Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  On the brink of the fourth decade of her life, Frederica looks in two directions: towards a past whose shaping of her she has a duty to understand; and towards a present with which, after her Rip van Winkle years in the countryside, she has to catch up. The intellectual equipment with which Byatt has endowed Frederica to perform these tasks is critical rather than creative. If the spectacle of Frederica wrestling with the past is more arresting than Frederica engaging with the present, this is because Byatt does not yet, in the third of the four volumes, seem to have decided whether Frederica has it in her to be creative – in her own terms, to write the book of laminations – or whether she will simply continue to subject the world around her to the operations of a sophisticated but rather passive critical intelligence.

  15 Caryl Phillips

  I

  OVER THE COURSE of three centuries the slave trade shipped some eleven million unwilling people from Africa to the New World – the greatest forced population movement that we know of before the twentieth century. Two-fifths of them went to the plantations of the West Indies, which made up the hard-core area of slavery in the Americas. In comparison, the English-speaking North American mainland received only 5 per cent.

  Britain (as well as Spain, France and Holland) transported Africans to the Caribbean to work its colonial plantations, sending out its own people, many of them undesirables or misfits, to oversee their labour. Planter society became notorious for its dissoluteness, its indolence, its philistinism and its snobbishness – a snobbishness that turned on money and on race. It left behind a legacy of racial prejudice based on minute gradations of skin pigmentation, ‘white, fusty, musty, dusty, tea, coffee, cocoa, light black, black, dark black,’ says V.S. Naipaul, reciting a familiar Caribbean colour litany.1

  Out of plantation practice and the rationale that sustained it there grew a corpus of colonial lore about black mentality and the black body that we can properly call racist. Eric Williams may go too far in claiming that, far from slavery being born from racism, racism itself was a consequence of slavery – nineteenth-century European ethnography and racial science would make their own huge contribution to the theory of racism – but Williams is certainly right to point to the Americas, and the West Indies in particular, as a forcing-bed for racist thought.2 In that sense, as the West wrestles today with its racist inheritance, it continues to live in the long shadow of slavery.

  The slave ships sailing to the New World bore the first wave of the African diaspora. Then, as the sugar-based economies of the islands began to falter in the early nineteenth century and as the European powers emancipated their slaves, that wave was succeeded by a second, more complex set of migrations continuing into the present: from one island to another; from the islands to the American mainland; from the islands to the former metropolitan (‘mother’) countries; from the islands to Africa; and from America or Europe or Africa back to the islands. (The spectacular migrations of Cubans and Haitians to the mainland in recent years have obscured the fact that shifts of population have long been a feature of Caribbean demography.)

  It is against this historical background of unsettledness and unsettlement, of Eurafrican hybridity and minutely fractured racial consciousness, of incomplete independence and ambivalence about models to follow in the future (‘Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way,’ writes Jamaica Kincaid; ‘eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way’), that the preoccupations of many of the great Caribbean writers of this century, including Aimé Césaire, Naipaul, and Derek Walcott, need to be seen.3

  II

  Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 on the island of St Kitts (population 45,000) but was taken to Britain as a child (the three loci of his genealogy are thus the three apices of the transatlantic slave trade: West Africa, the Caribbean, Britain). St Kitts of the 1950s was, as it still is, a typical migration society, its economy dependent on remittances sent home by the labour it exported. Phillips calls such islands ‘Third Worlds within the Third World’.4

  Britain of the 1960s was rife with anti-black feeling; in 1962 legislation with a transparently racist basis was passed to make immigration from the ex-colonies more difficult. In an autobiographical essay, Phillips has described the contradictions of growing up ‘feeling British, while being constantly told in many subtle and unsubtle ways that I did not belong’.5 His first novel, The Final Passage (1985) – for an unsettled West Indian the title reverberates with irony – draws upon the immigrant’s multifarious experience of cold-shouldering behaviour, subtle and unsubtle, conscious and unconscious, on the part of the natives. Of a white social worker, for instance, he writes, ‘When she talked . . . she always swallowed just before or just after the word coloured, as if ashamed of it . . . [The word] always got caught just beneath the centre of her tongue and created more saliva than the rest of the words in the sentence put together.’6

