“They are us”: Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore and the British transnation

Abstract

This article discusses Caryl Phillips’ novel, A Distant Shore (2004), in the light of recent work by John McLeod and Bill Ashcroft’s notion of the transnation to describe a revised sense of the British nation within which new resemblances gesture towards the potential for a post-racial society. These ideas will be applied to Phillips’ sense of himself as occupying an ontological mid-Atlantic location in relation to recurring images and concerns to be found in his collected essays in A New World Order (2001) and Colour Me English (2011). The article does not argue that Phillips’ novel depicts the success of a post-racial transformation, but rather, one that shows the individual struggles through which such transformation may be possible.

This paper seeks to offer some fresh perspectives on Caryl Phillips’ novel, A Distant Shore (2004), ¹ drawing upon some recent contributions to theories of transnationalism by Bill Ashcroft and contemporary black British writing by John McLeod. Central to this endeavour is a desire to place an increased emphasis on what may be considered to be the neglected latter half of the phrase “black Britain” and to focus instead upon suggested reconfigurations of nation and nationhood. My intention here is not to subordinate the cultural attachments and significance of black identities in favour of enduring and recuperative narratives of British heritage. Rather, it is to emphasize the dynamic interrelations between national identity and the nation-state as a site of migration and diasporic settlement during and since the latter half of the twentieth century. In this regard, my aim is to show how A Distant Shore might be read not so much as an illustration of transnational paradigms of borderlessness, so much as a novel that, following McLeod (2010), contains evidence of a nascent polyculturalism from which an idea/l of post-racism might be drawn.

I have taken Phillips’ seventh novel as focus for attention for three reasons. First, it is Phillips’ first attempt to convey contemporary Britain in a single (albeit complexly interwoven) narrative since his early plays. His debut novel, A Final Passage (1985), recounts the experiences of the Windrush generation in the 1950s; A State of Independence (1986) sees the main protagonist return to St Kitts for the Independence Day celebrations; and Cambridge (1991) recreates West Indian slavery. His other fictions, Higher Ground (1989), Crossing the River (1993) and The Nature of Blood (1997), are all triptychs that range freely across time and place and through which thematic cohesion is implied rather than diagetically presented. In A Distant Shore, Phillips does not abandon his formula of placing apparently disparate narratives in conjunction with each other and employs it as an apt approach for describing contemporary British social formations: it is here that the notion of the transnation finds its purchase. Second, the publication of Phillips’ most recent collection of essays, Colour Me English (2011), affords the opportunity to reappraise his perspectives on Britain, belonging, and nationhood, which themselves often seem to be viewed from a distant shore. In a telling passage in his introductory essay to the volume, Phillips describes a transformative process within which migrants were “colouring England”, leading to “England colouring itself”, and finally to the conclusion that the colouring of Britain (and Europe) “has already happened” (2011: 12–4). ² This transformation of the nation-state is the bond that holds together the disparate narratives of A Distant Shore and is symbolized by the fragile relationship between its two main protagonists, Dorothy and Solomon. Finally, A Distant Shore has attracted some contrasting critical responses since its publication, many of which turn upon readings of the novel informed by theories of transnationalism. As the work of Ashcroft and McLeod seeks to develop and refine transnationalism as an analytical model, so their ideas can usefully be read back into A Distant Shore and contribute to the ongoing critical debate on this complex and still highly topical novel.

Colour Me English is comprised of essays that range from 1993 through to the introduction written for the volume’s publication. Taken together with Phillips’ other non-fictional writings, it offers an opportunity to trace some recurring and evolving ideas in Phillips’ sense of belonging in Britain and the United States (which are his principal places of residence) as well as his thoughts on the role of writing as a socially significant act. In his introduction, Phillips expounds upon his conviction in the “moral capacity” of fiction to function as a “bulwark against intolerance”. He suggests, “the first thing we must remind ourselves of is the lesson that great fiction teaches us as we sink into character and plot and suspend our disbelief: for a moment, ‘they’ are ‘us’” (2011: 16). My reading of A Distant Shore will stem very much from a suggestion that the British transnation can emerge from the idea that “they” are “us”, which can be discerned both in the relationship between the two main protagonists and in key events in the narrative involving minor characters. However, I will not be arguing that this novel depicts the success of a post-racial transformation, only its potentiality. While Phillips’ commitment to a cross-cultural imagination is clearly evident in the form and characterization of his fiction, in his non-fiction the practical difficulties presented by the notion of simultaneously occupying the position of self are made clear.

