On the Exilic Woman in Caryl Phillips's Novels

sexual Abstract: Caryl Phillips is one writer whose major themes have focused on issues of being Caribbean and being black in spaces that white people have for centuries claimed ownership. To do this, Phillips’s aesthetics, and ideological trends have been dominantly experimental especially in his novel with fragmentation and memory being a major tool to re-historicised caribbeanness and blackness. A reading of Phillips’s fiction and dramatics reveal his attachment and concern about the plight of the woman as she too constitutes part of the search for belonging in Phillips’s world. It is therefore my focus in the paper to discuss the way Phillips represents women as victims of exile in The final passage , Higher ground and Crossing the river . While demonstrating that exilic life is characterised by sexual difference that defines identity, the paper argues that women suffer marginality in exile because of their gender and race.