Abstract
This article examines Caryl Phillips’s debut novel The Final Passage (1985) as a text saturated with the signposts of alterity that define the West Indian as the racial and cultural “other” in British society of the 1950s. Drawing on the novel’s central narrative — the doomed marriage of Leila and Michael and their migration from the West Indies to London — the article demonstrates how British segregationist attitudes, derogatory notices, and racialised employment practices crystallise the West Indian’s inferiority in the metropolitan space. The article further argues that the West Indian’s own internalised sense of his society’s nothingness, fostered by the history of slavery, compounds his condition of alterity. The result is a people trapped between two worlds, belonging fully to neither, for whom London becomes not a home but a confirming site of alienation.
Keywords: Caryl Phillips, The Final Passage, alterity, West Indian diaspora, colonialism, racism, identity, migration, otherness
Introduction
Human existence has unfortunately been constructed on the basis of contentious fundamental values that define societies from an externalised perspective. The exclusionist policy is one of the most sustained principles in human evolution. And the ‘you’ and ‘we’ syndrome has made human relationship most uncommon and evermore distant. This ‘you’ and ‘we’ phenomenon is the basis of historical, cultural, religious and geographical categorisation of humanity. Humanity has gradually progressed towards dominance from decade to decade and from century to century. This phenomenon is fostered by an extrinsic consciousness that makes alienation a social and cultural construct and value.
Alterity is a common but at the same time peculiar phenomenon in human history. It is however based on the idea of the other. Humanity deliberately creates otherness among them in order to maintain their supposedly superiority over the others and maintain the apparently inferiority of others. Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage holds salient signposts that undoubtedly define the West Indian as the other. Phillips revisits the path that entangled the West Indian life with such magnified subtlety that uncovers the realities of the 1950s. The flustered consciousness of the West Indian personality, dignity and dependence is revealed in a perturbed sense of exile. The British constructed image of the West Indian inferiority is crystallised through the code of rejection, segregation and debasement in the various attempts that the West Indian makes to survive in London.
We shall be making two points in this paper. The first is the British overt manner of making the West Indian to realise or understand that he is the other. British thoughts, words and notices are very categorical and telling. The British or whites had continuously formulated moods to perpetually keep the West Indian under their feet, making him not only to suffer from British rejection but also from a sort of self rejection. But it is not only the British segregationist attitude against the West Indian that Phillips dwells on. Phillips is also concerned with the fragmentation of the West Indian that is occasioned by history — the history of slavery that has built and sustained the idea of alterity. Alterity does not only insinuate the idea of the other and of the apparently incapability of the captured to depend on themselves but also the idea of the nothingness of a people. It is this idea of nothingness that leaves the West Indian at peace-off with himself and with his society. Our second concern is based on the hypnotism of the West Indian by slavery which has fostered the idea of alterity by his internalised idea of himself. Slavery has made him enclosed in himself that he cannot will his own survival but must depend on the metropolitan setup. This has contributed in reinforcing and compelling the sense of otherness towards and from him.
The Marriage and the Dream of England
When one reads The Final Passage what preoccupies his mind is the marriage relationship between Leila and Michael, a marriage characterised by failure from the beginning to the end and of which she says: “had probably only managed to breathe at all by drawing upon the artificial cylinder of blind hope” (197). Behind this relationship is the debate about going to England. But why is going to England such a big fuss among the West Indians? To this, a West Indian would explain with ignorance: “but we all the same flag, the same empire” (142). The British imperial agenda had included extending the British empire around the globe. With the end of colonialism her West Indian colonies had been left with the impression that they were British citizens. But they were to be proven wrong in many cases in their experiences in London. The hegemonious differences set against him draw the boundary and the idea of “the same flag” and “the same empire” becomes only a farce and a dream.
Derogatory Notices and the Construction of the Other
The position or the inferiority of the West Indian is well defined in the streets of London. He quickly understands that he is the other if not from the way people look at him or from what they say, then from the notices in the streets about him. Such notices are very derogatory and remind him always that he is the other and an inferior being. The Leilas come across such notices as “IF YOU WANT A NIGGER NEIGHBOUR VOTE LABOUR” (122), and “No vacancies for coloureds.” ‘No blacks.’ ‘No coloureds.’” (156). Phillips mentions this so casually as its palpability is indisputable. Their silence means everything; they understand the barriers that have been placed against them and they have learnt to live with them. In other words their reaction to the notices shows a people who understand the feeling of the other towards them. In another situation Earl would not hold it to himself but simply expresses his feelings by saying “well, some people just don’t like us and I guess we have to deal with it” (165).
The practice of alterity extended into employment. In The Final Passage, Michael’s first job in London probably completes the number of coloureds needed in the sector that employs him and so the boss, Mr. Jeffries, tells his fellow white man to “put up the COLOURED QUATA FULL sign now” (167). But what is clear is that the job demands not a particular expertise that can only be done by a coloured; it is the inferiority of it. Edwin cautions Michael about the position of the black man as he arrives in London. He emphasises to him the sense of black man’s inferiority in the presence of whites. He makes him understand that “all you need to remember is they treat us worse than their dogs” (168). He wants Michael to understand the bitter reality they go through as they work in London.
Such consciousness is what the West Indian has been made to live with. Edwin and Michael epitomize a people trapped in a system. They are like a sponge whose only importance is the water in it that has to be squeezed. They are no good if they are not serving the white man. They are there to ease life for the white man by doing what the white man would not bring himself low to do.
The Internalised Nothingness
In the face of all these, what is debasing, frustrating, and traumatizing is the West Indian hypnotism that makes alterity a continuous process. He has been so completely hypnotised that he despises his own capability and thinks his survival rests only in going out of his society. The larger belief is that England is a better place and that is why the move there is massive, and considered an achievement. But the mere desire and excitement to move to England is catastrophic to the West Indian. It revitalizes the white man’s superiority complex that further downplays on the West Indian humanity.
Michael’s father stands out as one character in the text, besides Leila’s friend, Millie, who disapproves of the idea of emigration. Millie is even vehement and categorical in her stand against it as she tells Leila:
‘I love this island with every bone in my body. It’s small and poor, and all the rest of the things that you and Michael probably think is wrong with it, but for all of that I still love it. It’s my home and home is where you feel a welcome.’ (115)
Going to England is a blindfolded achievement for the West Indian. England to them is a place of hope even though they are aware that “leaving the island is like leaving the safety of your family to go live with strangers” (11). One of the travellers with Leila upon arrival “knelt and kissed the ground” (143), falling short of articulating the words of Martin Luther King Jr. But like Lamming, Selvon, Kincaid, and many other West Indian writers, Phillips shows no successful West Indian in The Final Passage or in exile.
Conclusion
The failure of the West Indian in London to pull ends together bounces back to the thoughts and determination of Leila’s friend and mother. Leila ends her life in London with a backward glance to the island, not so much because Michael abandons her but because she is remotely connected to the society. Before she leaves for London she feels “sorry for those satisfied enough to stay” in what she would otherwise term a deserted place. She begins to read England as a new start and decides to take only a little of her belongings not to be reminded of the island. But hardly does she settle than her dream paradise becomes a nightmare and she begins to fashion her movement back to the island.
What Phillips does in The Final Passage, in the words of Patterson is “to remember, to construct, to fill in the past” (120). Constructing and filing in the past would mean extricating the West Indian from his stereotypical consciousness and imbuing him with an ontological commitment that redefines his purpose. It could also be constructing, as Laughlin discerns in his review of Caryl Phillips’s essays ”… a world in which the migrant’s state — dislocated, never quite ‘at home’, always adjusting to a continuous stream of unfamiliar cultural values — is the general condition, rather than the uneasy fate of an unusual few” (1).
Phillips’s ignition of alterity is a preponderantly excruciating confluence of the West Indian self and belonging. It reopens the West Indian thought and leaves him very distant from himself. He remains in the enigma of the ‘New World Order’ that does not only set him apart but also categorizes him with subjected references. London becomes a starting point for the West Indian. He has been identified by history and history continues to identify him, because as Phillips says in the epigraph of the novel, quoting from Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “A people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / of timeless moments…” (3).
The signal to the West Indian may be summarized in three words: ‘go back home’. This would reaffirm what Leila’s friend, Millie, tells her ”… home is where you feel welcome” (115), and what her mother tells her later in London, “Leila, child, London is not my home” (124). Being in England gives him a clearer vision of his relationship with the British and reawakens in him the traumatic search of home. Going to England therefore enables him to discover who he is and where he belongs, though his sense of belonging would neither be clearly defined in London nor in the West Indies. In the words of Caryl Phillips, “belonging is a contested state” (Laughlin, 1), especially to the West Indian.
Works Cited
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- Laughlin, Nicholas. (Review) “A New World Order: Selected Essays by Caryl Phillips.”
- Patterson, Richard F. Caribbean Passages: A Critical Perspective on New Fiction From the West Indies. Colorador: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998.
- Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge. London: Bloomsbury, 1991.
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- Walcott, Derek. What the Twilight Says: Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.