—— Reflections upon an Intellectual Life
1RENÉE SCHATTEMAN
H E NE W YO R K TI M E S H A S D E S C R I B E D CA R Y L PH I L L I P S as one of
the great literary giants of our time,2 an appraisal supported by the
sheer number of novels, plays, screenplays, anthologies, radio and television drama and documentaries, and essays he has produced in his more than twenty-five years as a writer and by the broad scope of his interest in issues concerning belonging, identity, and dislocation as they are manifested in multiple points of the African diaspora. Born in St Kitts in the West Indies, raised in England, and currently residing in New York City, Phillips has a his- tory that makes him uniquely positioned to address these concerns. Having experienced the ‘unbelonging’ that was imposed on Caribbean immigrants in England in his early years and having devoted his later years to the explora- tion of dislocation and homelessness, Phillips uses both his fiction and his non-fiction to imagine the lives of people least represented in history, even though they are often the most adversely affected by historical circumstances. His resulting works, in particular the nine novels and four works of non-fic- tion he has written to date, have firmly established him as one of the most important and talented writers of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century.
Since 1987, Phillips has given some fifty interviews that have appeared in a wide range of scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines, online sites, and – increasingly – the popular media. He is an ideal interviewee: articulate, col-
1 This is a slightly revised version of the introduction to Renée T. Schatteman, Conver-
sations with Caryl Phillips (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2009): ix–xviii.
2 George Garrett, “Separate Prisons,” New York Times Book Review (16 February 1992): 25.
legial, sincere, charming, and witty. A social being who appreciates the cama- raderie of others, he has an easy informality about him that causes many of the interviews to resemble a good conversation between friends at a pub, and, in fact, a number of the shorter ones actually were conducted in such a setting. At the same time, Phillips is always completely serious about his writing, an- swering each question he is asked with a precision and intelligence that speak to his deep knowledge about and commitment to his subject-matter. When I asked him why he is so willing to answer questions about his work, he re- sponded that he appreciates the clarifications that can emerge about the pur- pose and direction of his writing from a conversation that consists of tough, far-reaching questions. He explains:
it gives you an opportunity to think about what you really think about [a] subject, about an author, about a particular book, about yourself, about your own development – questions that I never ask myself when I’m sitting at my desk.3
The resulting interviews and profiles can be viewed as Phillips thinking aloud and can be used as important supplements to his writing, for they contain his insights into the factors that have motivated his career and inspired particular texts as well as his understanding of the aesthetic and thematic concerns that make up his writing. As such, the interviews open up new interpretative spaces for understanding the many writings that make up his oeuvre while providing illuminating connections between Caryl Phillips the writer and Caryl Phillips the man.
This willingness to speak so freely about his work may seem out of char- acter for a writer who, by his own admission, remains largely inconspicuous in his writing. As he comments to Louise Yelin when asked about where he positions himself in his novels, “I’m not present, the characters are totally in the fore, I’m invisible. [...] I hide behind the characters and let them have the issues.”4 Phillips has offered multiple reasons for ceding centre stage to his characters and refraining from authorial commentary: to avoid polemic, to seek out understanding rather than judgment, to provide room for his readers to dwell in the gray areas, and to let his characters have a voice, since they are so frequently excluded from other, more official narratives. This tendency to
3 Caryl Phillips, “Caryl Phillips: Reflections on the Past Twenty-Five Years,” by Renée
Schatteman, Conversations with Caryl Phillips, 169–70.
4 Caryl Phillips, “An Interview with Caryl Phillips,” by Louise Yelin, Culturefront 7.2
stand in the wings is in keeping with certain elements of Phillips’s public per- sona, for, while he is strikingly open about this intellectual life, he carefully guards his personal life and avoids anything that smacks of celebrity. As he tells Charles Wilkin,
people are always very interested in the lives of artists, of painters, musi- cians, writers, poets; they want to know the man or the woman behind the work. I’m quite reluctant to let things drift in that direction.5
When considering an entire body of interviews given over a period of more than twenty years, one might expect that the shifts over time would prove the most interesting, but that is not the case with Phillips. What is most striking is the consistency of his reflections and the particular points that are repeated, albeit in a variety of forms. This consistency is most obvious in his recollec- tions of his personal history. Phillips holds no cloak of privacy over his past as he does his present; instead, he is particularly forthcoming, especially about those touchstone moments that were critical to his identity-formation. His recollections, which work their way into nearly all of his interviews to some degree, are focused on three specific times in his life: his early years as a black youth growing up in a white working-class neighbourhood in Leeds, his university years when he was a student at Oxford and made his first trip to the U S A, and his return to the Caribbean in his twenties, especially his first visit there since his original departure at only three months of age. The fact that memories from his past have had such resonance gives credence to Stephen Clingman’s point about the striking degree “to which the personal, the bio- graphical, and [the] writing are interlinked” in this author’s work.6
Phillips has never softened the recounting of his childhood. As he tells Maya Jaggi,
objectively, my childhood was massively dysfunctional and traumatic. I have no happy memories of it. But I never felt deprived; I played with the cards I was dealt.7
The causes of his trauma were multiple. Being from the only black family in a white community, he suffered the verbal and physical abuse of being chased
5 Caryl Phillips, “Interview with Caryl Phillips,” by Charles Wilkin, W I N N F M, 23
December 2002 (Basseterre, St Kitts), in Conversations with Caryl Phillips, 119.
