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
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
