Caryl Phillips is undoubtedly one of the most prominent — and prolific — black British writers of the last two decades. He is the author of seven novels: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997) and A Distant Shore (2003); five plays; and a series of non-fictional works, including critical essays and two travelogues. Phillips’s fourth novel, Cambridge (1991) is still one of his most acclaimed works. This novel explores the interlocking of a variety of forms of marginalization, displacement, and dispossession that emerge from the experience of cross-cultural encounters. It persistently raises questions of home, identity and belonging. It is a text that addresses the “strangeness” of home and re-marks the uncanniness of identity and belonging. Ultimately, the text envisages, against all odds, a sense of community that is harrowingly open to the alterity of the other.

Phillips’s novel is set in an unnamed small Caribbean island during a transitional period, sometime between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the emancipation of the slaves in 1834. It is divided into five parts of unequal length. It presents three main narratives framed by a “Prologue” and an “Epilogue”: Emily Cartwright’s first-person narrative of her voyage to, and stay in, her father’s Caribbean sugar plantation; Cambridge’s first-person narrative, in the form of a spiritual testament which borrows from slave narratives such as that of Equiano, of the “extraordinary circumstances” (133) that lead him from Africa to England, where he becomes a Christian and a free man, and then to the West Indies as a slave; and a short, anonymous and extremely biased newspaper report detailing Cambridge’s murder of the overseer Arnold Brown and his subsequent execution.

Emily’s “fictional” journal, which recalls, as Evelyn O’Callaghan has observed, “real” travel journals by nineteenth-century women travellers such as Lady Nugent and Mrs. Carmichael (35), not least because of its mimicking of nineteenth-century polite English, is the longest section of the novel.[1] It describes her movement away from her home in England into “a dark tropical unknown” (22), where she intends to reside for no longer than three months.

There seems to be little doubt at the beginning of her journal as to where she belongs. Emily is sad to leave a country which “bears the title of ‘[her] home’” (8), and she quotes the following lines to emphasize her sorrow: “O my country, I have no pride but that I belong to thee, and can write my name in the muster-roll of mankind, an Englishman” (8). Yet, as she clarifies, England has “its faults” (8). To put it simply, the trouble is that she is in fact unable to “write [her] name in the muster-roll of mankind” as “an Englishman” (emphasis added). She is a woman.

One needs to read only the “Prologue” to realize that she is an “uncanny stranger” at home. Because of her gender, she simultaneously belongs and does not belong. As the extradiegetic narrator of the “Prologue” puts it: “The truth was that she was fleeing the lonely regime which fastened her into backboards, corsets and stays to improve her posture. The same friendless regime which advertised her as an ambassadress of grace” (4). This patriarchal “regime” of gender, which inscribes its rigidity on the female body and sees women as no more than “children of larger growth” (4), also dictates that she be married on her return from the West Indian plantation to a fifty-year old prosperous widower with three children to ensure her profligate father’s future. The “Prologue” equates marriage with “the rude mechanics of horse-trading” (4). To Emily, her arranged marriage is nothing less than “a mode of transportation through life” (3) (emphasis added).

“Transportation” evokes the forced movement of slaves across the “middle passage.” To an extent, therefore, Emily’s position within the strict regime of gender — being an object of a future, profitable exchange between two men — is uncannily similar to the predicament of the black slaves she will soon encounter on the island. Given this half-perceived similarity, it comes as no surprise that Emily starts her “adventuring” (8) as an abolitionist, condemning the “iniquity of slavery” (8). In fact, she begins to set down her observations in a journal precisely in order to instruct her father as to the “pains” endured “by those whose labour enables him to continue to indulge himself in the heavy pocketed manner to which he has become accustomed” (7). These “pains,” of course, are also hers. They are the pains of somebody like her who will be forced into a loveless marriage to keep her father’s gambling habits, in spite of her “buried feelings” and “hopes” (4). Thus, her attempt to “convert” her father to the abolitionist cause can be interpreted as a way of reclaiming some kind of “lordship over [her] own person” (8), a displaced attempt to escape her destiny. Put differently, her indictment of the institution of slavery abroad is an oblique form of protest against the regime of gender at home.

