Vexing Encounters: Uncanny Belonging and the Poetics of Alterity in Caryl Phillipss Cambridge Maurizio Calbi, University of Salerno

Caryl Phillips is undoubtedly one of the most prominent and prolific black British writers of the last two decades. He is the author of seven novels: The Final Passage (1985), A State of Independence (1986), Higher Ground (1989), Cambridge (1991), Crossing the River (1993), The Nature of Blood (1997) and A Distant Shore (2003); five plays; and a series of non-fictional works, including critical essays and two travelogues. Phillipss fourth novel, Cambridge (1991) is still one of his most acclaimed works. This novel explores the interlocking of a variety of forms of marginalization, displacement, and dispossession that emerge from the experience of cross-cultural encounters. It persistently raises questions of home, identity and belonging. It is a text that addresses the strangeness of home and re-marks the uncanniness of identity and belonging. Ultimately, the text envisages, against all odds, a sense of community that is harrowingly open to the alterity of the other. Phillipss novel is set in an unnamed small Caribbean island during a transitional period, sometime between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the emancipation of the slaves in 1834. It is divided into five parts of unequal length. It presents three main narratives framed by a Prologue and an Epilogue: Emily Cartwrights first-person narrative of her voyage to, and stay in, her fathers Caribbean sugar plantation; Cambridges first-person narrative, in the form of a spiritual testament which borrows from slave narratives such as that of Equiano, of the extraordinary circumstances (133) that lead him from Africa to England, where he becomes a Christian and a free man, and then to the West Indies as a slave; and a short, anonymous and extremely biased newspaper report detailing Cambridges murder of the overseer Arnold Brown and his subsequent execution. Emilys fictional journal, which recalls, as Evelyn OCallaghan has observed, real travel journals by nineteenth-century women travellers such as Lady Nugent and Mrs. Carmichael (35), not least because of its mimicking of nineteenth-century polite English, is the longest section of the novel.[1] It describes her movement away from her home in England into a dark tropical unknown (22), where she intends to reside for no longer than three months. There seems to be little doubt at the beginning of her journal as to where she belongs. Emily is sad to leave a country which bears the title of [her] home (8), and she quotes the following lines to emphasize her sorrow: O my country, I have no pride but that I belong to thee, and can write my name in the muster-roll of mankind, an Englishman (8). Yet, as she clarifies, England has its faults (8). To put it simply, the trouble is that she is in fact unable to write [her] name in the muster-roll of mankind as an Englishman (emphasis added). She is a woman. One needs to read only the Prologue to realize that she is an uncanny stranger at home. Because of her gender, she simultaneously belongs and does not belong. As the extradiegetic narrator of the Prologue puts it: The truth was that she was fleeing the lonely regime which fastened her into backboards, corsets and stays to improve her posture. The same friendless regime which advertised her as an ambassadress of grace (4). This patriarchal regime of

gender, which inscribes its rigidity on the female body and sees women as no more than children of larger growth (4), also dictates that she be married on her return from the West Indian plantation to a fifty-year old prosperous widower with three children to ensure her profligate fathers future. The Prologue equates marriage with the rude mechanics of horsetrading (4). To Emily, her arranged marriage is nothing less than a mode of transportation through life (3) (emphasis added). Transportation evokes the forced movement of slaves across the middle passage. To an extent, therefore, Emilys position within the strict regime of gender being an object of a future, profitable exchange between two men is uncannily similar to the predicament of the black slaves she will soon encounter on the island. Given this half-perceived similarity, it comes as no surprise that Emily starts her adventuring (8) as an abolitionist, condemning the iniquity of slavery (8). In fact, she begins to set down her observations in a journal precisely in order to instruct her father as to the pains endured by those whose labour enables him to continue to indulge himself in the heavy pocketed manner to which he has become accustomed (7). These pains, of course, are also hers. They are the pains of somebody like her who will be forced into a loveless marriage to keep her fathers gambling habits, in spite of her buried feelings and hopes (4). Thus, her attempt to convert her father to the abolitionist cause can be interpreted as a way of reclaiming some kind of lordship over [her] own person (8), a displaced attempt to escape her destiny. Put differently, her indictment of the institution of slavery abroad is an oblique form of protest against the regime of gender at home. However, Emily is sceptical of the abstract (8) beliefs of the abolitionists; this scepticism explains her empiricist emphasis on her first-hand record of all that [she] has passed through (7). One of the many ironies of the text is that the concrete observations that are supposed to replace the abstract notions of the abolitionists turn out to be consistent with the re-emergence of class, good manners and propriety, the mental corset-stays she so desperately wants to discard (Ledent 84).