The Destruction and Impossible Reconstruction of Family Links in Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips

Abstract

This article examines questions of kinship and family in Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River from the perspective of the impact of slavery on the family and on gender roles. It explores the problematic status of both the father and the mother in a system in which the Master played the role of the symbolic father and women were “de-maternalized,” in other words deprived of their traditional functions as caring and protective mothers. It furthermore raises the question of gender representations, arguing that in Phillips’s vision of the “Black Atlantic,” women succeed in crossing borders that are emotional and psychological, while men’s voyages are concrete and pragmatic. It also explores the possibility of surrogacy as an answer to the destruction of the family and suggests that in this respect also it is male bonding that dominates Phillips’s vision of the diasporic community.