Coming unmoored: Old and new ways of belonging in Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow

Abstract

Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow traces the diverging experiences of three related men – a grandfather, father and mixed-race grandson of Afro-Caribbean background – and examines how, over the decades following the arrival of the Windrush, their lives are affected by changes in British society. While the novel focuses most prominently on the figure of the father, the three-generational spectrum allows Phillips to explore how matters of belonging, identity and race impinge differently upon each of the three male individuals. This article discusses the representation of the varying life journeys resulting from these diverse subject positions and is especially interested in tracing and critically interrogating how the introduction of mixed-race characters in the novel might challenge and complicate the issues of belonging and racial identifications to suggest new, possibly “post-racial” ways of belonging.

Keywords:

• Caryl Phillips
• In the Falling Snow
• mixed race
• belonging
• identity
• class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See also Phillips’s description of the changed conditions for the children of first-generation migrants: “our response was different from that of our parents, who often held their tongues in order that they might protect their children.” (2001, 276).

2. Phillips has commented that “I am, of course, writing about myself in some oblique [ … ] way” (2001, 305).

3. With regard to the popularity of the discourse of mixed-race identities, see Smith (2014): “1.2 million people [ … ] describe themselves as mixed [ … ] making mixed race the fastest-growing ethnic minority group [ … I]t is clear that a major demographic shift is under way”.

4. On the history of the reception of biracial characters, see Sollors (1997, 10).

5. See, for example the repeated references to snowfall (Phillips 2009a, 129, 131).