[2] No sooner does she enter the dark tropical unknown (22), escorted by the plantation bookkeeper, than she uncritically adopts the latters a pseudo-scientific tone: There are many shades of black, some of which signify a greater acceptability than others []. The lighter the shade of black, the nearer to salvation and acceptability was the negro. A milkier hue signified some form of white blood, and it should be clear to even the most egalitarian observer that the more white blood flowing in a persons veins, the less barbarous will be his social tendencies. (25) [3] Among the many passages that could be cited to show the extent of Emilys sea-change, the following is perhaps the most significant. It appears in a much later section of her diary, when she is entirely under the spell of her lover, the overseer Mr Brown. She boldly states: Such untravelled thinkers [i.e., the abolitionists] do not comprehend the base condition of the negro. Nor do they appreciate the helplessness of the white man in his efforts to preserve some scrap of moral decency in the face of so much provocation and temptation. We all hope to welcome the day when liberty shall rule over an ample domain, but at present the white mans unfitness for long toil under the vertical sun would appear to go some way to justify his colonial employment of negro slaves, whose bodies are better suited to labour in tropical heat. (86)

Emilys narrative develops by articulating a repeated forgetting of the half-perceived correspondence between the margins of gender and the margins of race that marks the beginning of her adventuring (8) (cf. Low 29). She more or less unconsciously attempts to redefine herself to rewrite her self as a vital and authoritative force of feminine domestication in the margins of Empire. She endeavours to supplement an absentee owner/father who forcefully, albeit silently, marginalizes her in the metropolitan centre. This is mainly a process of reassertion of the proper bodily, linguistic and religious boundaries of the self, carried out in relation to in fact, under the sign of revulsion for bodies that are marked as racially inferior and utterly degenerate. The text presents many examples of this re-fashioning of a self that erects itself by turning away from the other in disgust. Still on a carriage on her way to the plantation, she comes across a number of pigs [], and after them a small parcel of monkeys. But what she has taken for pigs and monkeys are nothing other than negro children, naked as they were born, parading in a feral manner (23-4). She repeatedly associates the black inhabitants of the island with the animal kingdom and classifies them as subhuman (Ledent 86). She refers to slave homes as narrow nests (67) and the noises coming from the slave village as a distant braying (32). To Emily, the body of the black other is a body that unceasingly escapes its boundaries. Observing the black peoples favourite pastime of dancing after sunset, she comments as follows: their movements appeared to be wholly dictated by the caprice of the moment (44). After deciding to prolong her stay on the plantation, Emily is treated to a nocturnal serenade. She remarks on the congregation of black limbs tumbling and leaping, and the abundance of perspiration, as well as on the fact that black peoples instruments inexorably embrace discord (87). The eating habits of the slaves also bear witness to the fact the body of the other is seen as being on the verge of turning into something that is beyond or below what is properly human: I looked on with revulsion as these cannibals clamoured to indulge themselves with this meat, and I wished that with the growth of civilisation in the negro, the gorging of such unacceptable swinish parts might soon cease (44). In other words, the black body, in relation to which an imperialist and Eurocentric sense of propriety is upheld, is reduced to a mere physicality that does not signify. In Judith Butlers terms, it is constructed as the unconstructed abject, as a formlessness that is not quite a body, a body that matters (i.e. a body that is able to signify properly).[4] Alternatively, this black body is interpreted as a body that signifies in excess. For instance, Emily casts a disapproving look upon black peoples passion for wearing extravagant clothes on Sundays and festive occasions. She prefers to see the negroes, male and female, in their filthy native garb, for in these circumstances they do not violate laws of taste which civilized people have spent many a century to establish (66). However, in other sections of her travel journal, she also finds faults with their native garb, their ability to dress without concern for conventional morality (21). Their half-nakedness is itself sign and symptom of sexual intemperance: Negro relations would appear to have much in common with those practised by animals in the field, for they seem to find nothing unnatural in breeding with whomsoever they should stumble upon (36). Emily is concerned not only with the proper boundaries of the body but also with the body proper of language. She reprimands her black servant Stella for offering a distorted version of English: I [] informed her that I had no desire to hear my mother-tongue mocked by the

