Moving Around, Moving Between: Mobility and “Home” in Caryl Phillips’s Strange Fruit

Abstract

Caryl Phillips’s first play, Strange Fruit (1981), inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts ( Gangangere, 1881), shares its basic plot with Ghosts: the respectability of the late father, which the mother desperately wishes to maintain, is destroyed by a son’s homecoming. However, Strange Fruit, set in a black British household in the 1970s, is inevitably more focused on a complicated relationship between mobility and “home”, an urgent issue for a second generation of post-war British immigrants. Mobility is presented as a key factor in informing the main character’s sense of belonging. First, various kinds of mobility, from walking around a British city to movement between two countries (an unnamed Caribbean island and Britain), are represented as painfully deracinating for the characters. Taken together, these experiences work to erode the authenticity of concepts of “home”, whether defined in relation to family or to “homeland”, which each character “imagines” exists, variously, in Britain, the Caribbean island, or Africa. Secondly, a conflicting relationship between these already eroded notions of “home” generates a possibility of mobility itself becoming a space in which to dwell, an alternative to “home”. The article analyses ways in which mobility transforms characters’ (particularly the main character’s) ideas of “home” and, ultimately, contributes to a progressive though painfully fragmented sense of what Caryl Phillips later termed a “transatlantic identity”.