Long Suppressed Voices in Caryl Phillips’s Strange Fruit(s)

In July 2019 I attended Nancy Medina’s staging of Caryl Phillips’s first play Strange Fruit at the Bush Theatre in London in the company of the author and a colleague specializing in his work. Medina’s performance left us feeling “assaulted.”
Starting from this experience, my article puts Phillips’s 1981 play Strange Fruit in dialogue with his 2007 essay by the same title and discusses how, in these two works, Phillips dramatizes the relation between knowing and not-knowing in relation to suppressed voices and long delayed moments of revelation that almost feel physical. Strange Fruit, the title of Phillips’s 1981 play and 2007 essay, recalls the piercing song by Billie Holiday about the horrors of lynching in the American South of the 1930s. However, Phillips leaves the American associations of the phrase half-claimed, until his first trip to the American South jolts him into negotiating a Black Atlantic moment of affiliation while unlocking a silent affective archive in his African American host.