curious thick utterance of the negro language (29). But she also objects to what she sees as a form of mimicry that is too faithful to the original.[5] In her opinion, the slave Cambridges polite English (112) is highly fanciful (92). He seems to be perversely determined to adopt a lunatic precision in his dealings with our English words, as though [he] imagined himself to be a part of our white race (120). At the opposite end of the linguistic spectrum, but by no means less troubling for Emily, is the outrageous speechlessness of the black wench Christiania. Like a spectral apparition characterised by its sudden intrusion (32), she re-presents herself at regular intervals at the table of Emilys tropical home. Before her disappearance, she turns up outside Emilys window, scratching at the dirt (89) and crawling and whining like a dog in the filth (91). She embodies the language or non-language of the abject, simultaneously powerful and powerless.[6] Described as a coal-black ape-woman (73), she is figured as spitting out words whose meaning (73) is unimaginable, howling and hurling abuse like some sooty witch from Macbeth (74). According to the representation of events in Emilys journal, during her first and only encounter face-to-face with the base slave Cambridge (93), the latter broach[es] the conversational lead (93). He enquires after her family origins, and her opinions pertaining to slavery (93-4). His questions catch Emily unawares. Instead of answering, she anxiously counter-quizz[es] with enquiries as to the origins of his knowledge (93). But she does not wait for an answer. She quickly close[s] in the door (93) on Cambridges question(s) or potential answers. Jacques Derridas recent work on hospitality can help clarify the dynamics of this missed encounter. He points out that the question of the foreigner (la question dtranger) always takes one by surprise. It puts the self-same in question (Of Hospitality 3). Emilys inhospitable withdrawal is an anxious response to this questioning. It also bears witness to the fact that the excluded and abjected other is often too close, unbearably proximate. He is never at a safe distance. The second section of Phillipss novel displays the prematurely interrupted narrative of this foreign other. The lunatic precision (120) of Cambriges English takes centre-stage. His narrative offers a supplementary re-vision what Bill Ashcroft would probably call a revisionary interpolation (45-55) of most of the master tropes of colonial discourse Emilys narrative embodies, and in particular a re-vision of the process of redefinition of the boundaries of the proper in which she is engaged. Indeed, the mere fact that Cambridge speaks and makes sense, that he possesses the power of self-expression in the English language (133), is in itself a way of undermining Emilys belief that African people talk long, loud, and rapidly, but seldom deliver anything of import (38-9). Cambridges speech shows, to cite from Jacques Derridas Monolingualism of the Other, that the master cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological with what he calls his language (23). In short, the masters language is the language of the other. Cambridge alias Olumide alias Thomas alias David Henderson speaks of his extraordinary circumstances (133) in a way that recalls Othello. He presents himself as a black Christian (161). He also sees himself as a virtual Englishman (156) who proudly owns a superior English mind (155). He is an Englishman, albeit a little smudgy of complexion (147) who marries a sturdy Englishwoman [] unworthy of fleshy exploration (141). Thus, he successfully questions the interdependence of whiteness, Christian religion, proper use of English and English sexual restraint: an interdependence that is central to the process of

construction and re-definition of culturally hegemonic colonial identities. To Olumides ears, the English sailors talk on the slave ship resembled nothing more civilised than the manic chatter of baboons (135). He wonders whether these men of no colour, with their loose hair and decayed teeth, were not truly intent upon cooking and eating us (135). These remarks can be productively juxtaposed to Emilys observations on the linguistic and bodily savagery of the other cited earlier. In Cambridges narrative one also finds a trenchant critique of the unchristian behaviour of Christians on and off the Caribbean plantation, as well as a strong indictment of the institution of slavery and the part it played in English economic, social and cultural life: I soon came to understand that English law had recently decreed trading in human flesh illegal, so I learned to perceive of my master as a criminal. However, he was but one of a large multitude of contented plunderers happily accommodated in the bosom of English society. (141) Emily may not be so happily accommodated, but after witnessing Mr Browns whipping of Cambridge, she surmises as follows: If I were to be asked if I should enter life anew as an English labourer or a West Indian slave I should have no hesitation in opting for the latter (42). To Emily, the West Indian slave leads a happy hedonistic life (67). Cambridges narrative, which often writes back to Emilys in a rather detailed way, offers a slightly different perspective: I preached that the poorest in England may labour under great hardship, but not one would willingly exchange their status for the life of a West indian slave (150). Cambridges description of Emilys self-presentation is part of this strategy of writing back. It acquires its full ironic import if one reads it alongside Emilys obsession for the propriety of dressing codes on the plantation: She seemed decent, if a trifle overdressed for the heat, and she adopted a not altogether unsurprising posture of social superiority driven home by the alabaster in her complexion. Seldom without handkerchief to ward off the fetid air, she graced us with a detachment that bordered on thinly disguised disgust. (164) Yet it would be wrong to assume that the second section of Phillipss novel provides an unequivocal dismantling of the master tropes of imperialist and Eurocentric discourses. As Ledent points out, Phillipss novel resists any sentimental re-centring (96) of his main black character. She adds that Cambridges narrative simultaneously undermines and corroborates the colonisers discourse (97). Indeed, Cambridge, too, is involved in the process of othering of his black countrymen and native Africa. He speaks disparagingly of the barbarity of Africa he has fortunately fled (143). Once in England, he is proud of the fact that his uncivilized African demeanour begins to fall from [his] person (144). When he is re-enslaved, the pain he feels is compounded by the fact that he is mistaken for the African he is not: That I, a virtual Englishman, was to be treated as base African cargo, caused me such hurtful pain as I was barely to endure (156). Moreover, Cambridges narrative at times reinscribes the regime of gender from the Eurocentric perspective he partially adopts. He does not tell his new wife Christiana anything about his previous marriage. He fails to convert her, in spite of the fact that he sees her as possessing a spiritual nature (159). In fact, Christiania begins to mock at [his] Christian beliefs, a mockery which causes his heart to swell with both sorrow and anger, for, as is well known, a Christian man possesses his wife, and the dutiful wife must obey her Christian husband (163).

Therefore, the text displays a re-visioning of Cambridges re-visioning of Emilys constructions. Emily and Cambridges narratives are inextricably bound up with each other, in spite of the fact that there is no significant encounter between Emily and Cambridge qua characters within each single narrative. In other words, Emily and Cambridges narratives relentlessly, if often implicitly, read and respond to each other. They do not, however, make up a coherent whole. They do not merely fill each others gaps to provide a homogeneous truthful account of cross-cultural encounters. The truth, if there is any, resides in the sense of estranging strangeness of the encounter. It is not by chance that strange and strangeness are expressions that appear again and again towards the end of the novel. Cambridge sees himself as a strange figure (158). Emily is affected by strange moods (183) and is a strange fish (179; 180), like the former more compassionate overseer Mr Wilson. Christiania, Cambridges strange escort, is an exceedingly strange figure and is repeatedly associated with strangeness (159). The relativization of truth reopens the question of the foreign other. It allows the text to allude to the unrealised potentialities of a vexed cross-cultural encounter. Both Emily and Cambridge take part, no doubt in an asymmetrical way, in each others marginalization. Yet, there is some kind of unconscious subterranean empathy that binds the main protagonists, cutting across the boundaries of each others narrative (Phillips and Davison 93). One might go as far as to argue that this is the unreadable secret of the encounter. There are many examples of this underground sharedness and uncanny contact between the two main protagonists.[7] As Emilys narrative develops, one realizes that the longer she stays on the plantation, the less powerful she becomes. She is unable to present herself as the true and reliable supplement to her fathers absence. She blindly accepts the unscrupulous overseer Mr Browns explanations as to the reasons for the demise of the legitimate overseer Mr Wilson, and in fact falls in love with Mr Brown, failing to realise that the latter only preys on her dreams of romance and adventure (113) away from home. Emblematic of her inability to establish herself as the authoritative mistress of the plantation is the episode when she rushes to the sugar fields in the middle of the day, a wild Englishwoman, to confront Mr Brown, threatening to have him replaced: For some time we stood [], two solitary white people under the powerful sun, casting off our garments of white decorum before the black hordes, each vying for supremacy over the other (77). Needless to add, she is defeated. Mr Brown simply bids a black servant physically to carry her home. The immediate object of their contest is whether or not Christiania has any right to sit at the colonial mansions table with white people. This is highly ironic, because the utmost sign of Emilys powerlessness is precisely the fact that she is relentlessly translated into Christiania, who drives her beside [herself] with fury (74). Emilys romantic liaison with Mr Brown in one narrative becomes Christianas rape in the other. Moreover, one learns from Cambridges narrative that Christiania oddly conducts herself as though the mistress of the Great house (162). Mr Brown tolerates this pantomime and charade (162), and in fact indulges her behaviour (163).

