CHAPTER 1

INTODUCTION

Caryl Phillips is a very prolific contemporary Caribbean author in English and he belongs
to the second generation of Caribbean writers in Britain as he came at a very early age with his
parents in the 1950s. The themes of his works range from slavery, colonialism, independence to
migration, Holocaust, racism, national and cultural identity and many others.

Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 in St. Kitts, West Indies, and went with his family to
England that same year. He was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. He has written
numerous novels, scripts for film, theater, radio, and television; and his book The European
Tribe, a book of nonfiction that won the 1987 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize. His novels
that are analyzed are The Final Passage, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Crossing the
River, A Distant Shore and In the Falling Snow.

Slaves are the most exploited among the human race. It is a new phenomenon which
attracted the attention globally. Earlier, slave narratives were not considered worthy of study in
the academia. Although slavery had been abolished in America, it continues till today
subconsciously in indirect way just like the untouchability in India. Hence, Neo-slave narratives
are the ones which depict the traumatic experiences in the works written by the second or third
generation immigrants. Most of them are semi-autobiographical. These narratives focus on the
invisible shades of slavery that prevails in the postmodern globalized world.

Caryl Phillips‘s first two novels are The Final Passage and A State of Independence.
These are treated as neo-slave narratives. The novels deal with the burning issues of poverty,
illness, migration, racism, hybridity and complications in human trafficking.

The Final Passage deals with Leila Preston‘s migration to England, not only in search of
her mother, but also in search of a job and security of life (even for her son). Worse than that, she
takes her spoilt husband Michael with her for social protection who betrays her. Then finally,
mother‘s death, financial difficulty and marriage failure make her plan for returning to St Kitts in
the West Indies. So the final passage fails.
 The novel entails such issues as her hybridity (because she is a mulato), racism, poverty
and failure in human relationships. Caryl Phillips‘ second novel A State of Independence
continues the first novel‘s final motif i.e., that of return migration, which is a dominant issue in
West Indies-England relationship lately. In fact, the whole thing is borne out of the author‘s visit
to St Kitts, the Carribbea, after the island got its independence. A State of Independence a
bitterly ironic commentary on the empty ‗independence‘ of that small Caribbean island told
from the souring Olekar 11 perspective of a middle age man when a returned native sees the road
ahead, which he had imagined bright with promise, now clogged with failed expectations,
opportunities gone by, and love and loyalties of family and friends wasted away.

The year is 1958, Leila is a 19-year-old woman who has to care for her very sick mother.
She has never known her father, and her mother, who is only 40, has even refrained from telling
her about him. As her skin is lighter than that of most of the other islanders she believes that she
was the product of an affair her mother must have had with a white man. That, she thinks, would
also explain her mother's distrust of white people, an attitude she has always tried to pass on to
her daughter. Leila has a very good friend in Millie, who is more down to earth and knows much
better what she wants to achieve in life.

Leila's boyfriend Michael, who is in his early twenties, is an irresponsible young man
whose main interests are sex and drink. He does odd delivery jobs on his scooter for his friend
Bradeth, but most time of the day the two men can be seen outside one of the small bars getting
drunk on beer. Michael has fathered an illegitimate child but has not made any real effort to
move in with its mother. Rather, as his own parents are dead, he still lives in his grandmother's
house.

Rather than wait for Arthur, who has declared his love for her but left the island
promising to come back soon, Leila has set her eyes on Michael, who before long agrees to
become her husband. However, their marriage gets off to a bad start and cannot even be patched
up when their son Calvin is born, whom Michael at first does not even come to visit. One day
Leila is shocked to find her mother gone. A letter informs her that on her doctor's advice she has
left for England in order to seek medical treatment there.
 Leila finds life on the small island increasingly unbearable, and her wish to emigrate to
England and to reunite with her mother becomes stronger and stronger. It turns out that Michael
is not averse to the idea, and so Leila arranges everything for her young family's "final passage."
Bradeth and Millie, who are also a couple now expecting their second child, cannot be persuaded
to leave with them.

People leave in masses, the huge ship is packed with emigrants most of whom are lured
away from their home by the prospect of a better life. All they can go on, however, are snippets
of pseudo-information, misconceptions, things they picked up when they were at school,
exaggerated stories told by returnees, and second- or third-hand advice on how to tackle life in
England. Michael, for example, just like other young black men on board their ship, is secretly
looking forward to having promiscuous sex with white women, having been told by his friend
Bradeth that he heard "about one coloured man out there who writing home saying he be having
at least three or four different white girls a week.”

After a two-week voyage, Michael, Leila and Calvin finally set foot on English soil, have
"nothing to declare except their accents", and eventually arrive at Victoria on the boat train from
Dover with only her mother's address and some money to start a new life with. They take a taxi
to the fictitious Quaxley Street only to be faced with a shabby, overcrowded house divided into
several bedsits, and her mother gone again. Leila learns that she has been in hospital for some
time, and during the following weeks regularly visits her there. However, the heart-to-heart she
has wanted to have with her never takes place as her health rapidly deteriorates. She dies soon
afterwards.

As newly arrived immigrants belonging to a visible minority who are looking for suitable
accommodation and a regular income, Leila and Michael experience the kind of racism, petty
and otherwise, prevalent in a city inhabited almost solely by whites which is suddenly being
flooded by dark-skinned "foreigners". They fall prey to unscrupulous estate agents, and Michael
soon returns to his habit of coming and going whenever he chooses to, leaving all household
chores to Leila. He stops talking to his wife, is frequently drunk again and quits his job after only
a few days to "go into business" together with a newly found friend of his. Also, Leila discovers
a blonde hair on the shoulder of his jacket and draws her own conclusions. When she realises
that they have run out of money she starts working on the buses, but on her first day she has a
breakdown and is informed by the examining doctor that she is pregnant again. At the end of the
novel Leila has come to realise that Michael is not going to be part of her future.

The novel is divided into five chapters of unequal length entitled "The End," "Home,"
"England," "The Passage," and "Winter." Basically narrated in chronological order, it does
contain a series of flashbacks mainly outlining episodes of Leila's past life in the Caribbean
island.