6 Caryl Phillips, “Other Voices: An Interview with Caryl Phillips” (October 2001), by
Stephen Clingman, Salmagundi 143 (2004): 113.
down the street by other boys, the emotional turmoil of being best friends with someone one day and ignored the next – an event he says that “was often tinged with racial overtones”8 – and the discomfort of being torn between a
British and West Indian culture. He also faced challenges in his home setting that added to the precariousness he felt as the child of immigrants in the out- side world. He felt confusion about his Caribbean heritage because his par- ents, who were of the pioneer generation, were anxious to root themselves in England and consequently did not talk about back home. This was particu- larly difficult, he tells Pico Iyer, because Leeds was
a very kind of rooted part of England, very working class, extended family. A place where everybody is going to see their mam, their gran, or their aunt […]. I had my mother, and my father, and my brothers, and that’s it. So, the primary displacement I felt was growing up in such a tight community with- out a sense of extended family.9
Home was made even more elusive for Phillips when his parents divorced and afterwards when his mother struggled with serious illness. For a period of time, he and his brothers had to be fostered out, or, as he expressed it, “cargoed around between white families in the north of England,”10 and later he lived with his father from the ages of fourteen to eighteen, also due to his mother’s health problems.
Phillips’s childhood was also one in which gender and class figured pro- minently. Growing up working-class in England determined his identity as much as did his race, and living primarily in a female-ruled household made him especially sensitive to the struggles of his female characters. Various interviewers have commented on Phillips’s ability to successfully capture female voices, and he himself admits to being drawn to women’s viewpoints because they are often more honest, impassioned, and complex than men’s and because gender issues are so inextricably tied to issues of race and class. Describing his childhood as a time of profound silence about his identity, he suggests that this deprivation led him to use his writing to give voiceless peo- ple a chance to tell their own stories and consequently write themselves into history. Additionally, he often makes note of the importance of his learning
8 Caryl Phillips, “Disrupting the Master Narrative: An Interview with Caryl Phillips,” by
Renée Schatteman, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 23.2 (2001): 100.
9 Caryl Phillips, “Caryl Phillips,” interview with Pico Iyer, Lannan Foundation, Director
Dan Griggs, 1995, in Conversations with Caryl Phillips, 38.
about antisemitism and the Holocaust as a teenager because he could finally relate the hardships of his own life to a people’s story, even if it was not his own people or his own story. His first short fiction, in fact, was about a Dutch Jewish boy and was written in 1973 after watching a TV documentary about the German occupation of the Netherlands.
Phillips’s early years are critical to his writing because it is during this period that he gained the experiential knowledge of themes that would later infuse his fiction; the other touchstone moments from his past reflect periods when he began to understand the causes of the crucible he had had to endure. During his university years, he began to demythologize the concept of class when he learned that students who came from supposedly better stock were no more intelligent or sophisticated than he. He experienced racism anew, even though he was one of the more outgoing and socially active students on campus, but now he could contextualize the racial slurs against him in relation to the race riots that were taking place in Notting Hill in 1976. He also gained a heightened identification with blackness when he visited the U S A during the summer before his last year at university and learned of the African- American literary tradition. As he recounts in many interviews, during this trip he purchased a copy of Richard Wright’s Native Son while visiting Laguna Beach, California, and began reading it one morning. He did not rise from the chair until he had finished the novel as the sun was setting in the ocean, and he did so with the newly discovered intention of becoming a writer himself. The importance of his identification with African-American identity issues in the absence of a well-articulated black British identity cannot be overestimated. When he returned from his journey, he intended to do thesis work on African-American literature, as “a not too subtle way of trying to synthesize Laguna Beach with Oxford,”11 but he discovered that the univer-
sity library did not have any of the resources needed, even though American fiction was supposedly an available option. His frustration at this under-repre- sentation of minority voices would give him the determination to make sure that his own books would one day be found in the stacks of the Bodleian. Phillips started writing plays after university, but it was his trip to St Kitts in 1980 that gave him distance from England and attachment to his place of origin, both of which he needed to begin to write fiction that could contain his own story. As he tells Maya Jaggi, “the trip liberated me. It kicked my brain out of a British perspective; I realised the narrative didn’t begin in Leeds or