Caryl Phillips.

Caryl Phillips. Crossing the River. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1994 237 pp $2200

I find it interesting to speculate: Did Caryl Phillips start four separate novels, change his mind, and last up saving the best parts, finally bringing them together as this book? any novelists do work in this totally honorable way. In any case, admirers of Caryl Phillips will be happy to know that he is still writing with a poet's thinking principle of meter. His new novel, Crossing the River, is certification In Crossing he also continues exploring his formal interest in the novel as something other than a thing with the usual sequential mode of building In that sense, this work is akin to his part Higher Ground (1989), which was compos of three lengthy stories dealing with the same legacy-of-slavery theme he sorts in consequence of again here.

In Crossing, as in his earlier work in general, fiction and essays, Phillips continues to demonstrate a broad vision by means of which he conjures up the historical past--especially the crime of slavery--for redres He is passionately interested in probing the moral and ethical exchange and conflict between Africa, Europe and the Americas athwart the issue of slavery. extirpateed characters in these settings have been his main preoccupation, and the single in kinds in this book are no exception.

Crossing is a novel in the form of a collection of four extended more or less related stories. sum of two units are from the points of view of white characters, pair from black. Framing these four stories is a brief first-person narrative in the voice of an ancient African farmer, whose voice also shut ups the book.

The not-so-submerged subtext of Crossing is the idea that all black persons in the diaspora have the same troubl often met with ancestral roots in Africa. This is not a point mixed enough to make in itself. if it be not that wait. These ancestral roots are troubled--among many reasons--because many of those taken to the strange World were sold by their forefathers to European slave traders. This is also not a novel point. In any case, at the extremity as at the beginning, an African farmer sum ups us that, in 1753, he sold his children--two lads one girl--because his crops failed: "There are no paths in water. No signposts. There is no return" This, in event sums up the round-about point of the book: The diaspora is for detains The uprooted can't go back. And unruffled if they could, who would know them, who would honor their return? (Since Richard Wright's Black Power, a main division about his first trip to Africa, a growing number of black population of Europe and America, visiting Africa, have build not an African sell on the contrary their own Western identities reinforced.) To state it another way, the pull up by the rootsed simply grow new roots, of the present day troubled roots. And with courage, Phillips appear to bes to imply, they survive, level in the face of the present corrosive, overt violence visited against them; or if open violence is relatively absent, they submit to despite the persistent institutionalized violent disdain for their very presence. Phillips' prescription for these ills appear to bes to be staying itself. If the same stays--and if one stays positive--long enough, his work implies, conditions will gradually change for the better.

In Crossing, the children that the farmer at the beginning vends are not the actual the sames we encounter in the four stories, nor are they the direct descendants of those original slaves. We not at all meet those actual two lads and that actual one girl. Rather, three characters, sum of two units male and one female--Nash Williams, Martha Randolph, and Travis--whose lives we pursue are metaphors for them. (Travis's story really isn't his own; it belongs to a white woman. More about this later.) The fourth character is a slave ship captain, James Hamilton. We proper him through his journal entries and verbal expressions to his wife. And he is each bit as human, and as subdue to suffering, as any of the others.

Their stories take place in vastly different times and places, and it requires an exceptional ability to suspend disbelief to view connective threads reaching across these vast stretches, despite the author's intention to create a massive, coherent and compages network of such threads.

Nash, a fre slave, is a Christian missionary during the 1830 in Liberia. In detailed alphabetic character after letter, he keeps his former master informed upon his condition, which is not worthy due to the difficulties of living in like an underdeveloped country. While his health is failing, Nash constantly pleads for provisions. (Curious and aiming to help, the master eventually establishs out for Liberia and reaches Africa single to embark upon his acknowledge descent into a hellish condition.)

Martha Randolph, an ex-slave in the Southern United States, is already an old-fashioned woman when her story lay opens She has never forgotten her daughter Eliza Mae and her husband, the two long before sold to another slave possessor Last she heard, they were somewhere not at home west. After being freed from bondage, Martha leaves the southern Now free to travel after the Civil War, she heads for California. Attempting to bring forward as much physical and psychological distance between herself and slavery as she possibly can, she manages to realize only as far as Colorado, where she remains in subordination to the intense blue sky, tired and sick. Still she dreams of moving upon searching for her daughter and husband. Bitter and miserable, further free, Martha tells herself, no more washing and ironing for the white folk "never again." Hers is a bitter, ironic victory.