Caryl Phillips’s second novel A State of Independence narrates events experienced by

returnee Francis Bertram in his Caribbean island “home” on the eve of its independence from
Britain after an absence of twenty years in England on a frustrated scholarship enterprise.
Bertram seems to revolve around three encounters, namely, with his mother, with his former
schoolmate Jackson Clayton and with his former girlfriend Patsy Archibald.

These meetings reveal the protagonist’s condition as a diasporic returnee. In the first
place, Bertram’s roaming to and from the capital and his visits to his mother’s house, to the bar,
to the hotel, in the countryside, in the streets of Baytown are typical of the diasporic subject
returning home. The narrator reveals Bertram’s ambiguous state of mind through words and
expressions (“don’t know”; “wondered”, “uncertain”, “no idea”, “unsure”; “confused”;
“unclear”, “mystified”; “assumed”) that indicate a not-at-home-ness as a consequence of his
dislocation from the margin to the imperial centre twenty years ago and from the imperial centre
to the margin, with the consequent contrasting awareness of the difference between the two dates
(Ashcroft et al. 1998). In the second place, Bertram become gradually aware of the underlying
“life-lie”, the unrecognized and unconscious self-delusion that he may contribute towards the
“independence” of his island home.

However, the harshness of reality brings him to the conclusion that, as a returned
diasporic Caribbean, he simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the place. In fact the
three encounters occur when Bertram is in a state of uncertainty and confusion due to the
ambiguity of his condition.

Bertram Francis is coming home to St. Kitts after 20 years in England, where he had been
sent at 19 as winner of an island‘s scholarship. Now he is returning to help the new nation.‘
Perhaps he will open a business, something that does not make him dependent on the white man.
But in the blistered shack of his boyhood, his ill mother turns from him in contempt and he
learns that his younger brother, Dominic, who had adored him has dead. His childhood friend,
Jackson Clayton, now a prosperous wheeler-dealer Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of
Agriculture, Lands, Housing, Labor and Tourism advises him to go back where he came from.

There is always a tendency to compare a writer‘s first novel with the second one. Many
critics and readers think that Phillips´s second novel A State of Independence would be a sequel
to his first one The Final Passage since it had an ambiguous ending. While The Final Passage
addresses the issue of leaving one‘s country of origin and settling in Britain, A State of
Independence primarily focuses on the protagonist‘s homecoming after twenty years in Britain.
On the other hand, both migration to Britain and return migration are actually two sides of the
same coin.

Phillips‘s novels not only examine the predicaments of the African and the Caribbean in
the racialised spaces of America and Britain, but also of the Jews and the Asians who experience
similar gruesome practices especially in racialized spaces of Britain. His fiction, thus, opens
before the reader a vast panorama of racial terror and its psychological consequences.

By juxtaposing the intertwining experiences of the blacks, the Jews and the Asians,
Phillips creates a remarkable representation of individuals weighed down by the forces of
history. That history is racism. Racism has been a powerful weapon for the superiors‘. The
author provides elaborate descriptions about the two pairs, that of Leila and Michael and Bradeth
and Millie. Then the author comments on Michael verses Leila‘s mother issue. The 40 years old
woman Mrs. Franks did not like her daughter marry Michael of Sandy Bay. Because he did not
work. He drank. He did not love people. But Leila held to her gun. There is a lot of family
discourse between Michael and his grandfather. What later Leila saw as flaw in Michael his
grandfather saw it then.

The starting point of Bertram’s dim awareness of his futility in the Caribbean occurs in
the crude dialogue with his old mother and will be reinforced by his encounters with Jackson
Clayton and Patsy Archibald.

The 1807 abolition of the slave trade and the 1834 Emancipation Act in the British
Empire left certain aspects of the physical structure of the slave institution intact, or rather, the
plantations, the sugar mills and the slave quarters were abandoned. They could have been
demolished by the ex-slaves not only as a revenge on their white owners but as an erasure of a
past which was not worth re-viewing. The reason why the historical structures were left standing
by the population may have been its insight that “slavery” was still extant and that the subaltern
will be forever frustrated because of his / her permanent subjugation to the white man.

The ruins or their appropriation by neocapitalist procedures seems to be a depressing scar

that keeps reminding present day Caribbeans that, as in the past, the present is also an illusory
emancipation and independence. Beneath the flags, banners, bands, general hilarious attitudes
and festivities, the same colonial strategies are at work manoeuvred not only by foreigners but,
more ingeniously, by the very people of the place to maintain the island and its population within
the exploitation system.
 CHAPTER 2

NEO SLAVE NARRATIVE IN CARYL PHILLIPES THE FINAL

PASSAGE

In an interview that he gave to Maya Jaggi in 1996, Caryl Phillips states that Immigration
from former colonies has transformed Britain in the past fifty years. Caribbean migration has
made a phenomenal impact‖(Jaggi 157). The mass migration from the colonies to the English
metropolis began with the arrival of Empire Windrush at Dover in 1948. It is estimated that over
one lakh people from the Caribbean migrated to England in the 1950s.

Caryl Phillips‘s The Final Passage is set in the 1950s. Its main protagonist is Leila
Preston, a nineteen-year-old lady from the Caribbean who decides to migrate to England in order
to start afresh. The novel is divided into five parts: The End, Home, England, The Passage and
Winter. Each of them focuses on several aspects of Leila‘s life. Caribbean, a small West Indies
island, thrived with sugarcane in the British times. Though it was the 1950s, only one crop
thrived. Many people got fed up. They wondered as to how to prosper in a small island.