As a novelist born in St Kitts and brought up in Leeds, Phillips has typically been thought of as a “black British” writer. However, the term “black British” carries within itself the same double valence of being at once “us” and “them”, and this ambivalent state has continued to occupy Phillips’ writing. He returns on numerous occasions to an advert designed by Saatchi and Saatchi for the Conservative Party in 1983 depicting a smartly dressed black man carrying a briefcase and running the caption: “Labour says he’s black, Tories say he’s British” (Phillips, 2001: 247–8; 278; Phillips, 2011: 127). In each of his discussions of this poster, Phillips highlights the implied discontinuity of being both black and British, unless it is within the guise of some authorized narrative of upward mobility that accorded with Thatcherite notions of the enterprise economy. Phillips does not recognize himself in such an image, but neither was he comfortable with the oppositional politics that led to the formation of what James Procter describes as a “black imagined community” during the 1980s (2003: 8). In A New World Order, Phillips records, “[for] a moment my generation flirted with the idea of making being ‘black’ the basis of our identity […] but mercifully this unsatisfactory notion never really took hold” (2001: 276). He repeats this sentiment in Colour Me English, stating, “to submit to the view that race or ethnicity encapsulates the greater part of one’s identity […] is to surrender to a certain despair” (2011: 32).

One means of avoiding this surrender for Phillips has been to locate himself figuratively at a point equidistant between Africa, America, and Britain. This image appears first as a source of anguish for the troubled black British character, Alvin, in Strange Fruit (Phillips, 1981: 99). Phillips returns to it again in his final reflections on the “high anxiety of belonging” in A New World Order (Phillips, 2001: 304) and again in an interview in 2002 (Clingman, 2004: 116). For Alvin, this figurative location is a metaphor for the alienation felt specifically by second generation black Britons. In Phillips’ more recent work, however, it signifies a sense of release from this detachment through a celebration of water as a source of connectedness of a kind initiated by Paul Gilroy’s much-discussed image of a black Atlantic ship plying both routes and roots (Gilroy, 1993). For Phillips, this free-floating ontological point enables a sense of identity that is comprised of “dual and multiple affiliations [that] constantly feed our fluid sense of self” (Phillips, 2011: 131). ³

This mid-Atlantic point is a place of symbolic in-betweenness ― an escape from tropes of national belonging that serve to contain, define, and compartmentalize identity. Phillips first sought such multiple affiliations by travelling to America, arriving there, as he puts it, with the desire that it should be “everything that Britain was not” (2011: 29). His optimistic faith in the notion of the country’s motto, “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of many, one”), is reflected in his initial assumption that “for most citizens a sense of pride in claiming the more inclusive American identity would far outweigh any professions of loyalty to a particular racial or ethnic group” (2011: 28). As described in his essay “American Tribalism” in Colour Me English, Phillips’ New World enthusiasm would be short-lived, but he has taken on American citizenship and there is still something of this personal affection in his description of New York as being “recklessly hybrid” (2011: 35).

Cultural hybridity such as this can be a useful conceptual tool for reconfiguring some potentially stale and reductive debates over being “black and British” or “black or British”. Theories of transnationalism have also been effective in challenging the role of the nation-state in defining and containing identity. However, I will not be reading A Distant Shore as a novel of transnationalism within which traditional identity markers drawn from the nation-state are swept away by a globalized traffic in people, ideas, and institutions. Instead, I will be looking at the points at which the nation seeks to reassert itself as an exclusive entity and in the individual struggles that ensue as a consequence. The grounds for reading Phillips’ novel in this way are also to be found in his non-fiction.

