Stranger Shores_Essays 1986-1999 by J. M. Coetzee

Author:J. M. Coetzee [Coetzee, J. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Writing
ISBN: 9780099422624
Goodreads: 238916
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2001-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

15 Caryl Phillips

I

OVER THE COURSE of three centuries the slave trade shipped some eleven million unwilling people from Africa to the New World – the greatest forced population movement that we know of before the twentieth century. Two-fifths of them went to the plantations of the West Indies, which made up the hard-core area of slavery in the Americas. In comparison, the English-speaking North American mainland received only 5 per cent.

Britain (as well as Spain, France and Holland) transported Africans to the Caribbean to work its colonial plantations, sending out its own people, many of them undesirables or misfits, to oversee their labour. Planter society became notorious for its dissoluteness, its indolence, its philistinism and its snobbishness – a snobbishness that turned on money and on race. It left behind a legacy of racial prejudice based on minute gradations of skin pigmentation, ‘white, fusty, musty, dusty, tea, coffee, cocoa, light black, black, dark black,’ says V.S. Naipaul, reciting a familiar Caribbean colour litany.1

Out of plantation practice and the rationale that sustained it there grew a corpus of colonial lore about black mentality and the black body that we can properly call racist. Eric Williams may go too far in claiming that, far from slavery being born from racism, racism itself was a consequence of slavery – nineteenth-century European ethnography and racial science would make their own huge contribution to the theory of racism – but Williams is certainly right to point to the Americas, and the West Indies in particular, as a forcing-bed for racist thought.2 In that sense, as the West wrestles today with its racist inheritance, it continues to live in the long shadow of slavery.

The slave ships sailing to the New World bore the first wave of the African diaspora. Then, as the sugar-based economies of the islands began to falter in the early nineteenth century and as the European powers emancipated their slaves, that wave was succeeded by a second, more complex set of migrations continuing into the present: from one island to another; from the islands to the American mainland; from the islands to the former metropolitan (‘mother’) countries; from the islands to Africa; and from America or Europe or Africa back to the islands. (The spectacular migrations of Cubans and Haitians to the mainland in recent years have obscured the fact that shifts of population have long been a feature of Caribbean demography.)

It is against this historical background of unsettledness and unsettlement, of Eurafrican hybridity and minutely fractured racial consciousness, of incomplete independence and ambivalence about models to follow in the future (‘Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way,’ writes Jamaica Kincaid; ‘eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way’), that the preoccupations of many of the great Caribbean writers of this century, including Aimé Césaire, Naipaul, and Derek Walcott, need to be seen.3

II

Caryl Phillips was born in 1958 on the island of St Kitts (population 45,000) but was taken to Britain as a child (the three loci of his

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