The novel begins with native Caribbean woman Leila‘s anguish. That she wants to
migrate to England. This was in the 1950s as England allowed many a workforce to migrate to
the United Kingdom. The story begins as if Leila‘s end‘ in Caribbean. Hence, the first of the five
sections is called End‘. Leila describes how her husband Michael Preston is a failure in the
native. She hopes to revive his life in London. She has a son called Calvin. Her mother seems to
be in a hospital in London. As a mixed race woman she prides with her nearly white color. She is
optimistic of starting her life afresh. There is a lot of description about how Leila and her friend
Millie pack up suitcases for the journey. The two pack the things that are less and most essential.
Leila‘s marriage to Michael is another source of frustration and distress for her. Their
relationship is shaky from the onset and is a source of tension between Leila and her mother who
warns her about Michael before their marriage: ―the boy from Sandy Bay is no good. He loves
himself too much and he will use you. He don‘t even have a job‖ (Passage 34). Leila‘s mother
Mr.s Franks reads Michael like an open book and her words are prophecies that come true. For
critic Benedicte Ledent, Michael is a parasite.‘ Raised by his grandparents, he is forced to
abandon school when his grandfather dies. He was only thirteen at that time. He has no
qualifications and makes a living out of selling country fruit in the town and weeding the fields.

His girlfriend, Beverly, has given him a son Ivor (and also a bike) but he decides to leave
her for Leila. However, he treats Leila like a pastime and never commits to her seriously. He
constantly hovers between the two women, according to his whims. In the 1996 interview,
Phillips explains his male character‘s oscillating behavior as a normal one in the Caribbean
world:

In the Caribbean context that‘s not a big deal...There‘s a certain honesty to island
societies where the place is so small everybody knows what‘s going on-but nobody wants
to know. In a society like that, if you‘re going to have a mistress, or another woman,
there‘s no point trying to be clandestine about it...Michael‘s behavior there would have
been unquestioned. (Passage 164)

Michael takes advantage by both women Leila and Beverly and offers nothing in
exchange. Commenting on Leila and Michael‘s relationship, Ledent observes that ―Leila and
Michael seem to be instrumental in repeating patterns of domination‖ (Ledent 23). These patterns
are a continuation of the colonizer-colonized relationship and entail abusive attitudes of the
colonizer towards the colonized. They are present even in the private sphere where they regulate
man‘s relationship with his woman. Michael moves in with Beverly when he does no longer
want to stay in his grandmother‘s house. When she buys him a second hand bike, instead of
showing gratitude, Michael despises her for her alleged servility. He gets on the bike and rides
away to St. Patrick to collect Leila, his future wife.

His attitude shows that he considers himself superior to her because he is a man. Michael
considers that he deserves everything and treats women as agents whose only role is to fulfill his
desires. This is too much patriarchy which both women shun. Michael‘s treatment of Leila is
even worse. He deserts her on their wedding day and returns to Beverly. He is not present when
his son, Calvin, is born. When he makes up his mind to leave Beverly and go back to his wife, he
does it out of sheer selfishness not out of consideration for Calvin as Leila first believes.

It is in this socio-political background, Leila decides to migrate to England where at the

time her mother was hospitalized. In the midst of packing Millie alluded to Leila‘s white father.
A little later, the author brings in Francis Gumb‘s Christian inspired endeavor. The bus in which
Leila journeyed from St Patricks Church to Baytown, the capital ran fast. The ship lay at the
quarry as if a means to an end beyond. All this indicated a new hope for Leila. She avoided the
old thing, the traditional sight of breadfruit tree nearby (which Michael sold in market). The ship
lay at the quarry as if a means to an end beyond. All this indicated a new hope for Leila. She
avoided the old thing, the traditional sight of breadfruit tree nearby (which Michael sold in
market).

This complex situation that Phillips encapsulates in the metaphor of the breadfruit trees is
a literary translation of his own view with regard to the Caribbean people‘s migration. In
the same interview with Maya Jaggi he states the following: ―There‘s nothing
glamorous about immigration, it‘s usually made by people under duress...You leave
because there‘s something wrong with where you are, and it‘s usually something painful
for you to digest and deal with, politically or economically or both‖ (Passage 166-7).

Michael came there with his friend Bradeth that is Millie‘s husband. The two loaded the
luggage. The ship started, providing tiny and fading view of the island. Leila is determined to
offer Calvin a better future in the English metropolis, far from the island doomed to remain a
periphery of the British Empire. With her mind set upon departure and starting a new life, Leila
decides to sever all her connections with the island and the past. While packing her bags she
becomes aware that if she wants to forget, she must take as little as possible with her to remind
her of the island. Despite her determination to make a life elsewhere, Leila cannot deny that
something inside her links her to the island. When, from the deck of the ship she takes a last look
at the shore, Leila felt sorry for those satisfied enough to stay. Then she stiffened, ashamed of
what she had just thought. Her contradictory feelings define her ambiguous relation with her
home country.

Hours later, while the others slept, it happened. The ship lurched forward, then backward,
then forward again, towards England. But Leila was still awake and worrying. She listened to the
useless tune of the sea and thought of her mother.

Phillip’s A State of Independence begins with the acclaimed sentence: ‗It was twenty
years since Bertram Francis had last seen the island of his birth.‘ Then there is a realistic detail
about the airplane and the aerodrome in St Kitts, the Caribbean island. When young Bertram
Francis witnessed the airplane landing in a makeshift place, he was in school then. Jackson
Clayton was his classmate and friend. There was lover Patsy. The two boys had wondered about
it. However, Clayton had dismissed any admiration for the airplane.

Once he gets down Bertram noticed several placards in the capital such as Independence
forward never and backward never‖. Another one read Proud, Dignified and Black / None can
take my freedom back. The immigrant office received Bertram with reservation. The officer in
charge enquired him how long he would stay in the country. Bertram wondered as he felt both
home and exile.

The same age-old houses were there, and Bertram imagined that the same people were
doing the same things inside there. Only the festive streamers and slogans, and the images of the
new flag painted up on the stone walls, were new.

Bertram heard a familiar woman‘s voice soon, addressing him as Francis. Then the car
Ford CorSair came for him. The car was an oldfashioned one. The taxi driver asked an atrocious
fare eleven pounds, which Bertram found too exorbitant. The taxi driver hinted at corruption in
the newly-freed country.

Bertram then turned to the island of his boyhood. It is the Sand Bay, where Caryl
Phillip’s character Michael Preston (of the Final Passage lived). There are five villages in the
capital town, Sandy Bay being one of them, and the first of them. The houses in this first village
were wooden shacks painted all colours, as though a rainbow had bent down and licked some life
into the place.