However, Emily is sceptical of the “abstract” (8) beliefs of the abolitionists; this scepticism explains her empiricist emphasis on her first-hand “record of all that [she] has passed through” (7). One of the many ironies of the text is that the concrete observations that are supposed to replace the “abstract” notions of the abolitionists turn out to be consistent with the re-emergence of “class, good manners and propriety, the mental corset-stays she so desperately wants to discard” (Ledent 84).[2] No sooner does she enter the “dark tropical unknown” (22), escorted by the plantation bookkeeper, than she uncritically adopts the latter’s a pseudo-scientific tone:

There are many shades of black, some of which signify a greater acceptability than others […]. The lighter the shade of black, the nearer to salvation and acceptability was the negro. A milkier hue signified some form of white blood, and it should be clear to even the most egalitarian observer that the more white blood flowing in a person’s veins, the less barbarous will be his social tendencies. (25) [3]

Among the many passages that could be cited to show the extent of Emily’s “sea-change,” the following is perhaps the most significant. It appears in a much later section of her diary, when she is entirely under the spell of her lover, the overseer Mr Brown. She boldly states:

Such untravelled thinkers [i.e., the abolitionists] do not comprehend the base condition of the negro. Nor do they appreciate the helplessness of the white man in his efforts to preserve some scrap of moral decency in the face of so much provocation and temptation. We all hope to welcome the day when liberty shall rule over an ample domain, but at present the white man’s unfitness for long toil under the vertical sun would appear to go some way to justify his colonial employment of negro slaves, whose bodies are better suited to labour in tropical heat. (86)

Emily’s narrative develops by articulating a repeated forgetting of the half-perceived correspondence between the margins of gender and the margins of race that marks the beginning of her “adventuring” (8) (cf. Low 29). She more or less unconsciously attempts to redefine herself — to rewrite her self — as a vital and authoritative force of “feminine” domestication in the margins of Empire. She endeavours to supplement an absentee owner/father who forcefully, albeit silently, marginalizes her in the metropolitan centre. This is mainly a process of reassertion of the proper bodily, linguistic and religious boundaries of the self, carried out in relation to — in fact, under the sign of revulsion for — bodies that are marked as racially inferior and utterly degenerate.

The text presents many examples of this re-fashioning of a self that erects itself by turning away from the other in disgust. Still on a carriage on her way to the plantation, she comes across “a number of pigs […], and after them a small parcel of monkeys.” But what she has taken for pigs and monkeys are “nothing other than negro children, naked as they were born, parading in a feral manner” (23-4). She repeatedly associates the black inhabitants of the island with the animal kingdom and classifies them as subhuman (Ledent 86). She refers to slave homes as “narrow nests” (67) and the noises coming from the slave village as a distant “braying” (32).

To Emily, the body of the “black other” is a body that unceasingly escapes its boundaries. Observing the black people’s favourite pastime of dancing after sunset, she comments as follows: “their movements appeared to be wholly dictated by the caprice of the moment” (44). After deciding to prolong her stay on the plantation, Emily is treated to a nocturnal serenade. She remarks on the “congregation of black limbs tumbling and leaping,” and “the abundance of perspiration,” as well as on the fact that black people’s instruments inexorably embrace “discord” (87). The eating habits of the slaves also bear witness to the fact the body of the other is seen as being on the verge of turning into something that is beyond or below what is properly human: “I looked on with revulsion as these cannibals clamoured to indulge themselves with this meat, and I wished that with the growth of civilisation in the negro, the gorging of such unacceptable swinish parts might soon cease” (44). In other words, the black body, in relation to which an imperialist and Eurocentric sense of propriety is upheld, is reduced to a mere physicality that does not signify. In Judith Butler’s terms, it is constructed as the “unconstructed” abject, as a formlessness that is not quite a body, a body that matters (i.e. a body that is able to signify properly).[4] Alternatively, this black body is interpreted as a body that signifies in excess. For instance, Emily casts a disapproving look upon black people’s passion for wearing extravagant clothes on Sundays and festive occasions. She prefers to see “the negroes, male and female, in their filthy native garb, for in these circumstances they do not violate laws of taste which civilized people have spent many a century to establish” (66). However, in other sections of her travel journal, she also finds faults with their “native garb,” “their ability to dress without concern for conventional morality” (21). Their half-nakedness is itself sign and symptom of sexual intemperance: “Negro relations would appear to have much in common with those practised by animals in the field, for they seem to find nothing unnatural in breeding with whomsoever they should stumble upon” (36).