  Yet Phillips has also written sensitively about white characters, most notably in the story ‘Higher Ground’ (in the novel of the same name) and in the novella ‘Somewhere in England’ (in Crossing the River, 1993). In the latter, the central character is an Englishwoman living through the Second World War in the obscurity of the provinces, coping with a domineering mother, a petty crook of a husband, neighbours who ostracise her when she falls in love with a coloured American serviceman, and a social-welfare bureaucracy that removes their child from her on the grounds that it is a GI baby. In her levelheadedness, loyalty, calm competence and independence of mind (she sees through the war propaganda with which the country is deluged and particularly dislikes ‘that fat bastard Churchill’), she exemplifies the heroism of daily life at its most muted; but there is a solitariness, a bleakness, an untouchableness to her as well which is a feature of Phillips’s more deeply felt women.7

  Even the novel Cambridge (1991) is not unsympathetic toward its white central character, opinionated and prejudiced though she may be. Cambridge is set on an island that looks suspiciously like St Kitts, in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its main character is a young woman sent out from England to report on conditions on her father’s sugar plantation. It is hoped that on her return to England she will lecture to ladies’ associations on the realities of plantation life, rebutting anti-slavery agitation.

  Her first impression of slave life on the island is a rosy one: happy and hedonistic, with ample food and much singing and dancing. As she is absorbed into planter society, she comes to admire what she thinks of as the energy of the plantation managers, and to develop typically colonial nightmares of being cast adrift in an ocean of black bodies.

  After a reckless and sordid affair with one of the managers, however, followed by a stillbirth, her mind begins to unravel. The prim, careful language of her journal loosens up as structures of control and self-control – the patriarchal order embedded within her – crumble, and by the time the novel ends she is teetering on a knife edge between madness and a potentially real psychic engagement with the Caribbean.

  Cambridge itself is not a particularly good book – the last sections are schematically plotted and betray signs of hasty writing – but it does show Phillips, by 1991, extending the compass of oppression to include the white woman, particularly the white daughter figure.

  Phillips has written a number of other stories set in the slave era, marked (though not in all cases) by a finely judged balance between, on the one hand, linguistic and historical immersion in the period, and, on the other, a retrospective modern awareness of what was at stake.

  The best of these pieces is ‘The Pagan Coast’ (in Crossing the River), set in the 1830s. ‘The Pagan Coast’ is a takeoff of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the role of Kurtz being played by a naive house slave, Nash Williams, who is set free by his Southern master on condition that he go to Liberia and preach Christianity to the natives. Nash’s optimistic vision of Liberia (‘the beautiful land of my forefathers . . . the star in the East for the free coloured man’) gradually gives way to disillusionment. Mission
ary work is futile, he declares finally: he discards his Western upbringing, takes three wives, becomes, in effect, an African.

  His ex-owner, sponsor (via the American Colonisation Society) and onetime lover, travels to Liberia to reclaim him for civilisation, but arrives too late: ‘Nash Williams is dead,’ he is told (the words echo Conrad’s ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’). Like Kurtz’s trading post, Nash’s upriver mission station turns out to be squalid and overgrown, reclaimed by Africa.8

  The American Colonisation Society in effect asks Nash Williams to live out a hypocritical white project in which Africa will take back to her bosom her troublesome New World children. In its vision of Africa as the solution to America’s race problems, the Society came ironically close to the Pan-Africanism of Edward Wilmot Blyden and Marcus Garvey – both West Indians – who saw the black man as spiritually grounded in Africa and advocated a return to African roots. In ‘The Cargo Rap’ (in The Higher Ground, 1995) Phillips satirises the Pan-Africanist elements in the Black Power movement of the 1960s, unveiling a deadpan sense of humour and a talent for unobtrusive comic mimicry that one would not have suspected from his early novels.