Although taken aback by the poverty of the village, it was the general optimism of the
populace that now began to occupy Bertram‘s vivid attention. In the midst of this tropical
squalor, people were conscientiously repairing properties and dressing them with decorations.

But it was impossible for Bertram to ignore the existence of a conflict between the
optimism of this imminent independence, and the outward signs of a village still struggling to
acquire the means to meet the most basic of needs, such as running water and proper lighting. He
wondered if he was suffering from those same feelings of liberal guilt that he had always
despised in some English people, or if in fact his thoughts did contain astute insights into the
current state of the island.

In both the novels we see the predominant theme of migration. Phillips has cleverly used
this theme to show the problems with migration. The characters unknowingly are trapped in this
bizarre society. The struggle of the primary targets is artistically shown by Phillips. England,
with its heterogeneous and polycultural character, catches attention for the large scale influx of
migrants into its territories. A great part of the migrations to England has occurred as a result of
England‘s colonial policies and conquests. Over the period, people from erstwhile colonies
began to move to this part of the world under the conclusion that England had a definite role in
creating their postcolonial situations.

There is a woman called Beverly as Michael falls in love with her. This incident takes
place prior to his falling in love with Leila of St Patrick‘s Church. Most people thought Leila too
good for Michael. But he felt that to talk of this with anyone, including Bradeth, was admission
to his alleged inferiority. Therefore Michael kept his anger locked up. This frustrated him, but it
also made him more determined to prove something to himself and everyone. What exactly it
was he was trying to prove he was still unsure. And how he would prove it he had no idea.

The next Sunday Michael of Sandy Bay married Leila of St Patricks. The wedding took
place at Sunday Bay Anglian Church. A priest conducted the marriage service, singing hymn no.
47. Leila, her body small and hot beneath her gown, felt assailed on all sides by well-wishers and
those who just wanted to feel the cloth. Friend Bradeth kept Michael in good humor. Later Leila
feels that her mother was not pleased of her marriage with Michael. Instead she had liked the boy
Arthur who later immigrated to America. But what she worried the most was her identity.

This is what many Africans like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong‘o did. It is
unfortunate that Leila refused to marry Arthur, just because he would marry her after his two
years stay in America. However, her mother advised her to do so. Here we notice that Leila
erred.

But Leila had Millie, and with her help Leila had been slowly trying to regain some
confidence. Then Calvin had been born and she felt he would need a father in a way in which she
had not needed one, for he was a boy. She felt there would come a time, perhaps sooner than she
dared think, when he would ask questions she could never answer, and seek company she might
never be a part of. Leila knew, with Calvin‘s birth, that at some point Michael would probably
reappear, and today it had happened.

Michael had a hold over her, and short of abandoning her son, Leila could see no way of
correcting her mistake. Perhaps, as Millie had once said, she was a coward. Perhaps she had not
made a mistake and things would sort themselves out. Perhaps, thought Leila, the same things
had happened to her mother. As she began to cry, Millie hugged her. Then Leila‘s best friend
wiped away a tear of her own.

Two things are clear here: one Leila understands that Michael does not love her
sufficiently, not to speak of his spoilt nature; and two Leila, instead, finds solace in the company
of her friend Millie. Michael then tries to bring in reconciliation between his two women – Leila
with her child Calvin and Beverley with her child Ivor. Later Michael hears about Alphonse
Walters who returns from England as a prosperous man. On meeting him, Alphonse tells how he
should live in England. He tells staying in England is like acquiring knowledge. As he climbed
on Michael realized who it was the man reminded him of. Like his grandfather, the man had
filled his head with ideas, half-formed, half-truths, uncritical, myth, none of which could be
verified except by trust. Later he hears about Shorty Fredrick‘s son prospering in England. The
whole idea of migrating to England caused tension to Michael if not to Leila whose mother lately
stayed in London for health purpose. Ultimately the family decides to migrate to England.

Phillips‘s novels through demonstrating the experiences of the blacks, the Jews and the
Asians focus on the continued and crushing racist, ethnocentric and xenophobic attitudes of
Europe and America. Against this disturbing contexts, Phillips dreams of a ‗new world order‘, in
which each one acquires an ability to coexist and tolerate the other‘s‘ presence. Phillips once said
that whether we liked it or not we were all becoming multicultural individuals. Caryl Phillips
begins the section End‘ first. This is a kind of modernistic technique with little regard for
Aristotelian concept of unities.

The theory will be used in order to provide a better understanding of The Final Passage
especially in relation to Leila‘s hybridity. There are many reasons in selecting The Final Passage
as the object matter. The first, one of the main problems in The Final Passage is an exploring of
racial conflict. However, the racial conflict here is different from the other novels because the
conflict here does not occur in the black race but in the mixed-breed. Therefore, the novel can be
viewed from the postcolonial study, especially through Bhabha‘s perspective.

The second reason of choosing the novel as the object matter is that the problem of the
mixed breeds also occurs in our societies, for there are many native people who marry to the
foreigners. It often causes a problem to the product of miscegenation, who thinks that they do not
belong to a certain culture. Sometimes, they are rejected by the societies because of their
difference. Meanwhile, this issue still becomes the prominent issue in our society. Leila and
Michael with their child reach London harbor. They stay somewhere near a hospital where her
mother Mrs. Franks is hospitalized. The author tells her story in low key.

That Leila‘s black mother had bad days once when the white men ruled Carribbea. Three
of them, but in turn, used her. The last one was of her own age. He sired Leila. However, all the
three gave her enough money to last for her life. Then the white men left Caribbean. Later the 40
years old woman got some strange disease and herself went to a hospital in London. Mrs. Franks
was there for many months. A doctor looked after her. Leila herself stayed with her by way of
visiting her for four months. One day the mother died. Leila notices a lot of black people in
London. These people are multicultural, speaking several languages. They belong to several
ethnic cultures. What Leila notices is they are poor and suffering folks. In fact, she feels she too
is one. The section ends with Leila‘s mother‘s funeral.

