Caryl Phillips
Andrea Levy's spellbinding novel Small Island immortalized the experiences of Britain's first wave of Caribbean - or West Indian - immigrants. But what of the decades since the immediate post-WWII period depicted in Levy's award-winning novel? What of the subsequent emergence of black British identity?
This is the subject Caryl Phillips, himself a Briton of Caribbean origin, turns to in his latest novel, In the Falling Snow. Born in the tiny island country of Saint Kitts and Nevis but raised in Britain, to which his parents brought him as an infant, Phillips has written his own tale of Caribbean migration - 1985's The Final Passage - as well as several acclaimed novels and nonfiction works exploring the legacy of slavery throughout the Western hemisphere. In the Falling Snow, which probes what it means to be black and British today, is a low-key yet boldly meditative addition to Phillips's increasingly varied literary inquiry into the condition of the African diaspora.
Keith Gordon, a British-born forty-something son of black Caribbean immigrants, is a man unmoored. Three years ago, his wife kicked him out of the house after he confessed to having recently had a one-night stand.
These days, his job is threatened by a vindictive junior colleague whom he spurned after a brief affair. To make matters worse, Keith's teenaged son Laurie, who lives with Keith's overwhelmed ex-wife, is succumbing to the allure of delinquency.
On leave from work - at his boss's insistence - Keith tries to concentrate on writing a long-planned book, but makes little headway. "In effect, he has no role, and beyond the occasional fits and spurts of attention that he pays to his book, there really is no cogent purpose to his day or his life."
None of this is in and of itself particularly uncommon - or compelling, for that matter. What intrigues is the direction in which Phillips gently steers Keith's musings. Increasingly, Keith's Bergmanesque exercise in extended introspection leads him to grapple with questions of personal and communal identity. The issue is not simple. Keith, who works for the government's self-explanatory Race Equality unit and cares deeply about the black community, was raised largely by his white stepmother. Later, he married a white woman and now has a biracial son.
Both work and filial responsibilities confront Keith with the growing complexities of race and gender relations in contemporary Britain, a phenomenon Phillips handles with great subtlety. After having spent years helping black men and women challenge the state's often hostile power structure, Keith worries that he might be mistakenly perceived as an opportunist who abused his own position of power in order to sexually harass a younger co-worker.
On the domestic front, when his son Laurie is picked up for questioning by police following a crime, a suspicious Keith asks him if he was subjected to racial abuse. "What are you on?" responds a puzzled Laurie. "The copper who interviewed me was black."
And after observing Laurie's belligerent and antisocial behaviour, Keith agonizes over how to dissuade his son from conforming to a destructive societal stereotype of young black males. Indeed, "what his exasperated father is trying to say to him boils down to one sentence that he knows he can't say. 'Laurie, act your age, not your colour.'"
Meanwhile, Keith's research for his book about music and black cultural heritage brings to the fore unsettling aspects of black British identity. One of In the Falling Snow's most poignant moments occurs when Keith resignedly comes to terms with the marginality of black Britain's cultural output. "He is trying to write about a deeper and more substantial tradition of cultural inheritance, and this means that he has to look across the Atlantic for his models."
Equally distressing is the realization that Britain may be beholden to America in yet another respect: "Increasing numbers of social policy papers seemed to cross his desk arguing that one can only understand Bristol or Leicester or Manchester by looking at Oakland or Detroit or Chicago." It's almost as though black Britons, already overshadowed by their American counterparts in the realm of culture, can't even lay claim to a unique experience of neglect and discrimination for which an original solution must be devised.
The account - toward the end of the novel - of Keith's father's life has two contradictory effects. In one sense, it infuses In the Falling Snow with a certain historical depth, for now the story features the experiences of three generations of black men in Britain. Following his arrival in 1960, Keith's father endured violent racism, which traumatized him and forever damaged his mental health. Keith, who came of age in the 1980s, fared significantly better, but faced ostracism from his wife's parents.
Finally, Keith's biracial son Laurie, who was subjected to taunts of "halfie" in his childhood but escaped the more pernicious forms of discrimination, now turns to gang culture in order to carve out a niche for himself outside a society that might reject him.
But here is the irony. Precisely because the treatment Keith's father suffered at the hands of his inhospitable adopted home was so reprehensible, the decidedly less dramatic travails of Keith and his son appear minor in comparison. Not unexpectedly, violence and humiliation evoke stronger emotional reactions on the part of the reader than do cultural malaise and personal alienation.
Perhaps it is inherently difficult to transform the nuanced existence of contemporary black Britain - with its subjection to indirect discrimination, and with responses as varied as reverse racism and deliberate apathy - into something as starkly compelling as the outrages visited upon the first wave of black immigrants.
Yet this would appear to be the chief challenge facing novelists whose subject is the state of black Britain in the early 21st century. From such a standpoint, In the Falling Snow admittedly comes up short.
Nevertheless, reading Phillips's latest offering is not without significant rewards. Setting aside its undeniably arresting yet somewhat jarring plunge into the past, In the Falling Snow remains a richly reflective if somewhat languid examination of the fraught nature of black British identity today.
Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer and book critic in Beirut, Lebanon.