In Colour Me English, Phillips describes two key events that foreground the complexities of challenging and reaffirming national belonging through both ideological and legislative tools. He launches the volume with an anecdote recounting the arrival of the first British Asian boy at the school where previously Phillips and his brothers had been the only non-white faces. Phillips links his retrospective sense of “racial” affiliation with the boy to his shock on learning that the suicide bombers who attacked London in 2005 were from Leeds: “when I realised that three of the four bombers were from Leeds my heart sank. They were people with Yorkshire accents, exactly like the people I had grown up with. Just what had gone wrong with these young lives?” (2011: 14). Laura Doyle uses the term “(de)form” to describe the consequence of the transnational relationship within which a conflict emerges from “the odd, uneven time-travel of world-system economies and the lived placedness of human lives” (2010: 65). One can see how the bombers from Leeds were (de)formed by this conflict, since their act of violence indicated a single-minded attachment to an extreme form of Islam which both transcended national boundaries, insofar as the process of radicalization overcame any sense of being British-born, and reconfirmed them, insofar as Britain as a nation-state was identified with military intervention in Muslim countries. The response of the British government in terms of legislation is illustrative of one of the ironies of transnational theories, that while such theories propose a weakening of national identities and the impact of a secessionist economic culture, state governments have become increasingly rigorous in imposing and policing border controls.

If this incident dramatized a troubled sense of home, or correlation of place, belonging, and identity for Phillips in Britain, then there are some analogies to be found in his accounts of the attack upon the Twin Towers in the “Homeland Security” section of Colour Me English. Here, the now-disfigured cityscape has become Phillips’ own: “For those of us below 14th Street without newspapers, without supplies, without our beloved skyline, the sense of communal trauma is difficult to convey” (2011: 26). The emotional power in each passage emanates from Phillips’ clear personal attachment to both British and American locations which suggests he retains the multiple attachments expressed by his mid-Atlantic point. Even here, though, the reckless hybridity of the United States is not entirely indicative of a transatlantic freedom from national affiliation as Phillips identifies a reassertion of nationhood following the attack upon New York similar to that legislated in Britain.

Although the international loss of life within the towers made this more than an attack upon the United States, Phillips describes an aftermath in which a “climate of patriotic fear” (2011: 38) has been established by the United States government. He claims that a racial disaggregation has been legitimized by the 2001 USA Patriot Act and is evident in the establishment of gated communities, the appearance of “patriot killers” and the implementation of Operation Liberty Shield in 2003. As Phillips, somewhat mildly, concludes, “the whole question of belonging and national identity has become a decidedly more complex issue than it was before September 11, 2001” (2011: 46). This complexity of belonging and national identity may be discerned in the tension between a transnational sense of multiple affiliations and a contrasting concept of a “multiple-tiered sense of membership” (Vertovec, 2009: 88) brought about by a renewed State commitment to the defence of the nation as a bounded and defining entity.

In Phillips’ non-fictional writing, then, one can identify a continuing concern with the conflicts that emerge from questions of individual belonging and national identity. If these questions did become more complex after 9/11, it perhaps lends significance to the narrative structure Phillips employs in A Distant Shore, which was both his first fictional publication after those events and, as noted above, a departure from the style of his previous novels. The focus upon the village of Weston/Stoneleigh as the present of the novel, to which the two main protagonists both temporally and spatially return, fixes this as a depiction of Britain at a particular time and place. However, it is a focal point at which multiple narrative migrations and journeys converge resulting in the conflicts and struggles from which the new complexities of belonging and alienation become apparent. The transformations ― however partial and incomplete ― that I argue occur as a consequence, thus emerge from the struggle between the multiple affiliations that can result from transnational mobilities and the contrasting attempts to fix national identity. The significance that one should attach to these struggles in reading A Distant Shore as a novel depicting either a transnational freedom of movement or the restraints of national identity are evident in some critical responses to it.