One cannot but identify Emilys increasing powerlessness her inability to assert herself as the proper mistress of the house with this charade.[8] In short, she surreptitiously swaps places with the abject dis-figured figure Cambridge develops a true affection for, the odd female companion he learns to call his wife (160). In a way that is not untypical of Phillipss writing, the doubling, interchanging and intermixing of fictional selves in this case the interchange between Emily and Christiania, as well as the empathy between Emily and Cambridge mediated by Christiania allows the exploration of the strange coexistence of multifarious forms of marginalization.[9] But it is the Epilogue, more than any other section of the novel, which obliquely insists on the missed potentialities of cross-cultural encounters what Ledent calls an unrealised community of being (99).[10] The Epilogue also trenchantly raises questions of home and belonging. To an extent, Emily begins to learn to dwell in hybridity as home (Chambers 170). Her stay on the island is no longer a detour, or a domestication of the gap, between home and home: Are there no ships that might take me away? But take me away to what and to whom? (183). Her stay becomes a site of transit in which [her] setting out and hoped-for points of arrival are subject to equal interrogation (Chambers 197). To Dr McDonalds question: And when will you be returning to our country? she replies with another question: Our country? (172). Emily underlines that, as far as she is concerned, there is a loosening of the cultural constraints of the gendered regime of Englishness: The doctor delivered the phrase as though this England was a dependable garment that one simply slipped into or out of according to ones whim. Did he not understand that people grow and change? (177). Home, as Phillips points out in his collection of critical essays A New World Order, is a conundrum (308), a place riddled with vexing questions (6). Belonging is a contested state (6). Emily, at the end of the novel, lives in Hawthorn Cottage off the estate with her friend Stella, dear Stella (184), her former black servant who has finally replaced Isabella, the Iberian maid she has lost at sea. She relies on the kind hospitality of black people: They were kind, they journeyed up the hill and brought her food (182). What emerges as central to the fragmented narrative of the Epilogue is Emilys stillborn child, the little foreigner (183) Emily and Stella had hoped to share. This little foreigner simultaneously allegorises an encounter that hardly takes place and points to a traumatic opening onto alterity. In Derridean terms, the child can be seen as an arrivant (Aporias 34). It is mainly through the figuration of this child that the text hints at a fragile heterogeneous community that is impossible for it to inscribe in the historical moment it fictionalises, except as the unreadability of a secret. In short, this community largely remains venir. It is yet to come. It can only come from another time. It is worth adding that Cambridge, the man strung up, mouth agape, tongue protruding is poetically associated with this foreigner, and more precisely with the delicate head of a child [which] lie[s] peacefully in the shallow valley between [Emilys] fallen breasts (183). It is, therefore, around this child as unexpected guest, who speaks of and from an-other origin of this world, as Derrida would put it (Negotiations 95), that a different community is imagined, a community of displaced which includes those, like [Emily] herself, whose only journeys [are] uprootings (180). Notes