I’m a friend, and a fanboy, of Caryl Phillips. I know he’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s infra dig, I’m told, to write about your pals.
Nevertheless, my short review of Another Man in the Street for the excellent magazine Writers Mosaic urges you to pay close attention to his latest novel. So if you just want to read about that, you can pick up this link and stop reading the rest of this post. I’ve also written a long essay on all his previous novels, which concentrates on Phillips’ ‘subtle politics of hope’. If you like what I say now, you might pick up the link to that article at the end of this one.
In the review I refer to Phillips’ relentless focus on ‘the essential role of kindness and compassion in all human affairs’. If you want proof that this is one of his starting points you could do no better than read the title essay of his 2011 book Colour Me English.
Phillips is prolific — there’s now a vast body of work stretching back to the early 1980s which includes novels, essays, film and play scripts. (A delightful early script for film, when he was thinking about being a dramatist, is Horace Ové’s Playing Away [Channel 4, 1987].)
There are books, which his website says are novels, which show that he will play fast and loose with literary classification. Thus, Foreigners (2007) appears under non-fiction, but Dancing in the Dark (2009) (about Bert Williams) and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018) (about Jean Rhys) get listed as novels because he departs from ‘the facts’ and speculates about the inner lives of his subjects in the finest traditions of the novel’s form.
For that reason, Foreigners — Three English Lives (about three black Englishmen: Francis Barber, Randolph Turpin and David Oluwale) might also be classified as a novel. I think he refrains from using that category because, in telling David Oluwale’s story, he breaks both the novelist’s and the historian’s conventions.
For example, at the start of the third section of Foreigners, he imagines himself as a teenage girl walking up Chapeltown Road, in Leeds, and bumping into David Oluwale, during the time when David, by then a homeless man with acute psychiatric problems, could sometimes be seen walking the streets of the English neighbourhood where Black and South Asian British citizens had settled in the post-war period.
As his ‘Colour Me English’ essay makes plain, Phillips is heavily invested in Leeds. And so am I. He arrived here from St Kitts as a babe in arms in 1958. I arrived, as a bumptious 19 year old, in 1968. To our great loss, he left us for the USA in 1990 but his passion for Leeds United and for the city has not ceased, manifested in his support for the David Oluwale Memorial Association. (I’m its co-Secretary.)
As the ‘Colour Me English’ essay also shows, the subtlety of his writing about ‘race’ is another remarkable achievement. Darcus Howe once said to me “I’m English”. It was at the time, maybe 30 years ago, when every other Leeds Black person I knew would say “I’m African-Caribbean”. In London, they might say “I’m Black British”. The most adventurous would say “I’m a Londoner”. (It was good to see that Nels Abbey says “I’m English”.)
I think his writing leads us to infer “It’s OK to colour me English — of course I’m Black, and that doesn’t define me”. And I’m not sure he’d bother with the upper case. So he’s not proclaiming any simple symbolic marker. Superficial readers of his work say it’s about identity. But it isn’t. To oversimplify, it’s about migration and the (often painful) intersection of cultures and personalities where racism has underpinned those societies. That is: everywhere. He shows how every relationship is corrupted by the imbalance of power.
CLR James said ‘[We Caribbeans] are British, French, Spanish, African, Oriental – we have everything, we are attached to everything’. I think Phillips would say this too. And, like James, he would add ‘We are tired of this subordination’, because all his writing, in the least didactic of tone, pushes hard against every type of inequality.
That too is the value position that pulses through Another Man in the Street.
Playing Away, by Horace Ové and Caryl Phillips [Channel 4, 1987] is on YouTube
David Oluwale Memorial Association: RememberOluwale.Org
On CLR James (in my review of John L Williams’ fantastic biography of that great man):
https://writersmosaic.org.uk/reviews/clr-james-a-life-beyond-the-boundaries/
Nels Abbey, ‘Sorry Suella: I’m Nels — and I’m English”, Guardian, 5.3.25, print version. Online version, interestingly, has a different title
My view of Caryl Phillips’ novels:
https://www.maxfarrar.org.uk/writing/caryl-phillipss-subtle-politics-of-hope/