Both Bénédicte Ledent and Dave Gunning published readings of A Distant Shore in 2004 and each sought to emphasize the importance of Britain as a nation-state in reading the complexities of the novel. Ledent picks out Phillips’ ambivalent notion of belonging and national identity by pursuing the theme of “attachment and detachment” in the novel as a more widely felt condition that “characterises present day England” (2004: 154). Gunning also seeks to prioritize the (British) nation as a critical tool. According to him, A Distant Shore “must be read, at least partly, as a ‘British’ text” because, although it is an “international story” it is “finally located in a fixed location with fixed codes and laws: the British nation” (2004: 38–9). In each of these highly perceptive readings, however, the national object of study retains an elusive quality. Ledent refers to both Britain and England in her analysis, but each term is not interchangeable. Being English is a sign of being both of Britain and not of Scotland or Wales and each denomination seeks to promote a coherent identity that is always more ideological than real. For his part, Gunning endeavours to balance the legally defined fixity of state borders against “the actual intricacies of the condition of national belonging” (2004: 39). This appears to be borne out in the novel when Solomon receives his citizenship papers on one of the few occasions where the term British, rather than English, is used (291). Even so, the presence of a legislative framework does not entirely eliminate the capacity for the Law itself to be shifting and elusive in its practice and application. For example, Solomon’s experiences of British officialdom demonstrate that its agents are as likely to bend or flout the Law (see his inhumane treatment in the detention cell in Part II of the novel or the advice of his immigration lawyer to “do a runner” [166]) as his landlady and benefactress is to (literally) apply the letter of the Law in completing the forms for his citizenship papers.

This ambivalent relationship between a legislative framework and the individual’s ability to draw upon this to achieve a collective sense of identity forms the basis for some later readings of Phillips’ novel. Writing in 2011, Gunning’s emphasis upon the determining effects of asylum laws has become more marked. Here, Solomon undergoes a “complete assault upon his selfhood”, having been reduced to an “infrahuman” status in which either a self-imposed silence or the acceptance of infantilization is his only defence (Gunning, 2011: 143–6). In this view (and in every sense of the phrase), Solomon is both bound and gagged by the State as the national framework triumphs over the transnational individual. Stephen Clingman also notes the significance of Solomon’s silence, noting that “one of the crucial revelations of Solomon’s story is its non-revelation in any public form” (2009: 96) [emphasis in original]. Here, Clingman emphasizes the negative suppression of the global in subordination to the reassertion of the unchanging nation-state. Like Ledent and Gunning, he reads the nation depicted in A Distant Shore as one that is characterized by a lack of communication and connection and is unable to accommodate the transformation implied in the phrase with which Phillips opens the novel, “England has changed” (3). The sense that one takes from this, and from Ledent and Gunning, is that England has not changed: while it is a point of globalized intersection, its national context renders its subjects incapable both of speech (Gunning and Clingman) and of meaningful self-appraisal (Ledent). But surely this is too gloomy a conclusion to reach when dealing with a writer such as Phillips who has in many ways become a rallying point for those critics who see in his work the progressive potentialities of his transnational influences. A key figure in this regard is John McLeod whose own careful consideration of the relationship between black British writing and transnationalism also returns to an emphasis upon the nation.

In his own characteristically measured reading of this text, McLeod scrutinizes “the business of everyday life for the principles of a truly progressive and transformative prospect” (2008: 9) in search of what he calls a “tentative utopian vision” (2008: 3). His approach stands in sharp contrast to Clingman for whom the “forgotten and the hidden of the national everyday” in the novel is indicative of a “disconnection which is one sign of an inner national condition.” (2009: 95–7). McLeod takes care to ensure that any Utopianism in the novel remains a tentative, optimistic prospect only, but it is one that I think will find a strong correspondence with Ashcroft’s “idea/l” of the transnation as a site of transformative struggle. For McLeod, this struggle is present in the challenge to engender “a new practice of everyday life, where transracial and multicultural encounters can be ordinary and warm without endangering their participants” (2008: 13). Such a transformation is not achieved by this novel, but it is significant for me that McLeod sees the everyday as a site that, contra Clingman, provides the positive potentiality for transformation. However, this emphasis upon the everyday should not be confused with outward symbols of what McLeod describes as “the allegedly changed multicultural present” (2008: 14). As a brief summary of the novel will show, A Distant Shore depicts England as a country where migrations within and across its national boundaries suggest a radically transformational state. However, evidence of a superficial multiculturalism (and its defeat) is also present in the novel.

