sea it creates a distance which speaks to isolation and alienation, to incursions and violence, thereby confirming Derek Walcott’s statement that “the sea is history.”24 On the other hand, it facilitates mobility with its underwater con-
nections by way of currents and flows, undersea networks that absorb even as they connect all cultures, enabling Kamau Brathwaite’s perspective that the “unity is submarine.”25
It bears repeating that, in addition to its basic divisions, Phillips’s travel- ogue contains documentary material, and three fictionalized narratives relat- ing the individual histories of three men caught up in the effects of slavery. His use of the documentary is significant in terms of the relationship between authorial ideology and generic convention. When he inserts in the account of his travels already established documentary material, actual histories, and his- torical references, he is undermining the notion of history as linear, but, even as he does so, in his application of the documentary he is ascribing to his text the conventional, and normally incontrovertible, marker of authority and au- thentic truth, and effectively tethering his journey to Black-Atlantic historical reality. In short, he establishes the trustworthiness of his travelogue.
The three fictionalized narratives of Philip Quaque, John Ocansey, and Judge J. Waties Waring, spread across the three chapters, span the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. These narratives evoke the developmental trajectory of Phillips’s poetic – that movement from a seemingly linear narra- tive to the experimental and disruptive postmodernist forms of his later works. All three stories, told by a flatly assertive third-person narrator, feature funda- mentally linear plots that serve to underscore the relentlessly controlling forces of colonialism and the rigid, implacable nature of racism. On the other hand, the interruptions within each narrative by way of such sub-generic material as extracts from letters and court documents re-create the disruptive worlds of these people, their dislocation and relocation. Ocansey’s journey to Britain to right wrongs, Quaque’s English education and his conversion to Christianity, as well as Judge Waring’s social and professional demise, for ex- ample, symbolize the existential legacy of slavery manifested in the vicissi- tudes of inter-cultural encounters, alienation, ontological transformation, and loss.
24 Derek Walcott, “The Sea is History” (1979), Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (London:
Faber & Faber, 1992): 364–66.
25 Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integra-
The stories of Ocansey, Quaque, and Waring also bear the common mar- kers of movement. In fact, journeys constitute an important trope to emblema- tize rupture and dislocation, and many types of displacement converge in The
Atlantic Sound. Geographically, the three narratives locate the trajectory of
the slave trade. Consequently, although overtly all of the journeys are person- ally willed by the respective traveller, they are also focalized through the archetypal triangular voyage and specifically the Middle Passage. The Ocan- sey and Quaque narratives, in particular, recount actual physical crossings which, contextually, relate to England’s relationship with Africa. These trav- els involve, in the case of Quaque, a quest for knowledge as he goes to Eng- land for education and, in the process, undertakes a possible journey from self. Ocansey’s expedition works as a quest for justice. So does Waring’s, with the additional complexity that his is also a psychological journey, during which he is displaced by his social environment. Waring’s displacement is evident in Phillips’s reconstruction of his life. Thus, as the writer moves through the South Carolina city of Charleston, interviewing and meeting with the judge’s various acquaintances, he narrates and constructs a moving tab- leau depicting the coming into awareness and the resulting social alienation of the judge.
In The Atlantic Sound, the ship, aircraft, and the car are dominant motifs
that denote modes of transport as well as tropes of the centrality of journeys in Black-Atlantic experience. The ship specifically becomes a core metaphor, as a reprise of one of Phillips’s earliest experiences, literally generating his black British condition even as it is the “central organising symbol”26 of Black At-
lanticism. These motifs converge to form what Gail Low describes as “an alternative vision of cross-cultural fertilizations, hybridities, and diasporas.”27
This vision valorizes movement, difference, and fluid indeterminacy, as is evident in The Atlantic Sound’s repeated traversals across what Edward Said designates as “overlapping territories and intertwined histories.”28
Repetition in The Atlantic Sound also functions, inter alia, to illustrate the
nature of oppression as brutal and unending:
26 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge
M A: Harvard U P, 1993): 4.
27 Gail Low, “ ‘ A Chorus of Common Memory’: Slavery and Redemption in Caryl Phil-
lips’s Cambridge and Crossing the River,” Research in African Literatures 29.4 (Winter 1998): 122.
