Diasporic Experience and Music in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

This paper deals with Caryl Phillips who has incessantly represented diasporic experience in his work where he evokes complex identities at the crossroads between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe.
My proposal is to concentrate on Phillips’s novel Crossing the River (1993) which extensively explores the theme of the African diaspora and which, interestingly, has also been described as his most jazzy text. This narrative not only addresses diasporic themes, such as uprootings and lost origins, but very much like jazz -- which is for Brathwaite “a cry from the heart of the hurt man” (277) – it gives a voice to the victims of history, to shattered individuals in pain whose tragic fate is viewed at once as personal and collective. Benítez-Rojo draws attention to the importance of rhythm in this text, but he only provides a limited analysis with no specific examples of how this significant feature of the work is achieved or the purposes it serves. In this paper I will try to demonstrate that Phillips’s thematic and formal use of music, including the references to classic themes of the African American musical tradition or the recurrent and creative use of repetitions, has a performative role and reenacts the duty of remembering inherent in the diasporic experience.