The Atlantic Sound - Softcover

Philips, Caryl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099429969 ISBN 13: 9780099429968

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2001

Synopsis

In The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex notion of what constitutes 'home'. Seen through the historical prism of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan history engenders in the soul of an individual. Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat, repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He then visits three pivotal cities: Liverpool, developed on the back of the slave trade, Elmina, on the west coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the American South, celebrated as the city where the Civil War began - not for being the city where fully one-third of African-Americans were landed and sold into bondage. Finally, Phillips journeys to Israel where he encounters a community of two thousand African-Americans, whose thirty-year sojourn in the Negev desert leaves him once again contemplating the modern condition of diasporan displacement.

About this title

Review:

Caryl Phillips has established himself as one of the supreme chroniclers of African dispossession and exile. In previous works such as The European Tribe and Crossing the River, he documents the ironies of post-colonial history. Phillips's latest book is perhaps best described as a "meditation," although it is also a fine and invigorating book. The subject of Phillips's broodings is that of displacement, diaspora, homelessness--all those things that ineluctably accompany any descendant of West African slaves. Phillips himself was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, in 1958, and so here he retraces the first transatlantic journey he made with his mother in the late 1950s, by banana boat from the Caribbean to the gray shores of the Mother Country. He visits three cities central to the slave trade: Liverpool, Elmina in Ghana, and Charleston. Finally in Israel, he finds a community of 2,000 African Americans who have lived in the Negev desert for 30 years. Wholly absorbing, always surprising, brilliantly observant, sensitive to human tragedy but never pessimistic, Phillips writes as beautifully as ever. "It is futile to walk into the face of history. As futile as trying to keep the dust from one's eyes in the desert." --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk

From the Publisher:

"Phillips's travels retrace the 'triangle' of the slave trade, and courageously -- one cannot underestimate the discomfort for anyone of African descent who engages with this material -- he takes the measure of those he encounters at each stop . . . He refuses to be deflected. Not once does he avoid the difficulties of a person or situation -- to his great credit and our considerable benefit."
-- Anthony Walton, Times Literary Supplement (London)

"Like Jonathan Raban and the early V.S. Naipaul, Phillips can do truly live reportage. The honesty and detail forces you to experience what the writer is going through . . . Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, he seems to hone every thought and word before he allows it to leave his head. That stillness beneath his words is what makes Caryl Phillips such an exceptional writer and this book so compelling."
-- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The Observer Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0099429969
• ISBN 13: 9780099429968
• Binding: Paperback