  ‘The Cargo Rap’ is the monologue of a young African American jailed for armed robbery and suffering under a punitive regime of detention. Phillips uses as his starting point the prison letters of the Black Power activist George Jackson, collected in Soledad Brother, but achieves an admirable balance between satire of the prim didacticism of the revolutionary (‘I think the African man does not masturbate enough . . . Masturbation is safe, quick and can be practised with little danger to self or others’) and compassion for a young man of considerable intellectual passion growing more and more frantic as he sees he may never leave jail alive (‘Is there not an attorney who would agree to one day being paid in African crops and fruit?’ he writes desperately).9

  Though it played a large part in the creation of Liberia, the real-life American Colonisation Society had little success in repatriating freed blacks to Africa. Its greatest opponent was Frederick Douglass, who denounced it as a tool of the slaveholders: ‘Individuals emigrate, nations never.’

  As Douglass makes clear in his way, and Phillips in his, the question is not whether Africa is capable of reabsorbing its children, but how and where the African diaspora must see its future. Phillips’s position is more complex than Douglass’s because he comes after (indeed, has participated in) the second wave of the diaspora, and thus knows that neither Africa nor the second countries of birth of the diaspora – principally the impoverished islands of the Caribbean – are capable of providing a home for all the lost children. But both Douglass and Phillips claim a future for themselves where they are: in Douglass’s case in the United States, in Phillips’s in a Europe that includes Britain.

  This claim on Europe is implicit in Phillips’s stories, but comes out more clearly – and with less nuance – in his essays. ‘Black people,’ he writes, ‘trapped in a hostile and racist Europe, exiled from a politically and economically unreliable Caribbean, are beginning to gather around themselves the values of survival and resistance that have sustained them on two journeys across the Atlantic, and are now fighting for the right to be part of the future of this continent.’10

  III

  Frantz Fanon, interpreter of the black condition, used to recall the advice of one of his teachers: ‘Whenever you hear anyone abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you.’11 In The Nature of Blood (1997) Phillips follows a winding path through space and time to connect the ages-old persecution of the Jews of Europe with the sufferings of people of African descent. It is an intricately structured work, four stories of persecution and suffering told in parallel. The one that leaves the most abiding impression is the story of Eva Stern, sole survivor of a German Jewish family which perishes in Hitler’s death camps. The corpus of literature about the camps is by now so vast, and the ground so well covered, that one would think nothing new can be said about their horrors. Yet pages of Eva’s story seem to come straight from hell. Eva herself, drifting haplessly between the brutal reality of camp life and fantasies in which her mother and sister are still with her, kept alive by her care, is a haunting figure.

  Liberated in 1945, Eva waits for her case to be processed, annexing one of the camp huts for herself, turning it into a personal prison where she can hold on to the ghosts from her past. Here a kindly British soldier shows an interest in her. She responds with dogged silence, but takes a half-hearted proposal of marriage seriously enough to track him down in England, where she finds he already has a wife and child. Alone in a strange country, dogged by ghosts from the past, she suffers a series of mental breakdowns and suicide attempts. Her therapist, chilling but perceptive, diagnoses her problem as a refusal to forget – as mourning without end, a form of loyalty to the dead.

  When Eva climbs out of the cattle-truck at the camp that is meant to be her final destination, there is a suffocating smell of burning all around and the air is full of ash. In Phillips’s universe of interpenetrating historical spheres, the smell, the ash, come not only from the camp furnaces but from St Mark’s Square in Venice, where three Jewish moneylenders from the nearby town of Portobuffole are being burned alive for (so the allegation against them goes) killing a young Christian boy and using his blood in a devilish Passover ritual.

