequences for the African Diaspora. He has incessantly writing about rootlessness, disinheritance, racism, and hybridity. It is fact that no man is free from the impact of social forces and life around him. The environment in which he grows conditions man's character. Similarly, Caryl Phillips was the product of racial discrimination in society. The racial experiences he has explored in his novels are results of his first hand experiences. Therefore, we can trace strong autobiographical element in his writing.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 2017

The article seeks to give an overview of Phillips’s musical prose and to gauge its emotional impact on the readers. It concentrates on three novels by Phillips: The Lost Child (2015) where music is thematically present, The Nature of Blood (1997) which stylistically approximates music, and Dancing in the Dark (2005) which relies on both forms of relations between music and literature.

Caryl Phillips’s delineation of history in Crossing the River (1993) and Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007) is dependent on a narrative approach that is polyphonic in its presentation of different voices and the expression of competing histories in a variety of narrative forms. Phillips’s narrative modes range from the biographical to the epistolary and, in Foreigners: Three English Lives, the juxtaposition of archival accounts of the history of Leeds against David Oluwale’s dislocation in the city and its institutions. In the presentation of voices belonging to those both complicit in, and ensnared by, the vicissitudes and intersections of the histories of Europe, the Americas and Africa, Phillips presents opportunities for the reception of narrative without recourse to a didactic approach for the understanding of history. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, the narrative technique employed is that of ‘literary montage’ as Phillips draws, in the opening of Crossing the River, on Conrad...

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2018

SEPC (Société d'études des pays du Commonwealth)

Lectures du monde anglophone: Special Issue, Inhabiting the Void of History, 2019

Caryl Phillips’s delineation of history in Crossing the River (1993) and Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007) depends on a narrative approach that is polyphonic in its presentation of different voices and the expression of competing histories in a variety of narrative forms. Phillips’s narrative modes range from the biographical to the epistolary and, in Foreigners: Three English Lives, the juxtaposition of archival accounts of the history of Leeds against David Oluwale’s dislocation in the city and its institutions. In the presentation of voices belonging to those both complicit in, and ensnared by, the vicissitudes and intersections of the histories of Europe, the Americas and Africa, Phillips presents opportunities for the reception of narrative without resorting to a didactic approach for the understanding of history. In Walter Benjamin’s terms, the narrative technique employed is that of “literary montage” as Phillips draws, in the opening of Crossing the River, on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in a narrative move that belies the continuities of the Enlightenment project and its civilizing proclamations. Here Phillips returns to, yet also inverts, Conradian modernism. As with Benjamin’s intention in The Arcades Project, Phillips “needn’t say anything. Merely show”. Rather than approach history in Enlightenment terms, as progressive continuity, Phillips’s elliptical, disjointed and juxtapositional narratives illuminate time and space in ways that correspond with Benjamin’s “constellation” of unfixed points, both vanishing and re-emergent. For Benjamin, “history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance”. In Crossing the River this remembrance is communal and transcendent of time, space and history as the voice of the African farmer both opens and closes the novel and encompasses the experiences of his three children across two hundred and fifty years and three continents. The farmer claims that “there are no paths in water”, echoing the fluidity and malleability of both Phillips’s narrative form and history itself.

African American Review

ARIEL, 2018

In the third narrative of Crossing the River, which includes Captain Hamilton’s edited journal of his voyage to West Africa and correspondence to his wife, Caryl Phillips proposes both pastiche – through the imitation of the style of John Newton’s authentic logbook, Journal of a Slave Trader (1750-54), and of his letters to his wife – and a process of montage or collage through the inclusion of barely amended extracts from Newton’s original documents. Critics have disagreed about the proportion of appropriation and creation in that third section, with some of them insisting on the creative transformation and transposition of the historical documents, thus situating Phillips within a postcolonial and postmodernist tradition of reworking of past authoritative texts, while others – more specifically Marcus Wood in his detailed and incisive comparison of the various texts – have argued that Phillips excessively relies on the original text while simultaneously reducing its complexities. The aim of this paper is to compare Newton’s and Hamilton’s logbooks so as to assess the achievement of a twentieth-century Caribbean-English writer in his ventriloquism of an eighteenth-century slave captain within a historical narrative that is wedged between two fictional accounts by marginalized female characters.