Leila´s disillusionment is even worse since she is abandoned by her husband and her
mother dies, therefore England becomes associated with great pain for her. In a way, A State of
Independence might be considered a sequel to Phillips´s first novel but only a loose sequel. After
having spent a few harsh months in England, Leila contemplates coming back to the Caribbean
and Bertram, although his story is different from Leila‘s in many ways, actually returns home
and the reader primarily follows his new life back on the island. At the same time, Bertram
seems to have a lot in common with Leila´s husband Michael as they both behave in an
irresponsible and self-centred manner.

Once they are in England, they seem to forget their responsibilities and family ties
completely. From Bertram´s experience we might even deduce how Michael is going to end. The
male characters‘ coming into consciousness and growing up takes much longer than that of their
female counterparts. Nevertheless, what all the migrants (migrants to Britain or return migrants
to the Caribbean) in Phillips‘s first two novels undoubtedly share is arriving with high
expectations which never get fulfilled. Their journey which is also a spiritual quest for identity
only seems to cause their alienation and up rootedness. Instead of making sense of their selves,
they become torn between two countries feeling at home in neither of them.

Leila, the fact that her skin is lighter than the other Caribbean is defined that she is the
others. In addition, this perception makes her believe that she is different and she is regarded as
other by both societies. She feels that she does not belong to a certain race because both races do
not accept her as the part of them. She is not accepted by Whites because she is indicated has a
Black skin and she is also not accepted Black because her physical appearance is not Black at all.
Black regards her as a White girl, while Whites regard her as a Black skin. This condition also
makes her in the feeling of unhomeliness.

Hence, Bhabha suggests that hybridity is not so much a convergence of two original
identities into a new transcendent one, but rather that the hybrid identity will always be
intrinsically split. He states that the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original
moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the third space‘ which enables
other positions to emerge‖ (Bhabha, 1990:211). However, it is very hard for Leila to make herself
fully emerge.

In order to trace the development of human trafficking as a theme within Phillips‘s

writing, the researcher shows the plight of characters in both the novels. My interest lies in
reading A State of Independence (1986) precisely because it is a work that has often been
overlooked in the course of Phillips‘s writing career. The reasons for this lack of critical attention
stem from the novel‘s non-fragmented linear narrative format and a subject that has been deemed
too autobiographical for critical interest: the exile‘s return to the Caribbean.23 In addition to the
conventional format and autobiographical context of the narrative, I argue that the novel‘s
overtly cynical rendition of a migrant subject has led to a general silence regarding this early
work, since its cynicism acts to disrupt celebratory diasporic readings of Phillips‘s fiction.
 Through its return plot, A State of Independence also privileges the Caribbean as a space
wherein the effects of history and global commerce have most concretely formed a challenge to
cultural production and identity. Michael decides that, if he wants to make a fresh start, he has to
put his past and the Caribbean behind him. He starts a relationship with a blonde woman,
presumably an English native, takes up a job and deserts Leila.

When someone like Michael moves to a new country, one cannot and must not expect the
respective country to accommodate the newcomer‘s values. Rather, it is the other way round: it
is the newcomer who has to adjust and adopt the new location with its set of rules. Michael
understands quickly that Leila and Calvin become burdens for him in England. A relationship
with an English woman would help him find a place in the new milieu and open new
opportunities for him. Michael cannot apply the Caribbean patterns of behavior in England and
have two women. As a consequence, he renounces the one who cannot bring any benefits to him:
Leila. He also severs all his links with the past and rushes ahead without looking back.

Mrs. Frank‘s death was mourned. The inheritance Leila had expected to receive upon her
mother‘s death was not to be. It turned out her mother had spent what funds she had on bringing
them to England. What was left had to be spent on the funeral and the paying of unexpected bills.
For Leila the dream of a rich father was a dream buried with her mother. For the first time in her
life, Leila found herself troubled about her economy.

Leila did some job for the sake of her survival. She signed the papers and saw that her
wages would be £11 a week, with overtime a possibility if she wanted it. The man told her that
she looked so bony he was putting her on the factory run, to start with, which meant she would
ride an empty bus out to the factory to pick up the workmen at the gate. She was to collect the
standard fare of 3d and they would drop the workmen off en route back to the depot, and begin
again. He gave her the bundle of tickets and told her he usually gave the older women this run.
Leila did not know whether she was expected to look grateful or feel insulted.

It is too unfortunate that Leila finds two misfortunes later. She loses her job of the
factory, for she could not cope with. The next unfortunate thing is that Michael falls in love with
a woman and alienates from her. Worse still the thought of being pregnant again filled Leila with
something, though it was neither fear nor happiness. Resignation was the word she had come
most often to use, for any question of disposing of the child was, of course, out of the question.

Then Leila imagined Michael‘s woman, then a young Mary, and she tried to make the
two of them mix into one, but Mary was not blonde, and Leila‘s unconscious desire to unravel
her friend from such a fate held true. Then she saw Mary pretending to be asleep on the beach,
the man talking to Leila, and Leila‘s mother about to appear standing over them, and this seemed
to fit better, but it was the thought of Miss Gordon, a social worker. Somehow, the missionary
Mrs. Gordon and Mary avoided Leila.

The color of her skin is a permanent source of anxiety for Leila. In the Caribbean it
isolates her because it is too light in comparison with that of the rest of the population. It also
functions as a reminder of her mother‘s sin and of her missing white father. In England it does
not help adjust because it is not white enough. In both places, the color of her skin is a trouble
maker.

Bertram will have a drink in a local hotel whose owner admires America more than the
United Kingdom. The deputy Prime Minister Jackson Clayton visited the hotel. He could not
believe his eyes, for he had thought that he would never see Bertram Francis there. He said,
Good God, man, I was sure this independence would wash up all kinds of offshore
troublemakers, but Bertram Francis. I swear to God I never did think I would see you again.‘
(Independence 65)

Bertram recalls Dominic‘s old memories once he visits his grave. He feels that he is
buried alongside his father‘s grave. Unfortunately, the brothers knew little about their father as
that of many of the black characters in Caryl‘s Phillip’s novels. Once the two brothers had
enquired a priest of their father, and when the latter asked the Christian name of him, the
brothers did not know it. The mother was gravely silent about it. So the brothers felt that
something was wrong.