Emily is concerned not only with the proper boundaries of the body but also with the “body proper” of language. She reprimands her black servant Stella for offering a distorted version of English: “I […] informed her that I had no desire to hear my mother-tongue mocked by the curious thick utterance of the negro language” (29). But she also objects to what she sees as a form of mimicry that is too faithful to the original.[5] In her opinion, the slave Cambridge’s “polite English” (112) is “highly fanciful” (92). He seems to be perversely “determined to adopt a lunatic precision in his dealings with our English words, as though [he] imagined himself to be a part of our white race” (120). At the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum, but by no means less troubling for Emily, is the outrageous speechlessness of the black “wench” Christiania. Like a spectral apparition characterised by its “sudden intrusion” (32), she re-presents herself at regular intervals at the table of Emily’s tropical home. Before her disappearance, she turns up outside Emily’s window, “scratching at the dirt (89) and “crawling and whining like a dog in the filth” (91). She embodies the language or “non-language” of the abject, simultaneously powerful and powerless.[6] Described as a “coal-black ape-woman” (73), she is figured as “spitting out words whose meaning” (73) is unimaginable, “howling and hurling abuse like some sooty witch from Macbeth” (74).

According to the representation of events in Emily’s journal, during her first and only encounter face-to-face with the “base slave” Cambridge (93), the latter “broach[es] the conversational lead” (93). He enquires after “her family origins, and her opinions pertaining to slavery” (93-4). His questions catch Emily unawares. Instead of answering, she anxiously “counter-quizz[es] with enquiries as to the origins of his knowledge” (93). But she does not wait for an answer. She “quickly close[s] in the door” (93) on Cambridge’s question(s) or potential answers. Jacques Derrida’s recent work on hospitality can help clarify the dynamics of this missed encounter. He points out that the question of the foreigner (la question d’étranger) always takes one by surprise. It puts the self-same in question (Of Hospitality 3). Emily’s inhospitable withdrawal is an anxious response to this questioning. It also bears witness to the fact that the excluded and abjected “other” is often too close, unbearably proximate. He is never at a safe distance.

The second section of Phillips’s novel displays the prematurely interrupted narrative of this “foreign other.” The “lunatic precision” (120) of Cambrige’s English takes centre-stage. His narrative offers a supplementary “re-vision” — what Bill Ashcroft would probably call a revisionary “interpolation” (45-55) — of most of the master tropes of colonial discourse Emily’s narrative embodies, and in particular a re-vision of the process of redefinition of the boundaries of the “proper” in which she is engaged. Indeed, the mere fact that Cambridge speaks and makes sense, that he possesses the power of “self-expression in the English language” (133), is in itself a way of undermining Emily’s belief that African people “talk long, loud, and rapidly, but seldom deliver anything of import” (38-9). Cambridge’s speech shows, to cite from Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, that the master “cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological” with what he calls his language (23). In short, the master’s language is the language of the other.

Cambridge alias Olumide alias Thomas alias David Henderson speaks of his “extraordinary circumstances” (133) in a way that recalls Othello. He presents himself as a “black Christian” (161). He also sees himself as a “virtual Englishman” (156) who proudly owns a “superior English mind” (155). He is “an Englishman, albeit a little smudgy of complexion” (147) who marries “a sturdy Englishwoman […] unworthy of fleshy exploration” (141). Thus, he successfully questions the interdependence of whiteness, Christian religion, proper use of English and English sexual restraint: an interdependence that is central to the process of construction and re-definition of culturally hegemonic colonial identities. To Olumide’s ears, the English sailors’ talk on the slave ship “resembled nothing more civilised than the manic chatter of baboons” (135). He wonders whether “these men of no colour, with their loose hair and decayed teeth, were not truly intent upon cooking and eating us” (135). These remarks can be productively juxtaposed to Emily’s observations on the linguistic and bodily savagery of the other cited earlier. In Cambridge’s narrative one also finds a trenchant critique of the unchristian behaviour of Christians on and off the Caribbean plantation, as well as a strong indictment of the institution of slavery and the part it played in English economic, social and cultural life:

I soon came to understand that English law had recently decreed trading in human flesh illegal, so I learned to perceive of my master as a criminal. However, he was but one of a large multitude of contented plunderers happily accommodated in the bosom of English society. (141)

Emily may not be so “happily accommodated,” but after witnessing Mr Brown’s whipping of Cambridge, she surmises as follows: “If I were to be asked if I should enter life anew as an English labourer or a West Indian slave I should have no hesitation in opting for the latter” (42). To Emily, the West Indian slave leads “a happy hedonistic life” (67). Cambridge’s narrative, which often “writes back” to Emily’s in a rather detailed way, offers a slightly different perspective: “I preached that the poorest in England may labour under great hardship, but not one would willingly exchange their status for the life of a West indian slave” (150). Cambridge’s description of Emily’s self-presentation is part of this strategy of “writing back.” It acquires its full ironic import if one reads it alongside Emily’s obsession for the propriety of dressing codes on the plantation:

She seemed decent, if a trifle overdressed for the heat, and she adopted a not altogether unsurprising posture of social superiority driven home by the alabaster in her complexion. Seldom without handkerchief to ward off the fetid air, she graced us with a detachment that bordered on thinly disguised disgust. (164)

Yet it would be wrong to assume that the second section of Phillips’s novel provides an unequivocal dismantling of the master tropes of imperialist and Eurocentric discourses. As Ledent points out, Phillips’s novel resists any “sentimental re-centring” (96) of his main black character. She adds that Cambridge’s narrative “simultaneously undermines and corroborates the coloniser’s discourse” (97). Indeed, Cambridge, too, is involved in the process of “othering” of his black countrymen and native Africa. He speaks disparagingly of the “barbarity” of Africa he has “fortunately fled” (143). Once in England, he is proud of the fact that his “uncivilized African demeanour” begins “to fall from [his] person (144). When he is re-enslaved, the “pain” he feels is compounded by the fact that he is mistaken for the African he is not: “That I, a virtual Englishman, was to be treated as base African cargo, caused me such hurtful pain as I was barely to endure” (156). Moreover, Cambridge’s narrative at times reinscribes the regime of gender from the Eurocentric perspective he partially adopts. He does not tell his new “wife” Christiana anything about his previous marriage. He fails to convert her, in spite of the fact that he sees her as possessing “a spiritual nature” (159). In fact, Christiania begins to “mock at [his] Christian beliefs, a mockery which causes his heart “to swell with both sorrow and anger, for, as is well known, a Christian man possesses his wife, and the dutiful wife must obey her Christian husband” (163).

Therefore, the text displays a “re-visioning” of Cambridge’s “re-visioning” of Emily’s constructions. Emily and Cambridge’s narratives are inextricably bound up with each other, in spite of the fact that there is no significant encounter between Emily and Cambridge qua characters within each single narrative. In other words, Emily and Cambridge’s narratives relentlessly, if often implicitly, read and respond to each other. They do not, however, make up a coherent whole. They do not merely fill each other’s gaps to provide a homogeneous truthful account of cross-cultural encounters. The truth, if there is any, resides in the sense of “estranging strangeness” of the encounter. It is not by chance that “strange” and “strangeness” are expressions that appear again and again towards the end of the novel. Cambridge sees himself as a “strange figure” (158). Emily is affected by “strange moods” (183) and is a “strange fish” (179; 180), like the former more compassionate overseer Mr Wilson. Christiania, Cambridge’s “strange escort,” is “an exceedingly strange” figure and is repeatedly associated with “strangeness” (159).

The relativization of truth reopens the question of the “foreign other.” It allows the text to allude to the unrealised potentialities of a vexed cross-cultural encounter. Both Emily and Cambridge take part, no doubt in an asymmetrical way, in each other’s marginalization. Yet, there is some kind of unconscious subterranean empathy that binds the main protagonists, cutting across the boundaries of each other’s narrative (Phillips and Davison 93). One might go as far as to argue that this is the unreadable secret of the encounter.

There are many examples of this underground sharedness and uncanny contact between the two main protagonists.[7] As Emily’s narrative develops, one realizes that the longer she stays on the plantation, the less powerful she becomes. She is unable to present herself as the true and reliable supplement to her father’s absence. She blindly accepts the unscrupulous overseer Mr Brown’s explanations as to the reasons for the demise of the legitimate overseer Mr Wilson, and in fact falls in love with Mr Brown, failing to realise that the latter only preys on her dreams of “romance and adventure” (113) away from home.

