The Atlantic Sound [Hardcover]

Caryl Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 10, 2000

Liverpool, England; Accra, Ghana; Charleston, South Carolina. These were the points of the triangle forming the major route of the transatlantic slave trade. And these are the cities that acclaimed author Caryl Phillips explores--physically, historically, psychologically--in this wide-ranging meditation on the legacy of slavery and the impact of the African diaspora on the life of a place and its people.

In a brilliantly layered narrative, Phillips combines his own observations with the stories of figures from the past. The experiences of an African trader in nineteenth-century Liverpool are contrasted with Phillips's experience of the city, where, as a Carib-bean black, he is scorned by the city's "native" blacks. His interactions with American Pan-Africanists coming "home" to Ghana (and with those Ghanaians for whom leaving seems the best hope) are paired with the account of a British-trained African minister in eighteenth-century Accra who turned a blind eye to the slave trade flourishing around him. The story of a white judge who disrupted "the natural order" in Charleston by integrating the Democratic primary in 1947 is set against Phillips's search for remnants of the "pest houses" where slaves were "seasoned" be-fore being sold.

Phillips weaves these narrative threads together with acute insight and a novelist's grasp of time, place and character. The result is a provocative and unexpected book, at once historically illuminating and profoundly affecting.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Caryl Phillips has established himself as one of the supreme chroniclers of African dispossession and exile. In previous works such as The European Tribe and Crossing the River, he documents the ironies of post-colonial history. Phillips's latest book is perhaps best described as a "meditation," although it is also a fine and invigorating book. The subject of Phillips's broodings is that of displacement, diaspora, homelessness--all those things that ineluctably accompany any descendant of West African slaves. Phillips himself was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, in 1958, and so here he retraces the first transatlantic journey he made with his mother in the late 1950s, by banana boat from the Caribbean to the gray shores of the Mother Country. He visits three cities central to the slave trade: Liverpool, Elmina in Ghana, and Charleston. Finally in Israel, he finds a community of 2,000 African Americans who have lived in the Negev desert for 30 years. Wholly absorbing, always surprising, brilliantly observant, sensitive to human tragedy but never pessimistic, Phillips writes as beautifully as ever. "It is futile to walk into the face of history. As futile as trying to keep the dust from one's eyes in the desert." --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk

From Publishers Weekly

Journeys, as forces of spiritual and cultural transformation, bind this trio of nonfiction narratives, which explores the legacy of slavery in each of the three major points of the transatlantic slave trade. Once again, Phillips demonstrates the great aptitude for characterization, and for evoking historical settings and evaluating the moral demands of history, that he has honed in his fiction (The Final Passage, etc.) and nonfiction (The European Tribe). In the opening narrative, John Emmanuel Ocfansey, the adopted son of a prominent African trader on the Gold Coast, travels to Liverpool, England, in 1881 to investigate the loss of a substantial amount of his father's money, clinging to his Christian faith as he enters the thicket of the British justice system and, clear-eyed, studies the ways of the English. Another powerful story of identity, culture and assimilation follows with Phillips's account of an African minister's dilemma in 18th-century Accra, in which the minister, afraid to speak out, turns a blind eye to the horrors of the slave trade around him. The concluding narrative, of Federal Judge J. Waties Waring's bold battle against Southern racism in South Carolina in 1950, emphasizes the stance of a man who is willing to risk everything for what he believes. Phillips strips away his own personal and cultural armor with meditations on race, traditional social rites, identity and nationalism, although his analysis occasionally eclipses the raw power of his material. While the last two narratives don't carry the impact of the first one, they all sparkle with keen intelligence, careful research and well-expressed truths. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1ST edition (October 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375401105
• ISBN-13: 978-0375401107
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,259,997 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and his other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complex interrogation of the middle passage, March 13, 2002

By 

Amardeep Singh (New Haven, CT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Atlantic Sound (Paperback)

This is a remarkably complex and thought-provoking book.
It would be of interest to anyone who thinks about:
slavery/the middle passage, the limits (or failures) of Pan-Africanism, the power of the 'Exodus' myth in the Bible, and finally the invisible histories of urban space (i.e., of cities like Liverpool, UK and Charleston, SC).

The different destinations in the book -- Ghana, Liverpool, Charleston, even Israel -- all have some bearing to the middle passage. The argument of this book, if there is an argument, seems to be that the journeys "homeward" that many people of African descent invent for themselves are all in some way symptomatic of the original event of separation, the forcible departure constituted by captivity and the journey to the new world.

Amardeep Singh

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unexpected tone, aim and even subject matter. It's excellent, July 24, 2001

By 

CodyforOrange "CodyforOrange" (Davis CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Atlantic Sound (Hardcover)

I picked this book up in the library probably because of its alluring cover image and title, I'll admit it. And I was prepared to even enjoy what I thought was coming: an intellectual travel book of the Paul Theroux ilk, with perhaps the added sarcasm and chip on the shoulder due any returing British colonial.

It was, however, immediately more interesting and engrossing than any of those books Mr. Theroux has written, and it had even more honesty than Maya Angelou's book about coming to Africa, "All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes." For a long time I was not sure if it was meant to be novel or not. It was acertainly a novel idea, to make such trips, one after the other, in the time that one would need to see the places one was visiting (although I get the feeling that he might have strayed further afield in Africa than he did. There is an element of depression at times that was perhaps strongest in Africa, that kept some of his questions from being asked, so that he decided to move on and end any meandering reflection.) He was always interested in takling to people of the places he visited, but not to justify or romanticize about some book-learned image of the place. He aims more to appreciate what the possibilities of the places he visits are now, and then more importantly, what people there feel their history to be.

It is almost as if he goes to visit a relative in each place, (although he never does this) and in the process was not recognised as a visitor or tourist (was not recognised as anything, perhaps, something that helped lend the novel air to the book, and an interesting element of his reflection. I guess it is based upon the narrator's (and author's, I suppose) African heritage, colonial experience, and English mother tongue, despite his never having lived in America, Britain, or Africa.)

I recomend this book as history and even as a novel. I Guess it is a new sort of book for this age, frank and real and yet also curiously fictitious. It is hard to put down. I look forward to reading it again.

1.0 out of 5 stars Book Over a Month Late, December 6, 2011

By 

djhennin - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Atlantic Sound (Paperback)

I ordered my item over a month ago, and it still hasn't gotten here. I actually failed a class because of this. Thank you.