Dorothy is a retired school teacher who has recently moved back to the area of her childhood. Her “journey” is one of embourgeoisement away from her northern, working-class upbringing. As a first generation undergraduate, she moves away to university in Manchester and thence to Birmingham where, having married her middle-class student sweetheart, Brian, she enters a world of golf clubs, dinner parties, and her mother-in-law’s ill-concealed disappointment at her son’s choice of spouse. When her marriage fails she embarks upon an affair with Mahmood, a local newsagent, has a subsequent brief encounter with a supply teacher and finally (which is where the novel begins) begins a tentative friendship with Solomon, the African caretaker at the new housing estate where Dorothy lives. Solomon’s journey is more dramatic. Originally named Gabriel, he is sent by his father to fight in what will become a genocidal civil war in his unnamed African country. Now known as Hawk, he is hunted as a war criminal, returns home only to see his family murdered by enemy forces and escapes thereafter as an illegal immigrant across Europe and to England via the Sangatte camp. After a period of imprisonment on rape charges, Gabriel changes his name to Solomon and heads north, via London, to be befriended by an Irish driver and his Scottish landlord and landlady who finally find him the job as estate handyman where he meets Dorothy.

Mahmood’s tale is also meaningful. He has emigrated from India in order to escape an arranged marriage to a wife whom he is unable to “control”. Unwilling to either beat her into submission or shame her through rejection, he leaves for England (200–1). Mahmood’s arrival in Leicester, famous for its Asian communities, could be construed as his contribution towards England’s transformation into urban cosmopolitanism and what Dorothy describes as the “triumph” of his personal liberation (203). But his experiences working in his brother’s restaurant suggests that the ritual of the post-pub, Friday night curry is more an opportunity to rehearse old imperial prejudices than it is to embrace diversity and internationalization (202). Similarly, his second career as a newsagent-cum-shopkeeper does not achieve any greater social integration as he continues to encounter prejudice from his customers whilst, ironically, selling them the Daily Mail (200). Mahmood’s tale of migration is one of the failures of multiculturalism and it is paralleled by Dorothy’s husband, Brian, who migrates to Spain to set up a bed and breakfast “pension”. Named “Casa BeeBee”, the intercultural amalgamation implied by its name is not matched by its business model, which caters exclusively for a British clientele and boasts fried breakfasts as the speciality of the house (208). ⁴

A Distant Shore thus contains evidence of a freedom of movement across boundaries and the consequent establishment of multicultural communities. But it does not portray a successful social transformation in process. McLeod’s analysis therefore eschews any superficial trappings of multiculturalism and rests instead upon intense moments of interpersonal communication that provide evidence of “Phillips’ binocular focus upon the everyday refusals of racism and division within the grim context of a stubbornly prejudicial milieu” (2008: 13–4). In particular, McLeod identifies a utopian potentiality in the moment where Solomon, hiding in an abandoned house having achieved illegal entry into Britain, becomes a source of comfort for a young girl, Denise, who has just revealed a history of parental abuse. McLeod states, “we must not forget the weight of that silent moment shared by Gabriel/Solomon and Denise”, as “Gabriel/Solomon’s willingness to listen sympathetically to Denise is both ethically vital and at the heart of something transformative” (2008: 13) [emphasis in original].

In this approach, national transformations occur precisely at the point where a cross-cultural understanding is achieved at a highly personal level and new linkages and correspondences come into view. More recently, McLeod (2010) has developed these ideas to suggest that Britain is undergoing a reinvention of identity via an international and polycultural frame within which the nation is understood less from a transnational perspective of the notion of an absent structure and more as a site within which local transformativity takes place. He employs Phillips’ most recent novel, In The Falling Snow (2010), to launch his theory of “new routines” through which the “contemporary nation as a post-racial space of linkages, synchronicities and equivalences” (2010: 48) might be discerned. It is this emphasis upon new routines of everyday life as a site of struggle and transformation within a national setting that, in my view, links McLeod’s work to that of Ashcroft and his notion of the transnation. Ashcroft provides a number of compatible definitions of this term, but his emphasis upon a struggle that is held within and defined by the nation-state is striking: “The transnation begins within the nation. It is not an ontological object but a way of understanding the possibility of ordinary people avoiding, dodging, circumventing the inevitable claims of the state upon them” (2010: 13 [emphasis in original]).