  In Poland, in Eva’s life, the year is 1942; in Venice it is 1480. Incited by wandering Franciscan friars, who denounce Jewish usury and exhort Christians to resort instead to the new ecclesiastical loan funds, the Monti di Pietà, there has been a rash of attacks on Jews. The atrocities of St Mark’s Square mark the peak of these pogroms. After the demise of the worst of the Franciscan agitators, the flames of persecution will die down for a while, only to be fanned again by the Bull nimis absurdum (1555) of Pope Paul IV, commanding that the Jews of Christendom be confined to ghettos on the model of the Ghetto Nuovo of Venice, demarcated in 1516. (From Venice the sense of the word ghetto as a quarter where Jews live compulsorily spread across Italy and thence into other languages.)

  Through this same Venetian ghetto Othello, one-time slave, now professional soldier and commander of the armed forces of Venice, wanders as he explores his new home. The story of Othello, the black ram who offends Venice by tupping the white ewe, is the third of the four narratives of The Nature of Blood; through Venice Othello is tenuously linked to the Jews of Portobuffole, as these Jews are linked via their martyrdom to Eva Stern.

  In an essay caustically entitled ‘A Black European Success’, Phillips had earlier sketched his interpretation of Othello. To Phillips, Othello has not inwardly transcended the state of slave-hood and is therefore anxiously preoccupied with showing himself to be as good as his new Venetian masters. ‘Othello is an alien, socially and culturally. Life for him is a game in which he does not know the rules.’ It is predictable, says Phillips, that when Desdemona seems to betray him he will resort to violence, for violence is ‘the first refuge of the desperate’.12

  There is some conceptual confusion in Phillips’s essay, which veers between treating Othello as a real-life historical person on whom Shakespeare is reporting (‘There is no evidence [in the text] of Othello having any black friends, eating any African foods, speaking any other language than [the Venetians’]), and as a character in a play who is misinterpreted by fellow characters insensitive to the psychic baggage that an ex-slave must bring with him. (p. 51) Now Phillips renders this confusion irrelevant by the expedient of taking over Othello as a character in his own book, where he can make him as socially insecure, and as divorced from his African roots, as he likes.

  In principle there is nothing wrong with this recreation of Othello, doomed though it is to produce a figure pettier than Shakespeare’s noble Moor – Othello Minor rather than Othello Major. But for reasons that are not clear Phillips does not follow the Othello story through to its calamitous end. The courtship and secret marriage of Othello and Desdemona are given in close and sometim
es sensuous detail, but the narrative comes to a halt with the couple installed on the island of Cyprus: no jealousy, no murder, no suicide. Phillips further loads the dice against his Othello by giving him lifeless prose to speak.

  Cyprus provides the link to the fourth and last of the novel’s narratives. The year is 1946; the British, who hold the League of Nations mandate over Palestine, are diverting boatloads of Jewish refugees away from Haifa to transit camps in Cyprus. On the island is a doctor named Stephan Stern, Eva’s uncle, who has since the 1930s been active in Haganah, the Jewish underground. (Since Phillips keeps Stern’s underground activities shadowy, it should be stated that Phillips’s fictional Stephan Stern has nothing to do with the historical Abraham Stern, leader of the notorious Stern Gang of terrorists.)

  Stephan Stern is seen twice: once on Cyprus, and once in the Tel Aviv of the 1980s, where he meets a young woman, an Ethiopian Jew. The old man and the young woman spend a night (chastely) together; the encounter allows the woman an opportunity to tell the story of her journey to Israel (‘When we arrived, and stepped down off the plane, we all kissed the ground. We thanked God for returning us to Zion’), and Stephan an opportunity to hear at first hand of the hardships and the prejudice encountered by those who have ended one diasporic exile only to embark on another.13

  IV

  In the course of little more than a decade, Phillips has progressed from straightforward linear narration and uncomplicated realism to the complex shuttling of voices and intercutting of narrative lines, and even the forays into postmodern alienation affects, which we encounter in The Nature of Blood.