“One is exiled when one refuses to obey the commandments of Conquest Mission”

Caryl Phillips's later novels, from Higher Ground (1989) to Crossing the River (1993), have often been read in the context of what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic, as recreations of slave-trading in Africa, plantation life in the Americas, and exile in European metropolises. Described by one commentator as "a vivid historian of slave experience," Phillips could even be called one of the major current chroniclers of this often silenced past, since "behind all of [his fiction] looms the dark history of slavery and its consequences." For all its interest and relevance, however, this historicist approach has its own limitations. In the long run, it could indeed make us forget that Phillips's fiction, far from being exclusively concerned with elaborating a response to the wrongs of colonialism, among them slavery, aspires, like any self-respecting work of art, to express its own way of seeing the world: ie, its philosophy. Unsurprisingly, therefore, a few reviewers were mystified when in his latest novel, The Nature of Blood (1997), Phillips seemed to distance himself from what they regarded as his fictional territory, and dealt with the European roots of exclusion and tribalism, particularly the Jewish Holocaust (which, incidentally, he had already addressed in a collection of travel essays, The European Tribe [1987], and in the last section of Higher Ground). As if, by leaving the literary ghetto to which the sacred rules of authenticity would have confined him, Phillips had claimed a more direct say on the human condition at large, and had thereby committed literary trespass, an offence taken seriously by some mainstream critics. Such, at least, is the impression given in a review by Hilary Mantel, entitled "Black is not Jewish," where she objects to what she views as Phillips's inadequate tackling of the Jewish Holocaust: