1Family relationships have always been central to the way Caribbean writers define their identities. This is particularly the case for the contemporary novelists of the diaspora who use the family as a metaphor that sheds light on their own displaced condition. Several examples spring to mind. Perhaps the most obvious is that of Jamaica Kincaid, the author of several books with a strong autobiographical content. She first devoted several coming-of-age novels to the love/hate relationship with her mother, which seems to have shaped her as a woman and as a writer, very much in the same way as colonialism did. Later on she focused on the disappearance or absence of family members: she wrote a book entitled My Brother (1997) on her brother, who died of AIDS, then another one, entitled Mr Potter (2002), on an absent father figure that had already featured in The Autobiography of my Mother (1996), a novel in which Kincaid’s heroine, tough, childless Xuela, sums up her life thus: “My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; ... between me and the black room of the world” (3). Parental absence, obviously a metaphor for the Caribbean homeland left behind, also features prominently in other texts like The Intended (1991) and The Unbelonging (1985), two London novels respectively by David Dabydeen and Joan Riley whose protagonists arrive in Britain from the West Indies and end up in the care of social services. In both cases, the disruption of the family unit is associated with the trauma of displacement and the emotional void that exile can entail, especially in its first stages.

2Many more examples could certainly be provided. It seems to me, however, that one of the contemporary Caribbean writers who most clearly testifies to the pervasiveness of the family trope is St. Kitts-born Caryl Phillips, who uses it in his fictional exploration of the human condition admittedly less obtrusively than Jamaica Kincaid but, as we will see, with wider-ranging effects. In what follows I would like to argue that Phillips’s take on the family, especially on the parent-child relationship, crystallizes the complexities of diasporic identity, shaped as it is by initial losses but also by undeniable gains, however ambivalent these might sometimes prove to be. My paper is organized around three sections: after analyzing how Phillips’s novels present the family as a site of disruption, marked by absence, separation or even abuse, I will attempt to show that his fiction counterbalances this chronic dysfunctionality with an almost obsessive focus, on the part of his characters, on their absent or estranged kinship or with recurrent instances of surrogate parenthood which can suggest hope, of course, but in many cases also convey a more dubious sense of attachment. My conclusion will briefly examine how this representation of the family ties in with Phillips’s world-vision, in particular his rejection of racial and ethnic essentialism, a view which he develops in a more straightforward manner in his essays, notably in A New World Order (2001).

3Caryl Phillips has often been ‘accused’ of being a pessimist. His depiction of the family might be case in point to those who think of him as a nihilist, since most of the protagonists of his eight novels to date experience a collapse of what is considered to be the traditional family structure, and this crisis is almost always at the heart of their tragedy. With the relative exception of The Final Passage (1985), the author’s first novel, where the intimacy between Leila and her baby son Calvin compensates ever so slightly for the hardships of exile and, to some extent, of his second A State of Independence (1986), the characters in Phillips’s fiction are either childless or parentless, or both. And if they have children or parents, then they are either physically separated, or kept apart by an often unbridgeable communication gap, which is again the case in Phillips’s latest novel, Dancing in the Dark (2005), in which Bert Williams, the novel’s childless protagonist who calls his wife ‘mother’, entertains with his father a “perplexing, but loving, peace” (89) marked by silence. It would be tedious to list here all the occurrences of family alienation in Phillips’s fiction. What is more to the point is to try and understand, from a selection of examples, the meaning of this breakup of the family unit as well as its existential implications for the individuals, keeping in mind that Phillips is not a sociologist, but, an artist, and as such is first and foremost interested in sounding the human soul and its meanders.

6Thus, after the death of their parents and siblings, Dorothy and Solomon cannot resist the urge of the unconscious to remember the dismembered family. Their dreams and memories are constantly peopled with their parents or siblings, which leads, in Dorothy’s case at least, to some form of madness since she pretends that her sister Sheila is still alive. This mental condition is reminiscent of Eva in The Nature of Blood who refuses to acknowledge the death of her mother and behaves as if she was still at her side. While Dorothy’s and Solomon’s obsession with their kindred is to some extent the expression of their guilt for being survivors, it also indirectly expresses the impossibility of jettisoning one’s origins and of starting anew, an idea which nonetheless underlies Dorothy’s decision to go and settle in the village of Stoneleigh (259 & 268) and, even more importantly, that of the refugees who, like Solomon, dream of going “to a new place and a new beginning” (94).

7However, the pull of the past and of the family is irresistible. As Solomon puts it “I could escape neither myself, nor my country, nor my family” (297). This paradox of wanting to start a new life and yet being unable to leave one’s family behind is poignantly evoked in one of his dreams where his mother appears to him as faceless, “as if somebody [had] taken a piece of cloth and rubbed out her features” (132). Dorothy, too, becomes aware of how strong family bonds are when she reconnects with her sister Sheila after six years of separation. Afraid at first that “all that bound them together was blood and the increasingly distant memories of a past that they shared” (243), she gradually realizes that “her sister’s pain is connected to her own guilt with a bond that neither of them can untie” (262). One could say of the two sisters that “[they] are separated by silences, yet bonded by love,” (McLeod 144) a formulation used by John McLeod in his discussion of Phillips’s Crossing the River, in particular of the relationship between the English woman Joyce and her black son, Greer, whom she has given up for adoption and who comes back to see her eighteen years later.

9Incidentally, there are many other examples of (often interracial) surrogate kinship in Phillips’s fiction, the most striking of which is to be found in Crossing the River where the African father who has sold his three children into slavery, and has thereby triggered off the African Diaspora, eventually regards Joyce, a white English woman who has married his son Travis, as one of his own children. Yet, it is interesting to note that these alternative bonds are usually presented as problematic, as if to suggest that any return towards an original state of togetherness is impossible and that there is no easy way out of family fracture. It is either difficult for the characters to transcend race barriers, as is the case for Emily in Cambridge who finds it hard to accept her black servant Stella as a substitute mother figure and at one point refuses to call her ‘Aunt’ because, as she puts it, “my aunts Mabel and Victoria bore no relation, physical or otherwise, to this ebony matriarch, so how could I bind them together with the same word?” (36). Or, in some cases, these alternative relationships contain an exploitative streak that annihilates all the philanthropy they might entail, which happens, for example, in the case of Edwards Williams, in Crossing the River, whose paternal generosity to his ex-slaves is coupled with sexual concupiscence.

10If surrogacy in A Distant Shore mostly concerns Solomon, it applies to some extent to Dorothy as well, for her compulsive need to seduce men might also be seen as a search on her part for an alternative to the unsatisfying father-daughter relationship of her childhood. Quite ironically, the only parental substitute that she eventually finds after Solomon’s death is the mental home in which she ends up, and where she is looked after as a child would be. Very much like a family, the ‘unit’ where she is an inmate is “A retreat. Somewhere where you can lick your wounds and gather some strength before going back to the world” (312). For Dorothy, then, like Irina in Higher Ground and Eva in The Nature of Blood, the mental home is a family of sorts, a space that oppresses even as it protects.

11Clearly, the above examples from A Distant Shore testify to Phillips’s pervasive interest in genealogy, and more generally to a world vision that in its examination of man’s suffering replaces blind essentialism with a more inclusive approach to human relationships. His representation of disrupted family relationships indeed conveys what he has called “a new world order” in the eponymous collection of essays, a world in which “nobody will feel fully at home” (5), where “we are all unmoored. Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions” (6). In this world, the traditional family structure, defined by Paul Gilroy as “the approved, natural site where ethnicity and racial culture are reproduced” (197), cannot hold, even if it keeps haunting us. In its place, Phillips suggests a multiple, unpredictable formation, which results from man’s ability to create new links, even if fleetingly, with people who are not his kin. Paradoxically, this new, ambiguous family is perhaps all the more resilient for being so imperfect.