Bertram remembers that his mother later spoke of her husband as a person who had
visited America. Once he came back with a disease and died. Later Bertram reached home. He
spoke to Mrs. Sutton, the neighbor, who assisted his old mother. Bertram spoke to his mother,
and his mother‘s first regret was this:
 And now you‘ve been to see him.‘ She paused. I don‘t want to talk about Dominic. The
boy did his best to nurse whatever difficulties he had in his heart, but he was never the same once
you did desert him. Eventually he just took up with a wrong set of people, but you could have
helped prevent that.‘ (Independence 83)

The mother then referred to Patsy as if Bertram was to marry her and set up his business
in St Kitts. Consequently, the mother enquired Bertram as to what happened to England, and
why he did not write or why he lived there for twenty years. This interrogation is very seminal in
the conversation between the two. Bertram replied:

But it‘s the truth,‘ he said. England just take me over. New things start to happen
to me, new people, like I was born again and everything is fresh. But it‘s only
today walking about Sandy Bay and Baytown that I can see that maybe I was born
again the same fellar. Nothing happened to me in England, you can believe that?
A big rich country like that doesn‘t seem to have make any impression on me. I
might as well have left yesterday for I just waste off all that time.‘ He paused. I
think I‘m the same fellar. (Independence 85)

Bertram having spent twenty years in England returns to his island at the age of thirty-
nine and he expects to start a completely new life. Being naïve and confident, he plans to start a
business despite not bringing with him almost any money to make his plans real. He expects his
mother to be supportive and his childhood friend Jackson to help him succeed. What he does not
realize though is the fact that he left the island two decades ago and he did not keep in touch with
the island. He basically comes to the island with the idea of making profit from the local
economy which further underlines his self-centeredness. This is what the readers as much as the
characters wonder.

Be it as it may, the mother did not accept Bertram‘s reply as justifying. She asked him to
vacate the house as early as he could. Bertram still rested with a confusion of thoughts ranging
from bribery, his meeting Jackson, his brother‘s grave, his father‘s, then Mr.s. Sutton and his
mother. Bertram met Patsy the next day. She was very happy to see him. She was the only one in
the island to be happy to receive him. Then Bertram began some business at Vijay‘s
supermarket. The boy who worked in a hotel asked Bertram whether he could get a job
elsewhere. He thought of immigrating to America.

Caryl Phillips’s fiction is distinctive in its exploration of migrant identities and narratives
of cultural translation and exchange across a broad range of historical and geographical contexts.
The Final Passage (1985), for example, examines the experiences of the Windrush generation of
immigrants to Britain; Cambridge (1991) presents differing perspectives on plantation slavery in
the early nineteenth century in the West Indies and Britain; The Nature of Blood (1997) ranges
across several periods and locations including Renaissance Venice, Germany in the 1930s and
40s, and a fifteenth-century diaspora of Jewish people from Germany to Venice; and Dancing in
the Dark (2005) addresses issues of racism and performed black identities in the popular theatre
world of early twentieth-century New York. Phillips’s experimentation with narrative form also
stresses the communication of voices across borders, historical periods, genres, and modes of
writing. His fiction tends to use first-person narratives, whose characters often reveal their
traumatic experiences as both victims and implied perpetrators of slavery, racism, war, and
violence, often resulting in psychological instability.1 In this article, I argue that what lies at the
centre of Phillips’s writing is the articulation of individual and shared experience of trauma as a
consequence of postcolonial systems of exploitation with especial reference to two novels:
Crossing the River (1993) and A Distant Shore (2003). For Phillips, trauma affects the
perpetrators and the victims of exploitative colonial and postcolonial power relationships in
differing ways, but they are all bound up with the economic frameworks embedded in colonial,
postcolonial and neo-colonial relationships. Crossing the River comprises four narratives, one set
mainly in Liberia in the nineteenth century; one recounting the experiences of a runaway slave in
nineteenth-century America; a third providing the ship captain’s log of an eighteenth-century
slave trading ship; and one told from the perspective of a white British woman who has an affair
with a black American GI during the Second World War. These narratives are framed by a voice
that traverses historical and geographical moments in order to reflect an African diaspora driven
by the slave trade as well as articulating the experiences of characters who are implicated in the
exploitative systems of slavery. A Distant Shore juxtaposes the narratives of two main characters
whose experiences have forced them to move into new areas and new hostile communities: one
fleeing civil war in Africa, and the other relocating to a new area of a northern English town after
experiencing traumatic incidents. Alongside these narratives of personal trauma I discuss the
way in which the novel develops these experiences into broader national, cultural and historical
narratives.

A more comprehensive conceptualization of trauma is needed to theorize collective,

prolonged, and cumulative experiences of traumatization. In this respect, trauma theory’s
foundation in Freudian psychoanalysis may be acknowledged as a point of departure that invites
further expansion to enable an openness towards non-western, non-Eurocentric models of
psychic disorder and of reception and reading processes.

Crossing the River: Crossingthe River opens with the account of a father who, due to his
desperate economic situation, is forced to sell his daughter and two sons into slavery. This
moment of trauma that implicates the father as both originator and victim is accompanied by the
following image: “To a father consumed with guilt. You are beyond. Broken-off, like limbs from
a tree”. This anthropomorphic image of the damaged tree recalls the figure of Tancred in
Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata who, some time after inadvertently killing his love
Clorinda, lops off the branches of a tree from whose stumps blood gushes while simultaneously
emitting the revenant cries of his murdered lover. This is a myth that Freud refers to in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle as an example of the repetition-compulsion propensity of people who
“suffer again and again in an endless repetition of the same fate”. It is also a passage that is taken
up by Caruth, who develops Freud.

