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A searing novel about slavery and its legacy that tells multiple stories, set generations and continents. A searing novel about slavery and its legacy that tells multiple stories, set generations and continents apart but unified by their ambitious exploration. Petersburg, Fla.Ĭopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. Higher Ground by Caryl Phillips: 9780679763765 : Books. Serious fiction for larger libraries from the author of State of Independence ( LJ 6/15/86). While both interesting in concept and compelling, the book at times seems to be trying too hard, and the characters seem to lose their naturalness.

they have called us nigger, then negro, then colored, and now black do you imagine they will ever call us Americans?' The final story involves a young Polish woman, a refugee from Nazi terror, now trapped in fear and loneliness in England. The work of the British-Caribbean writer Caryl Phillips provides a notable literary instantiation of Cathy Caruths claim that trauma itself may provide. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York. In Higher Ground (1989) the three stories take us from a West African slave. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and his other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. 1This essay examines all of Caryl Phillipss novels to date with the aim of. Indeed, one of the story's most telling moments occurs when he asks, '. Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction. In the second, a young black man in a Southern jail struggles to maintain his fierce pride and revolutionary fervor in the face of isolation and brutality. In the first, an African adept at languages finds himself the toady of slavers, accepted neither in his world nor theirs. It is such situations that connect the three stories making up this work. Throughout history people have found themselves trapped in dehumanizing situations, their sense of personal dignity challenged.