Music as a Refuge in Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow (2009), The Lost Child (2015) and as a Policy of Audibility in Foreigners : Three English Lives (2007)

Born in St. Kitts, raised in Leeds and now living in the United States, Caryl Phillips is a novelist, playwright and novelist. Whether on a thematic or formal level, music persists throughout his fiction. This can be clearly noted in the manner in which Phillips integrates certain musical structures in his writing (riff, call and response etc.) as well as his use of song titles to caption some of his own narratives, for instance his play Strange Fruit named after the eponymous song performed by Billie Holiday. Such an impact of music can be explained by the fact that Phillips states that “[v]isibility in the fields of sport and popular culture, notably music, was how African-Americans first emerged on the national stage in the USA, and [he] thinks it’s clear that musicians such as Soul II Soul […] and many others did a great deal to dramatize the reality of a black British presence” (Revisiting, 126). In connection to Phillips’s claim of the ways in which music helped to illuminate the reality of a black British presence, in this paper, I seek to examine how Phillips uses music to make visible and audible those who have been left out of history books. What best way to achieve such a purpose than by inserting music, the medium which testifies to the creativity of the African Diaspora in the face of dispossession and displacement. “The music and the singing preserved us, and I think that without it we’d have been wiped out” (229), this declaration was made in Foreigners: Three English Lives (2007). Whether or not this is Philips's voice, this particular statement epitomises music as necessary for the survival of Phillipsian characters as well as their identity construction. As the musicologist, Simon Frith, points out, “[m]usic […] gives us a way of being in the world, a way of making sense of it” (114), and this quote perfectly illustrates how Phillipsian characters experience music. My paper will attempt to demonstrate how Frith’s assertion applies to several of these protagonists Keith in In The Falling Snow (2009) and Ben in The Lost Child (2015) as well as to the author who also uses a musical language in his own interviews.