According to Ashcroft, this agency, this freedom from state determination will be felt in the ability for self-articulation. As the old imagined certainties of fixed identities fall away, subjects will experience agency as the ability to “hook on and off” aspects of a fluid identity, free from older determinants such as nationality or exile. Ashcroft is arguing openly for a Utopian form of thinking here, what he terms an “idea/l” (2010: 13). Here, in-betweenness is not uncertainty; it is hope, a potential for transformation that runs through the State as well as between nation states. He employs Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of smooth and striated space to describe the thorough interpenetration of individual agency and state control which provides the potential for liberation and transformation. In their metaphor, striated spaces are the ordered strands of interwoven woof and warp of textile fabrics, manifested as “government institutions, fixed concepts and essentialized peoples”. By contrast, smooth spaces are crushed and entangled fibres that constitute felt. The smooth spaces interpenetrate striated spaces and provide potential for defying categorizing machines, producing transformed and transforming “monsters” (Ashcroft, 2010: 22–3). The transnation is, for Ashcroft, this smooth space. It is within the nation that it is possible to find a space where the striated notions of centre and periphery, national self and foreign other, may be dissolved.

Ashcroft’s idea/l is reflected in McLeod’s own optimistic sense of a national reinvention, re-visioning and a hesitantly-proposed “post-racial” nation state. McLeod’s assertion of a national space within which new resemblances and routines are being forged that have the potential to replace outmoded definitions of self and other would seem to carry some trace of Ashcroft’s invocation of a transformative smooth space. In sharing these idea/ls, Ashcroft and McLeod are both promoting ― not at all naively ― a sense of hope for transformation. For McLeod, the nation’s nascent state is one of “polycultural admixture and fusion” (McLeod, 2010: 51); for Ashcroft, the transnation balances utopian potentiality against the “constant, ubiquitous, oppressive and combative discourse of particular nation states” (Ashcroft, 2010: 25).

Finding evidence for this in A Distant Shore is not wholly clear cut. For example, the events that follow the shared moment of silence between Solomon and Denise that McLeod seizes upon are open to interpretation. McLeod declares that this shared moment of contact between Solomon and Denise is “profoundly non-sexual” (2008: 13) and Solomon’s subsequent arrest under suspicion of rape is unwarranted. Clingman shares this conviction, stating that Solomon has been “falsely accused of rape” (2009: 95). I am less sure. For me, Solomon’s decision to say nothing of “the temptation of the poor girl […] who presented the opportunity to debase myself and simply gratify a passion of nature” (278) cannot be ignored. ⁵ While it does not explicitly state that this was an opportunity acted upon, I think it is quite strongly suggested. Similarly, Solomon’s other internalized protestation that “[t]hey simply fell asleep, that is all” is not wholly confirmed by the ensuing statement, “no matter what anyone might say, Solomon knew that he did not force himself upon the girl” (188–9), since force is not necessarily an issue in the prosecution of an offence involving sex with an underage girl. In addition, Solomon’s memories of Denise do not end there. In the moments leading up to his murder, Solomon notices a girl amongst the group of youths who would become his attackers:

Whenever I see this girl, I have noticed how she looks at me. I am sensitive to the weight of her gaze. The girl reminds me of Denise, and like Denise she lacks the modesty that I would expect in someone of her tender years. I walk past the girl and resist the urge to turn and see if she is watching me. I keep walking in the hope that she will soon disappear from my life. I have been fooled already and I do not wish to be fooled again. (283 [emphasis added])

