Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Ledent, Bénédicte

Titel

There is always the other side, always

Ist Teil von

• Wasafiri, 2019-03, Vol.34 (1), p.61-66

Ort / Verlag

Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis Journals Auto-Holdings Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In 1997. Caryl Phillips published an anthology entitled Extravagant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging, a fascinating collection of texts by writers who were at some point based in Britain. However, because these authors were not born there, they were regarded as outsiders to English literature, a tradition that still now in the twenty-first century tends to be viewed in terms of racial and social continuity. As Caryl Phillips makes it clear in the preface to this volume, one of his intentions in bringing these literary voices together is to radically question the 'mythology of homogeneity (xiv) that affects the way the nation views itself and its culture, and thereby make us reconsider Britishness and see it as hybrid in nature rather than 'pure'. Phillips's selection of writers and extracts from their work reflects the 'freight of expectation with regard to Britain' (xv) of these so-called 'outsiders' and their 'high anxieties of belonging', to adapt a phrase that Phillips has used in relation to himself as well ('The "High Anxiety" of Belonging'). The anthology also suggests that such cultural and existential ambivalence is in the end artistically fecund, as it gives rise in many cases to a formally daring literary production. wary of linearity and sterile order. There are about a dozen writers with Caribbean roots in this collection's impressive line-up. such as George Lamming and Samuel Selvon. There is no doubt that these authors' navigation between Britain and the Caribbean has. in various degrees, been an inspiration for Phillips, whose literary Career has been visibly marked by his birth in the Caribbean island of St Kitts, which he left at a very early age. Even if Phillips has expressed himself openly about the influence of Lamming and Selvon on his work ('Following On'), it is with the only descendant of former colonisers in the list of Caribbean writers anthologised in Extravagant Strangers — the only 'white' person, but also the only woman, Jean Rhys — that Caryl Phillips seems to have had the most consistent artistic 'affinity', a word that I use here as both synonymous with similarity and, importantly, as synonymous with an ability to understand.