“Nobody disappears. People don’t just disappear”: Repetition and negation as dialogic devices in Caryl Phillips’s “Northern Lights”

Abstract This article investigates the literary significance of two linguistic devices, repetition and negation, in the fictionalized biography “Northern Lights” by British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips, a narrative that focuses on David Oluwale, a Nigerian immigrant to the UK who died as a result of police violence in Leeds in 1969. To recount Oluwale’s story, “Northern Lights” uses a non-linear structure that juxtaposes stylistically diverse material such as eyewitness testimonies, a history of the city of Leeds, administrative documents, and passages featuring an authorial figure who apostrophizes the dead Oluwale. Analysing linguistic patterns found within and across these different textual segments, this article argues that repetition and negation play a key role in generating forms of dialogism that, in turn, implicitly indicate how “Northern Lights” positions itself towards Oluwale and his controversial story. From a more broadly methodological perspective, the article seeks to advance knowledge of how negation and repetition, when jointly studied as pragmatic phenomena, can impact literary strategies of characterization and reinforce a text’s poetic effects.