I would suggest that there is enough textual evidence here to be at least equivocal about Solomon’s innocence. My intention here is not to “prove” Solomon’s guilt so much as to identify an alternative way in which McLeod’s idea/l of transformation might still be found in Solomon’s role in helping to establish new routines. In each of the events discussed here (Solomon’s arrest and his murder), English characters choose to break old routines of their own communities by electing to side with Solomon. Whether or not Denise engaged in sex with Solomon, it would probably have been easier for her to endorse his presumed guilt than it would have been to declare him innocent, but she takes the latter course of action. Similarly, the girl amongst the group of boys is Carla, who will later confess to her involvement in the attack upon Solomon and identify his killers to the police. Since the landlord of the local pub probably expressed a widely-held view when he stated to Dorothy that Solomon’s death “must have been an accident because there’s nobody in Weston who would do anything like that” (48), Carla’s confession carries a similar weight to Denise’s in terms of breaking with established beliefs and prejudices to promote new linkages. In effect, their willingness to identify with Solomon’s predicament is the embodiment of Phillips’ assertion that literature has the moral capacity to “wrench us out of our ideological burrows” (2011: 16).

Denise and Carla each break both the codes and the laws of their national-regional community in a manner that places them within the “smooth spaces” of the English transnation. Their actions can neither free Solomon from guilt by association (hence his flight north and reinvention as Gabriel) nor restore him to life but, as Ashcroft points out (quoting Deleuze and Guattari), “smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory, but the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches, adversaries” (2010: 24). Here, the struggle is played out at the level of narrative, since it is their determination to “set the story straight” through a willed act of memory, rather than going along with a story that fits the national narrative of the criminal Other that changes lives. For Ashcroft (and McLeod), this combination of memory and revised narrative is central to the potential for national transformation: “memory, through the medium of literature, becomes the vehicle of potentiality rather than stasis. This is the potentiality of return, when the past adumbrates a future that transforms the present” (Ashcroft, 2010: 28). The dangers inherent in the converse of this process, where memory is distorted to provide stasis, are in plentiful evidence in A Distant Shore.

As noted above, the novel begins with an apparent expression of England as a borderless transnational state: “England has changed. These days it’s difficult to tell who’s from around here and who’s not. Who belongs and who’s a stranger” (3). However, McLeod’s emphasis upon the routine and the local encourages a different reading of Phillips’ opening lines as this apparent loss of discernible boundaries quickly becomes ironic. Dorothy’s home is in fact highly codified. The new estate where she and Solomon live, Stoneleigh, is viewed with a mixture of contempt and suspicion by the village(rs) of Weston, of which it forms a discontinuous economic and physical part. Weston itself is resolutely unchangeable, despite (or because of) the loss of the local mining industry twenty years previously. Here, people know exactly “who is and who is not from around here” as witnessed by the short-lived appearance of a Jewish general practitioner who failed to properly conceal her difference by naming her children Jacob and Rachel (9). Weston is five miles from “town” ― near to, but distinct from, Manchester. This sense of a thread-like connection with the world outside is emphasized by references to the now redundant and sluggish canal and the disused railway bridge and track. There is only the linearity of the bus route to “small towns and lonely villages beyond Weston” (29) charting a daily reiteration of individuals to designated places: of lives to carefully calibrated locations. Solomon’s harassment and murder by the local youths is one consequence of the prejudices fostered by such calibrations of belonging and intrusion and certainties of selfhood and otherness. In Phillips’ terms, these certainties are held within the “ideological burrows” from which fiction has the capacity to release us and A Distant Shore is replete with evidence of the dangers inherent in the failure to achieve this, as Phillips does not restrict such certainties to Weston.

Solomon also arrives in England with an apparently clear sense of self and otherness. Unable yet to map himself within a new cognitive landscape in which being white is not a guarantee of belonging (as his Irish friend Mike can attest), Solomon reflects on his African home where “it was relatively simple to distinguish a man of different tribe or region” (273). However, the ethnic conflict from which Solomon has just escaped demonstrates that such distinctions are not neutrally observed and one of the tragic ironies of the novel is contained in the eventuality that Solomon should escape a genocidal conflict only to meet a violent end by becoming haplessly enmeshed in the suppressed racial tensions of another country.