Emblematic of her inability to establish herself as the authoritative mistress of the plantation is the episode when she rushes to the sugar fields in the middle of the day, a “wild Englishwoman,” to confront Mr Brown, threatening to have him replaced: “For some time we stood […], two solitary white people under the powerful sun, casting off our garments of white decorum before the black hordes, each vying for supremacy over the other” (77). Needless to add, she is defeated. Mr Brown simply bids a black servant physically to carry her home.

The immediate object of their contest is whether or not Christiania has any right to sit at the colonial mansion’s table with white people. This is highly ironic, because the utmost sign of Emily’s powerlessness is precisely the fact that she is relentlessly “translated” into Christiania, who drives her “beside [herself] with fury” (74). Emily’s romantic liaison with Mr Brown in one narrative becomes Christiana’s rape in the other. Moreover, one learns from Cambridge’s narrative that Christiania oddly conducts herself “as though the mistress of the Great house” (162). Mr Brown tolerates this “pantomime” and “charade” (162), and in fact indulges her behaviour (163).

One cannot but identify Emily’s increasing powerlessness — her inability to assert herself as the proper mistress of the house — with this “charade.”[8] In short, she surreptitiously swaps places with the abject “dis-figured” figure Cambridge develops “a true affection for,” the “odd female companion” he learns to call his “wife” (160). In a way that is not untypical of Phillips’s writing, the doubling, interchanging and intermixing of fictional selves — in this case the interchange between Emily and Christiania, as well as the empathy between Emily and Cambridge mediated by Christiania — allows the exploration of the strange coexistence of multifarious forms of marginalization.[9]

But it is the “Epilogue,” more than any other section of the novel, which obliquely insists on the missed potentialities of cross-cultural encounters — what Ledent calls “an unrealised community of being” (99).[10] The “Epilogue” also trenchantly raises questions of home and belonging. To an extent, Emily begins to learn to “dwell in hybridity as home” (Chambers 170). Her stay on the island is no longer a detour, or a domestication of the gap, between home and home: “Are there no ships that might take me away? But take me away to what and to whom?” (183). Her stay becomes a “site of transit in which [her] setting out and hoped-for points of arrival are subject to equal interrogation” (Chambers 197). To Dr McDonald’s question: “And when will you be returning to our country?” she replies with another question: “Our country?” (172). Emily underlines that, as far as she is concerned, there is a loosening of the cultural constraints of the gendered regime of Englishness: “The doctor delivered the phrase as though this England was a dependable garment that one simply slipped into or out of according to one’s whim. Did he not understand that people grow and change?” (177). Home, as Phillips points out in his collection of critical essays A New World Order, is a “conundrum” (308), a “place riddled with vexing questions” (6). Belonging is “a contested state” (6).

Emily, at the end of the novel, lives in Hawthorn Cottage off the estate with her “friend” Stella, “dear Stella” (184), her former black servant who has finally replaced Isabella, the Iberian maid she has lost at sea. She relies on the kind hospitality of black people: “They were kind, they journeyed up the hill and brought her food” (182). What emerges as central to the fragmented narrative of the “Epilogue” is Emily’s stillborn child, the “little foreigner” (183) Emily and Stella had hoped to share. This “little foreigner” simultaneously allegorises an encounter that hardly takes place and points to a traumatic opening onto alterity. In Derridean terms, the child can be seen as an arrivant (Aporias 34). It is mainly through the figuration of this child that the text hints at a fragile heterogeneous community that is impossible for it to inscribe in the historical moment it fictionalises, except as the unreadability of a secret. In short, this community largely remains à venir. It is yet to come. It can only come from another time. It is worth adding that Cambridge, the “man strung up, mouth agape, tongue protruding” is poetically associated with this “foreigner,” and more precisely with “the delicate head of a child [which] lie[s] peacefully in the shallow valley between [Emily’s] fallen breasts” (183). It is, therefore, around this child as “unexpected guest,” who speaks of and “from an-other origin of this world,” as Derrida would put it (Negotiations 95), that a different community is imagined, a community of displaced which includes “those, like [Emily] herself, whose only journeys [are] uprootings” (180).