Caruth identifies this simultaneous and paradoxical knowing and unknowing as the
“crucial link between literature and trauma theory” before going on to describe the “double
wound” that underpins trauma narratives. In this context, the relationship between the originating
traumatic experience and its reappearance locks sufferers in a repetitive cycle that disallows
forward movement and that places them “between the story of the unbearable nature of an event
and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival”. Caruth’s model of trauma suggests a
repeated revisiting of the originating moment of trauma and, although this aspect of her theory
has attracted criticism, as noted above, elements of this model resonate in the repetitious
patterning of Crossing the River.

The concept of transgenerational trauma associated with slavery and/or colonialism has
been identified in Carl Phillips’s The Final Passage. Although the trauma for Edward remains
unspeakable, it is conveyed effectively by Phillips’s control of the narrative and this section is
followed by three further narratives that contextualize the effects and causes of slavery; a series
of narrations that combine to convey the sense that the traumatic rupture in humanity represented
by slavery exceeds its eighteenth and nineteenth-century context. The implication is that slavery
as a system is so pernicious that its effects exceed the moment of its ending. The very last section
of the novel reinforces this point by connecting the narratives set in the nineteenth century with
more modern examples of an exploitative system that is registered along racial inequalities.
Formally, this section acts as a kind of repetition of a traumatic memory in its refusal to allow
the slave trade to be designated as a crime of the past. The novel’s manipulation of historical
cause and effect thus reintroduces the guilt firmly into the neo-liberal and neo-colonial present
and the social structures of late capitalism are read as grounded in the exploitative systems that
drove slavery: “The slave who mounted this block is now dying young from copping a fix on
some rusty needle in an Oakland project”. Contemporary narratives of economic struggle and
exploitation are thus read as intimately connected to the past. Through the perspective of the
slave father who “sold my beloved children” in the nineteenth century the voice slips out of time
and connection is made to “a helplessly addicted mother” in Brooklyn, and “a barefoot boy in
Sao Paulo”. In another reference, “A mother watches. Her eleven-year old daughter is preparing
herself for yet another night of premature prostitution” . In its connection of desperate but
implicated parent and exploited child this contemporary situation echoes the originating
repetition of the first chapter: “The crops failed. I sold my children.”

A Distant Shore: A positive conclusion is something that is not available in Phillips’s

2003 novel A Distant Shore, the title of which echoes the previous novel and which also
develops a transnational narrative of ethnic conflict and racism, although this time located more
firmly in the contemporary moment. A Distant Shore includes narratives in which the loss of
loved ones in terms of death, divorce and exile is a prominent feature; however, it is in the
incapacity of the characters to come to terms with their losses, or indeed with the accumulation
of loss that results in psychosis. The relationship between loss and trauma is thus at the heart of
Phillips’s examination of personal and collective identities.

If Solomon serves as a surrogate psychoanalyst for Dorothy, then the older woman acts
as a surrogate mother for the younger refugee, revealing one of the main causes for his traumatic
experiences. While in Africa, Gabriel witnessed the brutal killing of his parents and the rape and
murder of his two younger sisters by soldiers. During the attack, which has been instigated
because of his involvement in the civil war, Gabriel is secreted in a cupboard and watches the
killings unseen. But perhaps the height of this traumatic experience is the fact that when the
soldiers leave, although Gabriel’s mother is still alive, he flees the house because he “dare not
stay with her too long”. The trauma induced by this experience continues to haunt Gabriel. When
he later arrives at his uncle’s house we are told “the pain of what he has witnessed begins to rise
through his body” , revealing classic symptoms of PTSD, and much later, when he is held in a
detention centre in Britain, the root cause of the trauma returns to him in dreams: “He hears her
voice, but she does not turn around to face him. He reaches down and pulls back her shoulder
that he might look into her eyes, but there is no face. It is as if somebody has taken a piece of
cloth and rubbed out her features” . As with Tancred and Clorinda, Gabriel’s trauma is a
complex mix of guilt and shock at being witness to, and implicated in, horrific actions. By taking
part in the civil war and by abandoning his mother, father and sisters, he is implicated in their
deaths and his trauma thus haunts him as both the victim and perpetrator of violence. It is in this
context that Gabriel, now called Solomon, is able to connect with Dorothy as both a fellow
sufferer of trauma, and as a potential source of alleviation of his sense of guilt. Indeed, unlike the
situation involving his real mother, his relationship with Dorothy offers him an opportunity to
help.

Overlaid on these individual narratives are traumas associated with collective identities.
The middle sections of the novel detail the way in which the civil war in the African state (based
loosely on Rwanda) represents a wound in the collective psyche of the nation. But it is also in the
sections that are set in the north of England that another collective trauma manifest in terms of an
insular and xenophobic suspicion of outsiders is revealed. Dorothy’s dead father represents this
outlook; as she notes “I’m glad that Dad isn’t here to see what’s become of his town” and later
reminisces “He’d be there sucking on his pipe and bemoaning the fact that we were giving up
our English birthright and getting lost in a United States of Europe”. But Dorothy is also able to
reflect on possible causes for this reaction in terms of the collective trauma visited on the north
of England by the set of economic policies that came to a head in the Thatcher period: the
closure of the mines and the decline in the heavy industries that were the bedrock of towns like
Weston. In this context Dorothy, as a conservative teacher, is regarded as representative of the
middle-class metropolitan elite who are seen as one of the causes of the area’s industrial decline;
when discussing the attitudes of a man who lives in Weston to the newly arrived population of
Stoneleigh she speculates:

To conclude, both Crossing the River and A Distant Shore reveal Phillips’s interest in
trauma as a source for narrative engagement and examination of ideological and political
discourses, both historically and pertaining to the present. Indeed, the very capacity of traumatic
narratives to slip free of conventional time and linear structures allows for a trans-historical,
trans-national and trans-generational set of connections. His fiction shows a sophisticated
understanding of the ways in which trauma narratives can identify aspects of the unspeakable for
the individual that can be re-articulated as powerful commentaries on collective acts of violence
and economic exploitation. In addition, his work represents that call from critics such as Craps,
Rothberg and Visser for a fertile conjoining of trauma narratives with postcolonial literature that
challenges the argument that trauma theory has too often been located as an ahistorical and
western-centric set of theories.
 CHAPTER 3

CONCLUSION

Caryl Phillips‘ novel The Final Passage (1985) deals with neo-slavery. It is like Sam
Selvon‘s novel The Lonely Londoners (1956). Historically speaking the Middle Passage refers to
the slaves‘ journey from Africa towards the Americas. The term final passage‘ may mean either
the passage from a small Caribbean island towards England, which the main characters in this
novel undertake, or the passage from England to the Caribbean island, which the protagonist
Leila Preston considers at the end of the novel. Both solutions are suggested for the story‘s end.
There is a spiritual hint that it is the soul‘s journey to Godhead. Caryl Phillips‘ The Final Passage
deals with the issue of racism and hybridity.

