British freedoms: Caryl Phillips's Transatlanticism and the staging of Rough Crossings

Abstract

This essay is an exploration of the British-raised writer Caryl Phillips's dramatic adaptation of Simon Schama's book Rough Crossings (2005), which was first performed in the UK as part of the 2007 bicentennial commemoration of the end of slavery in the British Empire. It explores how Phillips's rewriting of Schama's history of transatlantic slavery, Abolition, the War of Independence, and the fortunes of the Sierra Leone settlement in the eighteenth century functions as a dramatic critical envisioning of African American politics and leadership in the twentieth century. The essay begins by noting the initial and instructive significance of Africa America for Phillips's diasporic engagements with Britain, and its emergence as a central concern in his circumatlantic envisioning of modern diasporic life. It considers next the confluences between Schama's book and Phillips's adaptation, and explores the significant changes and transformations which distinguish the play of Rough Crossings. Rather than offer an accurate vision of the eighteenth century on stage, Phillips uses the historical occasion of the play to address twentieth-century concerns and happenings related to African American charismatic political leadership. Its two key African American figures, David George and Thomas Peters, are presented as “hagiographical” characters who recall the political trajectories of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Malcolm X – hallowed and revered personages in African American history who iconically encapsulate two distinct kinds of dissidence in which the proper name of each functions almost as a sacred signature. The essay argues that Phillips's play calls into question the efficacy of each form of dissidence across centuries, and ultimately considers Phillips's concluding identification of an American-born post-racial vision of circumatlantic and humanitarian affiliation with the problematic figure of well-meaning white British Abolitionist John Clarkson, who is going into exile as the play ends.

Keywords:

• African American
• slavery
• dissidence
• race
• leadership
• adaptation
• Caryl Phillips

Acknowledgements

The author is very grateful to the organizers and delegates of the Caribbean Research Seminar in the North (especially Drs Clare Newstead and Abigail Ward), who commented generously and helpfully on an early version of this essay which the author presented at Nottingham Trent University, UK on 25 April 2008.

Notes

1. Schama, Rough Crossings, 385.

2. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 564.

3. West, Race Matters, 7.

4. Phillips, A New World Order, 84.

5. Phillips, A New World Order, 84.

6. Phillips, A New World Order, 81.

7. Phillips, A New World Order, 85.

8. Rough Crossings opened 14 September 2007 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and subsequently toured several theatres in the UK: the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds; the Everyman Playhouse, Liverpool; Lyric Hammersmith, London.

9. Marlowe, “Rough Crossings.”

10. Smirke, “Rough Justice,” 28.

11. Schama, Rough Crossings, 17.

12. For Schama's account of how he came to write Rough Crossings, see Schama, Rough Crossings, 446.

13. Like the fictional Rudi, Malcolm X was also imprisoned for burglary (in 1946). Bénédicte Ledent has noted that Rudi's name recalls “the name of one of Malcolm X's sidekicks when he was a burglar” (Caryl Phillips, 58).

14. Logan, “Crossing Over.”

15. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 21.

16. Schama, Rough Crossings, 385. This quotation was also cited in the play's programme.

17. Phillips, Crossing the River, 235.

18. Phillips, A New World Order, 15.

19. Phillips, A New World Order, 15.

20. Phillips, The European Tribe, 7–8.

21. Phillips, A New World Order, 16.

22. Schama, Rough Crossings, 17.

23. Schama, Rough Crossings, 18.

24. Fyfe focuses on Peters in one paragraph of his book, where he notes how he “courageously crossed the Atlantic” to seek redress in London for the hardships of life in Nova Scotia. David George is introduced at the same time as one who “prospered as a free man in Nova Scotia and accumulated some property” (A History of Sierra Leone, 32). Further references to each personage are minimal.

25. Schama, Rough Crossings, 334.

26. Schama, Rough Crossings, 7.

27. In the introduction to the published play text of The Shelter (1983), Phillips writes of a postcard he bought in Paris (and reproduced on the play text's cover) depicting a white woman whose head was held in the hands of a black man. The postcard inspired him to ponder what he considered as “[a]n explosive, perhaps the most explosive all relationships, seldom written about seldom explained, feared, observed, hated [...]” (The Shelter, 10–1).

28. O'Callaghan, “Historical Fiction and Fictional History,” 39. The exception to this rule is Dancing in the Dark, in which Phillips indeed fictionalizes the cultural personage of Bert Williams. For more on this exception, see Philips, “Dancing in the Dark.”

29. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 4-5.

30. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 5.

31. Phillips has written previously about the significance of Cruse's book. In The European Tribe he describes it as a “pioneering study” (8) which was crucial in helping him make the decision to become a writer during his last few weeks as an undergraduate at Oxford University.

32. West, Race Matters, 101.

33. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 564.

34. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, 564.

35. Phillips, Higher Ground, 152.

36. The corresponding passage in Malcolm X's writings can be found in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 496.

37. Phillips, Higher Ground, 152.

38. See Ward, “An Outstretched Hand,” 31. Phillip's brooding 1997 novel The Nature of Blood arguably critiques the visionary sense of post-racial brotherhood mooted in the climax to Crossing the River.

39. White, Black Leadership in America, 139.

40. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 39.

41. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 39.

42. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 73.

43. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 39.

44. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 48.

45. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 48.

46. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 85.

47. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 113.

48. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 113.

49. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 95.

50. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 95.

51. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 111.

52. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 111.

53. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 125–6.

54. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 126.

55. Phillips, Rough Crossings, 126.

56. Phillips, A New World Order, 17.

57. West, Race Matters, 7–8.