English somewheres Caryl Phillips and the English North

Abstract

It is only relatively recently that Yorkshire’s arguably most successful contemporary novelist, Caryl Phillips, has become explicitly concerned with the English North in his writing. It is a surprising preoccupation, perhaps, given Phillips’s long-standing literary disavowal of the specif-ics of historical place as part of his attempt to explore wider questions of culture and identity untethered to more solipsistic concerns of race, locale or biography. Prior to 2000, the North hardly figured in his writing. Of his early plays and novels which feature British settings, only one seems to include a northern location: the ‘somewhere in England’ section of Crossing the River (1993), which includes subtle references to an unspecified region not dissimilar to South Yorkshire and Sheffield. Since 2000, Phillips has published two novels, A Distant Shore (2003) and In the Falling Snow (2009), in which the North is prominent; a work of non-fiction, The Atlantic Sound (2000), part of which concerns Liverpool’s role in the Atlantic slave trade; a short autobiographical story ‘Growing Pains’ (2005); and a generically challenging work of fiction, Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007), which includes a long, powerful section entitled ‘Northern Lights’ concerning the death in Leeds in 1969 of the Nigerian migrant David Oluwale and the culpability of two officers from the now-defunct Leeds City Police Force. Intriguingly, among this variable and rich body of recent work Phillips has developed a distinct discursive envisioning of the North. This chapter is concerned with exploring briefly Phillips’s North, especially its bifocal character, as a tentative heterotopia which holds out the possibility of postcolonial transformation within a grimly prejudicial region.

The fact that [Dancing in the Dark is set in America doesn’t really matter. It’s about the same basic process: being vigilant about one’s history and suspicious of the narrative that is presented to me as the narrative of the people, as the narrative of the region, as the narrative of the town, as the narrative of the country, I’m suspicious of it all. And therefore I’m going in and occasionally trying to do a little historical repair work. The impulse comes from having grown up in Leeds — in England.

(Phillips, cited in McLeod, 2009, p. 148)