3 This is the term that Phillips, in an interview with Bénédicte Ledent, said “might be a suitable la (.)Ģ Crossing the River, published in 1993, represents not necessarily a turning point in Phillips’s career, as it relies, like his two previous novels, on the use of historical archives and the creation of “a many-tongued chorus of common memory” (235) but nonetheless reveals an increased “sense of responsibility to history,” as Bénédicte Ledent points out in her monograph devoted to Caryl Phillips (107).2 Phillips uses this expression in the final essay of A New World Order (304).1 This conversation took place during the conference on Caryl Phillips entitled “Inhabiting the Voids (.).With the publication of Cambridge (1991), he revealed his interest in the use of written sources like the slave narrative as a way of giving his fictional voices an authenticity grounded in the only remaining trace of the past, written archives. He had already begun to use the polyphonic technique which he initiated with Higher Ground (1989) and which would allow him to explore different voices as a way of making audible the intimate suffering of those caught in the complex web of historical forces.

When he published the novel in 1993 he had already written four other novels focusing on the effects over time of the trade, particularly on people living in the Caribbean ( A State of Independence, 1986) or those who emigrated to Great Britain ( The Final Passage, 1985). I sold my children.” With these three short sentences, the opening lines of his fifth novel, Crossing the River, Caryl Phillips undertook an imaginative and intellectual journey that would involve an active engagement with a subject which had become a crucial and difficult one for writers on both sides of the Atlantic – the legacy of the slave trade.

Higher Ground by Caryl Phillips