The silence of Palestinians in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

Abstract

Caryl Phillips and postcolonial writing and criticism have been criticized for marginalizing Palestine as a colonial polity. This article contends that Phillips engages with Palestine in The Nature of Blood, albeit in an indirect way. It explores how critics examining the novel within the context of postcolonial trauma have overlooked how it raises Palestine as one of the traumatic histories it addresses. This suggests two problems. Firstly, the critics’ failure to discuss Palestine and Phillips’s own hesitation suggest that where postcolonial approaches meet the Holocaust, engagement with Palestine as a colonial formation may be deferred. Secondly, this occlusion is connected to a tendency to read Phillips in a positivist way, neglecting the way that Phillips’s use of unreliable narration and complicit perspectives requires a reading practice that is attuned to what remains unrepresented and silent.