Roots versus Routes in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the river and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

Abstract

In Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1994) and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), slavery is the starting point for the interrogation of blackness. Both Caribbean writers use the disembodied voice of an ancestor to provide the roots that bind together the transnational lives of black diasporic subjects across the Black Atlantic. These ancestral voices frame the separate narratives of several individuals, male and female, across time and space, thus tracing many different routes in Africa, America, and Europe. In Phillips’s Crossing the River, an unnamed male voice laments the sale of his children into slavery due to the failure of his crops. Consumed by guilt, this desperate father continues to listen for the voices of his lost children, two hundred and fifty years later. Their “many-tongued chorus” is represented by the life stories of Nash in Africa, Martha in the United States, and Travis in Britain. In Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon, each chapter tells the life of one of the many descendants of Marie Ursule, an African slave in early 19th-century Trinidad. Brand’s novel starts with the forced relocation of Marie Ursule as she is sold from one plantation to the next due to her rebelliousness and insolence, and continues by tracing the criss-crossing paths of her descendants over North America, the Caribbean and Europe. All in all, both Caribbean writers make use of a similar structure for their novels. Their deployment of the ancestral voice is countered by the diversity of experiences of their descendants, so that the notion of a timeless black essence is destabilised by the multiple blacknesses in the novel. Brand and Phillips thus manage to analyse the interrelatedness of the construction of the (racialised) self and the politics of place while continuing to build a black culture on the unifying ordeal of slavery.