Significantly, all of these certainties are characterized by an uncertain grip on the past. Solomon must try to forget that he once wished to “live in peace with our brothers” (137) in order to become an active participant in the war. This act of forgetting is symbolically enacted by Solomon and his comrades in their adoption of new personae such as Hawk, Captain Juju, and Colonel Bloodshed. Solomon’s lack of conviction in these new identities prevents him from participating in war atrocities and renders him the enemy of both sides of the conflict. Having stepped outside of the tribal binaries of self and other that now define the nation, Solomon finds himself forced into the itinerant status of the exiled refugee. In an analogous process, Dorothy is also exiled from her place of birth. Dorothy’s retirement in Weston marks a return to the area of her childhood, but she is made a stranger by the locals who view her as if she has “the mark of Cain” on her (6). In this instance, one of “us” has to be made one of “them” in order for Weston to retain its identity, whilst memory must be responsively unreliable to fix the ideological certainties of the past into a stable present and retain an ontological distance between them and us.

In Ashcroft’s view, literature can engage with this ideologically fixed narrative history since it offers the opportunity to return to and revise the past. The “potentiality of return” (2010: 28), as he calls it, is one where ordered narratives can be disordered. In A Distant Shore, Phillips enacts this potential through the use of a narrative structure in which recollections of the past are complex, selective, unreliable, and reiterative and where the significance of events has to be held in abeyance, rather than assumed. It is perhaps for this reason that the actuality of what occurred between Solomon and Denise remains open to interpretation. What is more certain, however, is the shared nature of the experiences that have drawn two such unlikely characters together in the first place. If Solomon has abandoned, and been abandoned by, his country, then Denise is similarly, “one of the most abandoned of her species” (278). As a consequence of this abandonment Denise is enabled to seek out new linkages that prepare her for her actions in saving Solomon against the preferences of her community. Similarly, as Dorothy recounts her past to Mahmood she also realizes that her “story contains a single word, abandonment” (203): a word that might equally be attributed to Mahmood’s own enforced migration from tradition in India and racism in Leicester. The affair between Dorothy and Mahmood is only short-lived, but the passages in which they exchange their personal histories are marked by their clarity and their confessional nature. In a novel that features characteristically unreliable narratives, exchanges such as these are rare in terms of their function in achieving self-realization, rather than suppressed memory, and they anticipate the potential for reconciliation with the past that is held within the truncated relationship between Dorothy and Solomon.

Revisiting the past in order to “adumbrate a future that transforms the present” is achieved in Phillips’ novel through the act of memory, of telling stories, since this is crucial to both the construction of the novel and the (de)construction of its characters. The present of the novel, after all, is one in which Solomon is dead and Dorothy is deranged and so the unfolding of their stories simultaneously precedes and succeeds that present and thus falls outside of the striated space of a chronologically structured narrative. In addition to the characters it is, therefore, the reader who also has to meet the challenge of making new linkages in order to make sense of the novel. In so doing, the reader will similarly have to abandon the certainties that make the friendship between an essentially bigoted woman and an African refugee such an unlikely one. Phillips’ belief in the “moral capacity of literature” functions in what Ashcroft terms the potentiality of return in the space of the literary transnation.

In this paper I have sought to read Phillips’ A Distant Shore as a novel that depicts the British transnation. Following Ashcroft’s and McLeod’s cautious optimism that the idea/l of the transnation has offered the prospect only of a post-racial utopianism, I have similarly suggested that the transnation that exists in Phillips’ novel is not a reality; it is a yet to be realized idea(l), with the new friendships and linkages held within it functioning as an illustration of the potential for new routines. In this novel, racism still exists and the inheritance of an imperial past is still clearly present. However, this novel also depicts a nation characterized by migration, resettlement, reinvention, and an uncertain grip upon the realities of the past. As these intricate aggregations become crushed together in the smooth spaces of the transnation, small and routine resemblances start to become more real and significant than the imagined large differences of the past. In many ways, this is a feature of Phillips’ oeuvre as a whole, which typically challenges readers to find resemblances in otherwise seemingly disparate narrative strands. Herein lies the challenge, with which this paper opened, that literature presents for the reader: to inhabit a different subject position ― to imagine that “they are us”.