Slave trade stories fail to tell the whole tale

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, May 28, 2000 | by Kate Chisholm

The Atlantic Sound By Caryl Phillips (Faber, #16.99)

ONE of the characters whom Caryl Phillips meets on his travels along the route of the slave trade reminds him that, while six million Jews lost their lives in the Holocaust, more than 100 million black Africans died in chains to their white European masters.

It is a strange - and repulsive - comment: as if there should be some kind of victims' competition for sympathy and retribution. And this is an odd book: part travelogue, part memoir, part "factional" documentary.

Phillips begins by recreating the journey he took as a four-month- old baby from the island of St Kitts in the West Indies to England in 1958.

He sails from Guadeloupe on a banana boat, but is both bored by the tedium and claustrophobia of idle days at sea and offended by the post-colonial prejudices of his fellow European passengers, who are oblivious to the fate of those who around 200 years earlier would have made the same crossing in horrifyingly different circumstances.

He waits longingly for the sight of the white cliffs of Dover, and on arrival back in the country, which for him is now home, makes his way north to Liverpool, hub of the Atlantic trade in "black gold".

As his train pulls into Lime Street, he is "struck by the satanic quality of the station", and observes "the same miserable aspect which seems to be etched across the faces of most of the people".

He visits the town hall and is disgusted by "the visual evidence of excess". Everything in the city that spawned the Beatles and Ken Dodd is dull, grey, bleak and depressed: even the dawn is "reluctant", knowing that it can only "brighten to grey".

At Accra Airport - on his way to revisit the scenes of horror at Elmina Castle, the trading fort where hundreds and thousands of slaves were encaged before onward transport to America via England - Phillips watches a "pinch-faced" Scotsman as he becomes increasingly irritated by the chaotic system of baggage retrieval.

"He appears to be angry about something," writes Phillips, "The collapsing colonial condition, I imagine." More like the fear of losing his suitcases, I would have thought.

Phillips interleaves his account of his trip with the stories of individuals branded by slavery: of John Ocansey, a black trader from the Gold Coast, cheated in 1881 by a white Liverpudlian merchant; and Philip Quaque, a black missionary for the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, whose letters home to his bosses in London from 1766 to 1811 never once mention the fate of his "brothers and sisters".

He reports, too, on the angry young men he meets, dislocated by colonialism and desperately seeking acceptance in white supremacist Britain. And he ends up eating tofu burgers in a black Hebrew settlement in Israel, where 2000 African-Americans are seeking to create a world in which Africans can be "free at last".

The trade in humans between Africa, England and the West Indies and America is a shocking history, and a discomfiting legacy for the white descendants of Empire.

Phillips's recognition that the grand Victorian buildings of Liverpool are built on human sacrifice reminded me of the frisson I experienced when, on the same day, I visited an idyllic manorial village and read the letters of the family who built it, discovering that they owned plantations in Barbados and Florida.

But he does not make clear what he thinks of all this - apart from suggesting that the people of Liverpool are fated to live forever in a guilt-ridden hell because of the sins of their fathers - and he does little to bring together the various strands of his book.

Exactly how does Phillips feel, for instance, about his separation from St Kitts? It's as if he has prepared notes for a book which has yet to be written.