28 See Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993).
For many years the African has been respected. But now the white man has cheated him of nearly everything that he owns. Abandoning his Christian beliefs, he makes desperate sacrifices to native Gods. But they have forgotten him. His life is running aground. The African has dispatched money to the white man. And now his heart is heavy with grief. (A S23, 80)
Repetition in itself stifles – indeed, breaks – linearity and, combined with fragmentation, causes a sense of time as something other than a fixed moment. The combined techniques of starting at the beginning and then later moving backward in time simulate reiteration within the Ocansey story, and so they do across the different sections of the travelogue. Indeed, the Prologue sees Phillips leave the Caribbean, while the next chapter, “Leaving Home,” is devoted to Ocansey’s departure from Africa and suggests that this is how it all started. In the same way, stylistic strategies such as perspectival shifts, which, for example, occur in the switch from Phillips’s first-person account of his journey (AS, 3) to third-person narratives of individuals’ stories (AS, 23) or ‘objective’ recounting of the history of the founding of Liverpool (AS, 37) make the writer both presenter and re-presenter, even while effecting move- ment from the individual to the general.
Phillips also incorporates dialogue that creates ‘factional’ moments, making the text informal and uniquely personal. As well, he constantly interrupts himself,29 not merely because he wants to alleviate the dominance
of his own voice, but to insert other voices. In this sense, then, the shift in perspective enables a broader view, gives depth to the consequences of the slave trade and the development of the Black-Atlantic condition, and creates a dialectical text. In view of this polyphony, it is not surprising that he should employ the technique of Free Indirect Discourse, a fact already men- tioned in passing above. According to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., quoting Zora Neale Hurston, this involves “words walking without masters” which, among other things, “evoke a ‘voice’ or presence” – a presence which, Gates further asserts, “supplements the narrator’s.”30 In The Atlantic Sound, this technique undergirds the Ocansey narrative with urgency and agency. Free Indirect Discourse works to reveal psychological discontent, as it fore- grounds the elder Ocansey’s sense of desperation and impending social and
29 In The Atlantic Sound, the story on Elmina interrupts Phillips’s account of his journey
(157), and the Philip Quaque narrative interrupts the description of Phillips’s visit to Pana- fest (175).
30 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Lite-
personal catastrophe in the face of betrayal. Moreover, it informs the younger man’s need to successfully complete his business in order to return home. In other words, Phillips’s multiple perspectives and use of Free In- direct Discourse validate Michael Ginsberg’s definition of the latter tech- nique as the “way of expression of a divided self.”31
As this essay has attempted to demonstrate, the textual manoeuvres and strategies at work in The European Tribe and The Atlantic Sound are not all about an alteration of existing aesthetics, or the subversion of traditionally held conventions, merely to describe a journey over land and thereby depict the individuality and idiosyncrasies of a continent or two. Shaped by the same revisionist imperatives as Phillips’s fiction, these two travel narratives operate a decentering of eurocentrism by resorting to a politics of black lite- rary filiation and reversing the conventions associated with the white travel- ler’s gaze. They also foreground travel as transculturation and destabilize essentialist discourses of identity, while at the same time documenting colo- nial and imperial histories and legacies. Indeed, Phillips’s travel narratives derive from the disjunctive moment that arises from the conjunction of his postcolonial and postmodern sensibilities and is full of complexities and in- compatibilities. Not only does Phillips’s very condition as a Caribbean-born British subject make it problematic for him to define himself in terms of a particular place, but the condition is itself forged in the crucible of the travel/journey from Columbus to the slave ships of the Middle Passage and the banana boats-cum-passenger ships to Europe. Travel is therefore a sig- nificant part of his life and the physical journey becomes a psychic move- ment to confront his own confusions. Thus, given its pliability, the travel- ogue becomes an apt vessel to accommodate and reflect Phillips’s predica- ment. His travels, or his exploration of other countries, represent his exam- ination of his own displacement, his search for an integrated self. The dia- lectic of being Caribbean and black British reveal Phillips in a psychologi- cal Sargasso Sea. Therefore, in an approach that recognizes not only his plurality but also the imbrications and problematics of identity, Phillips con- structs his subjectivity textually, by way of the travelogue, and experiential- ly by way of the consequences of his many journeyings.
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