“Looking across the Atlantic” in Caryl Phillips's In the Falling Snow

Abstract

Caryl Phillips's novel In the Falling Snow (2009) explores a spectrum of black British diasporan positions, moving from the early optimism and subsequent disappointment of the Windrush generation of migrants to encounter the difficulties facing second- and third-generation black Britons in a sometimes inhospitable and turbulent country. This article argues that In the Falling Snow is especially interested in the lasting relationship between black America and black Britain – evidenced not least of all by the novel's intertextual relationship with works by Richard Wright. Critics have mentioned the significance of Wright's novel Native Son (1940) to Phillips's choice of career, and it is clear that the concerns of this novel with the politics of mixed-race relations finds commonality with Phillips's works. However, the connections between Wright's haiku and Phillips's In the Falling Snow are equally important, and reveal an evolving, and reflective, relationship with Wright. Although the associations between Phillips and Wright suggest a continuation of Phillips's interest in the relationship between black Britain and black America, the black British identity explored in In the Falling Snow is both crucially informed by, but also different from, black American identifications.

Keywords:

• Caryl Phillips
• Richard Wright
• transatlantic
• black Britain
• black America
• Paul Gilroy

Notes

1. Gilroy's emphasis on the evolving nature of black cultures prefigures Stuart Hall's notion of diasporan identities as being fluid and ever in production, “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (Hall 402).

2. This presence was previously acknowledged in Phillips's earlier works, such as the novel Cambridge (1991), in which the Anglicized slave Cambridge also discovered that “[t]he bustling narrow cobbled streets of [18th-century] London were indeed teeming with a variety of unfortunate negroes” (143). The 18th-century black presence in Britain appears in several other works by Phillips, including his anthology Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging (1997), which features writing by slave narrators Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, and Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), one part of which explores the life of Francis Barber, the servant of Samuel Johnson.

3. Wendy W. Walters has also located Phillips within a group of “black international writers” (along with Richard Wright, Michelle Cliff, Chester Himes and Simon Njami) whose works “exceed the boundaries of the countries in which they were born” (x).

4. First published in Ebony 16 (1961) 93. See also Phillips, European 100.

5. Wright's daughter Julia similarly understands her father's haiku as enabling “him to reach out to the black boy part of himself still stranded in a South that continued to live in his dreams” (xi).

6. In other haiku by Wright, snow suggests more a familiar theme of alienation, for example: “Entering my town / In a heavy fall of snow / I feel a stranger” (Wright Haiku 116). See also haiku 519 and 681.

7. Irving Howe also referred to Wright's “inner feelings of anger and hatred which no white man could reach” (62), and James Baldwin wrote of Native Son that “hatred smoulders through these pages like sulphur fire” (16).

8. The roots of this anxiety can be traced back to the slave trade; see Ware 4. Although in Phillips's novel Cambridge the relationship between Emily, a white slave-owner's daughter, and Cambridge is never a sexual one, it is still at the core of the novel. Emily's prominent narrative presence within a novel entitled Cambridge suggests the integrated nature of the relationship between the protagonists, despite their minimal contact, and both are shown to struggle with British national identity.

9. For more on transracial affiliation in Crossing the River, see Ward.

10. A point that seems to have been missed in Peter Parker's review in The Sunday Times, in which he claims that the novel's “resolution (a death in one generation coinciding with the possibility of a new start and a new life in the next two) is altogether too pat” (Parker 1).

11. As Phillips has pointed out, “some of the most eloquent, politically powerful writing is [ … ] whispered”, unpublished interview n. pag.