Caryl Phillips

Posted on Dec 15, 2011 in Research | 0 comments

I've become fascinated with literary representation of transmigration (see, for example, my chapter on transmigration in David Mitchell: Critical Essays). One of the most interesting examples of this kind of writing is Caryl Phillips’ Crossing the River (Bloomsbury, 1993), which approaches the traumatic psychic ramifications of African diaspora through a transmigratory family. Sold by their father to the slave trade in the eighteenth century when his crops fail, Nash, Martha and Travis live across three centuries: Nash is one of the freed slaves encouraged to repatriate West Africa as part of the American Colonization Society’s Christian mission in the 1830s; Martha goes West as the postbellum American Frontier expands during the late-nineteenth century; and Travis appears as an American solider posted to North England during the Second World War. As the first-person voice of their father relates in the novel’s Prologue: "For two hundred and fifty years I have listened to the many-tongued chorus. And occasionally, among the sundry restless voices, I have discovered those of my own children. My Nash. My Martha. My Travis. Their lives fractured. Sinking hopeful roots into difficult soil" (p. 1).

In Fictions of the Not Yet, I argue that the ability of Phillips’ characters to transmigrate diachronically across centuries of historical time in Crossing the River is analogous to the spatialised, metempsychosic configurations in which characters are “networked” together in recent British and American novels dealing with the Internet. Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (Hamish Hamilton, 2004), for instance, networks the lives of an Indian computer engineer, a British business tycoon, and a Bollywood starlet as they become inextricably linked through a software virus that collapses international economic and communication systems. The “Leela” virus replicates the iconography of the Bollywood star from which it borrows its name, but quickly transcends even her global celebrity status as it infects domestic and business software across the world: “Leela was not one thing. She was not even a set or a group or a family. She was a swarm, a horde " (p. 108).