Writing back or writing off? Europe as “tribe” and “traumascape” in works by Caryl Phillips and Christos Tsiolkas

Abstract

This article takes its cue from Caryl Phillips’s critique of Eurocentric “tribalism” in The European Tribe and compares it to the ghostly and highly dystopian “traumascape” of Dead Europe by the Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas. It argues that, in contrast to the predominantly black British frames of reference of Phillips’s counter-travelogue, Tsiolkas’s depiction of Europe is characterized by a transcultural shift. Scrutinizing this shift, the analysis of Tsiolkas’s novel demonstrates how transgressing generic boundaries and employing narrative unreliability and magical realism not only brings transculturality to the fore, but also creates reader complicity. The article goes on to examine the novel’s use of photography, since it plays a crucial role in depicting Europe as “traumascape” and, together with the novel’s unclear stance on anti-Semitism, invites readers to experience the struggle and tensions accompanying diasporic encounters and the emergence of transnational identities in contemporary fictions of Europe.

Keywords:

• literary imaginations of Europe
• postcolonialism
• transculturality
• transnationalism
• magical realism
• narrative unreliability

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders.

Notes

1. See Said’s ([1978] 2003) concept of Orientalism. See also Nyman’s (2000) study of Europe in the 20th-century British literary imagination.

2. Phillips, for instance, records his visits to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and Buchenwald concentration camp. Moreover, his chapters devoted to Venice as a place which, in the 16th century, “both enslaved the black and ridiculed the Jew” ([1987] 2000, 45) contain readings of Shakespeare’s Othello (45–51), who – under the pressures of Venetian society – ultimately “died a European death – suicide” (51), and of The Merchant of Venice (54–55). See also Phillips’s return to similar Jewish and black European experiences in his novel The Nature of Blood (1997).

3. The quotations from the lecture Phillips gave as part of the international conference “Afroeurope@ns IV: Black Cultures and Identities in Europe” at the University of London on 4 October 2013 are based on notes by the author of this article.

4. See similarly, but with a focus on the creative output of Africans living in Europe, Bekers, Helff, and Merolla (2009).

5. According to Kostova (2000), the term “‘[p]ost-wall Europe’ [ … ] refers to the whole continent in the aftermath of the fall of communism” (83n1).

6. See earlier references to Tumarkin by Padmore (2007, 53, 57) and Parlati (2011, 45).

7. The motif of the ghost as a literal manifestation of Europe’s traumatic legacies can also be found in Evaristo’s Soul Tourist (2005).

8. See transcultural memory studies in general and Erll’s (2011) concept of “travelling memory” in particular, which captures transcultural memory’s capacity to travel across and beyond territorial and social boundaries (11).

9. Several scholars have drawn attention to Tsiolkas’s rendition of the vampire (Marinkova 2013, 176; Ng 2013, 130; Parlati 2011, 47; Shek-Noble 2011, 6) and support their argument with the observation that no blood flows when Isaac is hurt (e.g. Padmore 2007, 59).

10. For a recent survey on the state of narratological research on “unreliability” see Shen ([2011] 2013).

11. A similarly ventriloquistic dialogue can be found earlier in the novel when the boy speaks to Isaac through Anika (Tsiolkas [2005] 2011, 295). Yet, since this dialogue takes place while Isaac is unconscious after having fainted, it is (still) clearly marked as a hallucination.

12. Likewise, the exact location of the “other” presence and how it relates to Isaac remain ambiguous throughout the novel because Isaac alternately perceives the demon inside (Tsiolkas [2005] 2011, 360, 371) and outside (358, 369) his body.

13. It is worth noting that the effects drugs such as alcohol, hashish or ecstasy have on Isaac are acknowledged, but neither alter his self-perception nor coincide with syntactic and linguistic changes as the consumption of blood does (Tsiolkas [2005] 2011, 86, 96).

14. See Padmore (2007) for an overview on reviews of Dead Europe and bibliographical references. See also the more recent reviews by Johnstone (2011) and Ravenhill (2011) accompanying Dead Europe’s rerelease in the UK after the success of Tsiolkas’s multi-perspectival novel The Slap (2008).

15. In an interview, Tsiolkas has referred to Europe as a place of “ancient terrors and tribalism” (2006, n.p.).