Homi Baba, as a theorist, speaks of hybridity. The term is about miscegenation.

This issue is like belonging to neither race. It is about the rejection of one from both. This is a
serious issue in postcolonial discourse, in societies wherever several races are mixed up (as in
Africa and Latin America). The subject of hybridity in modern fiction is a kind of neo-slave
narrative. For example, this text is a discourse on mulatto issue. It is about the tragic protagonist
of the novel Leila (a kind of Indian Leela or reduced Sheila).

There are many reasons in selecting The Final Passage as the subject matter for
discussion in the study. The first, one of the main problems, in The Final Passage is an exploring
of racial conflict. However, the racial conflict here is different from the other novels because the
conflict here does not occur in the black race but in the mixed-breeds. It occurs in our societies,
for there are many native people who marry to the foreigners. It often causes a problem to the
product of miscegenation, who thinks that they do not belong to a certain culture. Sometimes,
they are rejected by the societies because of their difference. Meanwhile, this issue still becomes
the prominent issue in our society.

Phillips‘s A State of Independence is a moving and acute second novel, by an England-

based native of St. Kitts: a bitterly ironic commentary on the empty independence‘ of that small
Caribbean island told from the souring perspective of a middle age man when a returned native
sees the road ahead, which he had imagined bright with promise, now clogged with failed
expectations, opportunities gone by, and love and loyalties of family and friends wasted away.
Bertram Francis is coming home to St. Kitts after 20 years in England, where he had been sent at
19 as winner of an island‘s scholarship. Now he is returning to help the new nation.‘ Perhaps he
will open a business, something that does not make him dependent on the white man. But in the
blistered shack of his boyhood, his ill mother turns from him in contempt and he learns that his
younger brother, Dominic, who had adored him has dead. His childhood friend, Jackson Clayton,
now a prosperous wheeler-dealer Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Agriculture, Lands,
Housing, Labour and Tourism advises him to go back where he came from.

If Mrs Francis unfriendly attitude towards her son is a metonym of the mother country’s
“rejection” of Bertram and all that he represents, Patsy Archibald’s important dialogue at the end
of the narrative brings to a reasonable “conclusion” the diasporic subject’s haughty manner and
assuages the guilt complex that has haunted him from the moment he feels himself an outsider.
Trying to understand Bertram’s bewilderment on his encounter with the island after twenty years
absence, Patsy convinces him to come to terms with his experience as a diaspora Caribbean in
Britain. Although Bertram continually states that “nothing happened” in England, the narrator
actually uses a vocabulary that describes the turmoil caused by the encounter between the
colonial subject and the white European. Terms such as “wind”, “fog”, “frustration”,
“confusion”, and “miasma” underlie the “hurricane” that the British has produced in the
Caribbean mind. “He knew that to her Europeans were like hurricanes, unpredictable, always
causing trouble, always talked about, a natural disaster it was 9 impossible to insure against”
(Phillips, 1995, p. 151). If the term “hurricane” was the symbol that characteristically
beleaguered European colonizers in the Caribbean and connoted the uncanniness and the
wildness of the place and the people (Hulme, 1981; 1986), a reverse situation is revealed in
Phillips’s text. The British environment is called uncanny, the British people provoke disasters in
the Caribbean subject, and the colonial encounter implodes the identity of the other. Patsy makes
Bertram realize that what happened in Britain was “the frustration of trying to understand a
people who showed no interest in understanding him” (Phillips, 1995, p. 151).

An indifferent attitude towards the other is a recurring theme in current British Black
fiction and harks not only to the slave period but also to the contemporary aftermath with its
implications in South-North relationships. Kincaid’s Annie John, Levy’s Fruit of the Lemon and
Small Island, Gordimer’s The Pickup, and Phillips’s A Distant Shore, to mention just a few
recent novels, poignantly concentrate on the unwelcomeness and even hostile conditions, the
continuous othering and the persistence of racial stereotypes in Britain and in Western society. In
Bertram’s case there seems to be no improvement for the future and things will pretty be like that
for the ex-colonial or the non-white migrant.

Although to make matter worse he does not feel at home on the island of birth (“I don’t
yet feel at home back here either”, Phillips, 1995, p. 152), the admission and assimilation of
Britain’s non-acceptance of diaspora subjects and a new beginning in peace with Patsy, and, one
may suppose, with his mother too, will presumably trigger an accommodation with his newly
independent country. However, Bertram’s lethargy to take action and the acknowledgment of
“his own mediocrity” (Phillips, 1995, p. 157) seem to indicate more frustration. Corruption and
US dependence nip the country’s development in the bud. Such disillusionment is corroborated
by Livingstone’s enthusiasm for US culture and Lonnie’s pessimist reading of the island’s
endemic dependence.

A quiet, sensitive exploration of a sad and maddening truth that there are, in a
world of big fish and little fish (the Indian matsanyaya thing), lovers and loved, no states of
independence. So the title of the novel is ironic all the while. There is always a tendency to
compare a writer‘s first novel with the second one. Many critics and readers think that Caryl
Phillips´s second novel A State of Independence would be a sequel to his first one The Final
Passage since it had an ambiguous ending. Although the two novels have a lot in common and
may be studied comparatively, in his second novel Phillips has chosen a male protagonist´s
perspective and the primary concern here is his return to the island after spending twenty years
abroad. What follows is an analysis of the novel both from the formal and the psychological
point of view.