From Biography to Autobiography: Caryl Phillips's Radiophonic Lifewriting

Anglo-Kittitian Caryl Phillips is the author of three radio plays exploring moments in the life of famous artistic and intellectual figures of the African diaspora: James Baldwin in A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris, Marvin Gaye in A Long Way from Home as well as Richard Wright and CLR James in Dinner in the Village. Respectively broadcast by the BBC in 2004, 2008 and 2011, these radio dramas convey Phillips’s fascination for these four men whose writing (or music in the case of Marvin Gaye) could be described, to borrow the words of Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as Phillips’s “sentimenthèque” -- that is works that have had a deep emotional impact on him and affected his development as a writer. To that extent, the three radio plays in question also have an autobiographical dimension: they indeed touch upon the difficulties facing all black artists in white societies, particularly in their attempts at defining themselves away from the racist clichés trying to circumscribe them and their art.
Rather conventional in terms of form, A Kind of Home: James Baldwin in Paris, A Long Way from Home and Dinner in the Village are economically written and rely on a succession of short scenes that evocatively capture the essence of the characters’ dilemmas, both as men and as artists. These three plays constitute intimate sonic companion pieces to the numerous essays that Phillips has devoted to his four protagonists over the years; it will therefore be interesting to explore what radio drama can do that non-fiction can’t when it comes to reconstituting lives.