“Words Without Sound”: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

Abstract

In Crossing the River (1991), Phillips uses pastiche of historical documents to show the ways in which language has been used to record a particular version of memory from which Britain’s Black presence has frequently been excised, and defers instead to the fragile quality of the spoken voice in order to emphasize the role of individuality in establishing the fluid category of Black British cultural identity. In clear contrast with the practice of pastiche employed by Ishmael Reed, in which appropriation is equated to possession by the past, Phillips mixes archival records with fictional invention in order to evoke a sense of the real lives which were lived but not recorded, and which exist “beyond the page”.