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Crossing the River Summary & Study Guide

Crossing the River Summary & Study Guide Description

The first section of Crossing the River is a novella, "The Pagan Coast," the tale of an ill-fated project of the American Colonization Society to educate slaves in Christian ways and then ship them to Liberia where they will carry the Gospel to the pagans in the interior of Africa. The central characters are Nash and Edward Williams. Edward is a well-meaning but naive slave owner in Virginia, and Nash is his slave, whom he adopts into his family at an early age. When Nash is a young man, groomed for the task and on fire for the mission, Edward sends him to Liberia, where he faithfully sets out to civilize the savages. Gradually - and due in part to a breakdown in communications, which prevents Edward from receiving his letters - Nash becomes disillusioned with the ways of the white man and the notion that white civilization will work in Africa. The life in Africa is harsh, and many of the transported former slaves die from fever and other diseases. Eventually, Edward travels to Africa to find Nash. By the time Edward reaches the village that Nash established, however, his former slave is dead, and all that remains of his work is a village of lethargic blacks living in the same squalor as the other natives. The shock is too much for the self-righteous Edward, and he goes mad.

The second work in the collection, "West," is a short vignette involving an old escaped slave named Martha, who is abandoned by fellow blacks in a doorway in Denver, Colorado during a winter blizzard. The abandonment is not an act of cruelty, but necessity. She was attached to a wagon train of blacks headed for California in the mid-1800s and grew too ill to continue. Martha is near death, and in her fevered hallucinations, she relives segments of her past. She, her husband and their only child, a daughter, are sold to different owners when their original master dies. Martha escapes from her new owners and flees to Dodge City, Kansas. There, as a free black, she falls in love with a black cowboy and opens a restaurant. When her cowboy is killed in a gunfight, she moves to Leavenworth, Kansas and opens a laundry. There she meets the wagon master, who agrees to take her west with his train. While she is shivering in the Denver doorway, a mysterious white woman discovers her and takes her to an unheated cabin, where Martha dies in the night. When the white woman returns to find the corpse in the morning, she realizes that she never asked Martha's name, and she frets over the necessity to give her a Christian name, so that she might receive a Christian burial.

The third work bears the same title as the novel, "Crossing the River," and takes the form of a ship's log. Captained by Englishman James Hamilton, the ship sets sail from Bristol in August of 1752, bound for the Gold Coast of Africa to take on a cargo of slaves. Through his truncated entries in his log, Hamilton emerges as an intelligent merchant and competent seaman, stern but fair with his crew and aware at a visceral level of the inconsistency between his Christian beliefs and the inhumanity of the trade that he has inherited from his recently deceased father. Yet, he goes about the business of dealing in human bondage with what is referred to as "commercial detachment" from the misery to which he is contributing. The prevailing attitude is that business is business. Cargo is cargo, and while gentlemen must deal with their colleagues and peers ethically and morally, such niceties do not extend to cargo.

Phillips paints a picture of the Gold Coast slave trade as something that is no particular group's fault. Ultimately, the original sellers of slaves are black men, though there may be white intermediaries between the various points of sale. It is not a racial or moral issue; it is business. Hamilton's more-refined nature emerges in two adolescent letters to his bride back in England, extolling her purity and pledging his undying fidelity. He sees the horrors he encounters in the slave business as enabling the idyllic and genteel future he sees for his wife, himself and the proper English family they will produce. In his mind, that noble end seems to justify the barbaric means.

Hamilton is haunted by the mysterious circumstances surrounding his father's death on his final voyage to Africa. A trader named Ellis knows the secret, but he will not reveal the details. He states, however, that no man associated with James's father should call himself a Christian. James knows that his father battled with the dichotomy of trying to maintain Christian beliefs while dealing in slaves, and the implication is that the conflict drove him mad.

"Somewhere in England" is the final independent work within the novel Crossing the River. The action takes place between 1936 and 1945, with a brief interlude looking forward to 1963 at the end. The novella-length piece is presented in a journal or diary form in the voice of Joyce, a young woman during the years leading up to and through World War II. Consistent with the title, the small town and smaller village from which Joyce observes wartime England remain unnamed. Joyce is not a happy 1ass, continually nagged by her neurotic mother who has never gotten over the death of her military husband in the First World War and has taken refuge in religious zealotry. Joyce marries a shopkeeper named Len from a small village near the town where she lives with her mother. Len is a bit of a dolt, and Joyce knows almost immediately that the marriage is a mistake, following as it does on the heels of an earlier romance-gone-bad that ended in an abortion.

Len eventually goes to prison for dealing in the black market during the war, leaving Joyce to run the village shop. The U.S. Army stations a detachment of black soldiers near the village where Joyce lives, and she falls in love with one of the officers named Travis. She becomes pregnant by Travis just before he is shipped off to Italy. He is able to return on leave to marry Joyce - whose divorce from Len is finally settled - just days before the birth of their baby, Greer. Travis is killed in Italy, and Joyce is forced to give Greer up to the county as a war orphan. The only time she sees him again is in 1963, when he comes as a young man to visit her in a new life. Joyce secretly continues to love Travis, even in her new life, and she is portrayed as a good person, caught up in bigotry and circumstances beyond her control.

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