Traumatic Memory and History in The Fiction of Caryl Phillips

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine how Caryl Phillips in his neo-slave narratives, revisit the history of slavery by allowing their characters reveal their traumatic memories. It aims to demonstrate how slave victims uncover and recover the forgotten and manipulated histories of their bondage. The neo-slave narratives under study include Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River and The Nature of Blood. The analysis of these novels is based on the assumption that the characters reconstruct history by recounting their experiences through memory. Informed by psychoanalysis and new historicism theory, the study finds that memory recovery takes place through a constant shift from present to past both in the characters’ psyche and in the narrative. It reveals that the narrative methods used by Phillips to revisit the history of slavery, re-centers the voice of slaves giving them therefore the occasion to tell their own tale.  These narrative methods highlight the way that the dismantling of a monolithic, static and unquestioned history gives place to the predominance of a revisionary narrative impulse to “historicize the event of the de-historicized” in Homi Bhabha’s terms (The Location of Culture, 198). The paper concludes that the characters’ process of recovery through actual recount of their past experiences release them of their trauma.