FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND BUSINESS STUDIES
Department of HumanitiesThe Giving Up of Greer:
The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the
Janus-Faced Empire
Writing Back Against the British Imperial Discourse
David Woods
2021
Student thesis, Bachelor degree, 15 HE English
ENG804
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to examine the tension at the heart of the British colonial
1
Table of Contents
Introduction ... 2
Theoretical Framework ... 3
Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory ... 3
Historical and Social Context ... 9
Discussion ... 14
A Postcolonial Analysis of the Narrative Structure ... 14
Subversion of the British War Narrative ... 15
Crossing the Racial Divide ... 20
Joyce’s Submission to Official and Societal Racial Prejudice ... 23
Conclusion ... 28
2 Introduction
3 because Travis and Joyce’s mixed-raced relationship threatens the national discourse of racial hegemony, of a national identity signified by ethnicity and race, that it is resisted by populace and officialdom alike and is the major reason for Joyce giving up her baby, Greer. This Janus-faced nature of the British Empire, both allowing the conditions for the relationship to develop and then rejecting the resulting progeny, is thus made evident.
Theoretical Framework:
Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory
Postcolonial theory is a complex subject dealing with issues relating to
4 In a similar way, the stereotype of “the Negro’s animality” (McLeod 65) had earlier served to justify the cruelties of slavery. Although Edward Said was talking about Asian and Islamic cultures when writing, his statements referring to Orientals are applicable to any non-western culture. The Oriental was set up in opposition to what were thought of as natural European traits: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, ‘different’; thus, the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’”
(Orientalism 40). This justified, in Europeans’ eyes, their right to dominate the Oriental, the ‘Other’. In The Wretched of the Earth, an earlier work, Frantz Fanon writes that, “[t]he colonial world is a world divided into compartments […] a world cut in two. The dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations” (29). These compartments, he insists, “were inhabited by two different species”, explaining the stark differences in the lives of these two different “species” (30). Fanon was talking
explicitly about the colonial experience in the French colonies, particularly Algeria. However, this separation, this “world cut into two … inhabited by two different species” not only described the world of the European colonies, it also described
regions of the United States. In the southern states, the ‘two different species’, the white American and the African American, were increasingly segregated with African
Americans marginalised as the so-called Jim Crow laws whittled away at the rights gained in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of the slave population. This segregation extended even to laws against sexual relations or marriage between the races, termed miscegenation.
5 values could be implicitly understood, or internalised by the colonised, and need not be expressly taught by the colonisers, a process termed “colonising the mind” in McLeod (20). Indeed, the converse should also be understood, that the mind of the coloniser has been colonised with the same value system. Thus, these colonial discourses of racial superiority and inferiority, of binary oppositions like good and evil aligned with racial types, like white and black, are internalised by both coloniser and colonised. Boundaries can be created even without laws.
One way of challenging these discourses of superiority and inferiority is for postcolonial writers to ‘write back’ to the so-called metropolitan centre, the seat of empire, from their marginal positions in the periphery, generally the colonies
themselves, though increasingly from diasporic communities within Europe itself. As Helen Tiffin suggests, “The rereading and rewriting of the European historical and fictional record” (qtd. in Tyson 429), is a way to subvert colonialist narratives. In
canonical texts this can be achieved through identifying aspects of colonialism within or else downplayed or omitted, as with Said’s study of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Alternatively, by bringing the decentred subject to the centre, a post-structuralist technique, the stories of the marginalised, those hidden or side-lined, can be told. Furthermore, stressing parts of the historical record conveniently and deliberately forgotten or minimised, reminding the reader and challenging the national historical discourse and mythmaking, is a central aim. Feminist perspectives may also be highlighted, and parallels drawn between the marginalisation of women and the colonised, and the violence meted out to both women and colonised peoples. The
concept of “double colonisation” coined by Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford (McLeod 201) highlights the lot of the colonised woman, subject to two types of
6 According to Barry, there are three stages in this writing back, the adopt, adapt and adept phases. The adopt phase is the initial phase, whereby a writer adopts the existing form of literature as used by the colonising culture, which is stressed by the metropolitan centre to be universal and thus the only correct form and writes in these existing genres. The adapt phase then is when a writer uses this form and adapts it to start writing about specifically African (or Asian etc.) concerns and matters, rather than ‘universal’ ones with their implication, when relating to the British empire, of British and white Christian norms. Finally, the adept phase is when the colonial writer
reimagines the form in “a declaration of cultural independence” (Barry 198). However, this is also an admittance of cross-cultural interactions, an alternative to a nativist approach, such as rejecting the language of the coloniser, as famously done by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who switched from writing in English back to his native Gikuyu for that reason. However, for Caribbean and British writers, for example, unlike African ones, rejecting the language of the coloniser is not a practical choice, their displacement from their distant ancestral African and Carib cultures and languages being too great. This cross-cultural interaction of the adept stage is key to several aspects of postcolonial theory, for example hybrid identities, and, in Edward Said’s expression, “intertwined histories”, the idea that the histories of the coloniser and colonised are interlinked (Culture and Imperialism 1).
Said used the expression “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” as the title of Culture and Imperialism’s first chapter (1) to emphasise that, as a result of colonialism, the coloniser and the colonised each influenced the other, quoting C.L.R James as saying that “Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to
7 differentiated, and unmonolithic” (xxxii). In western countries, such as the United States that he was invoking, this heterogenous cultural history competes with a “unitary cultural identity”, inherited from the metropolitan centre of the imperial entity, that seeks to “celebrate the uniqueness of their tradition (usually and invidiously at the expense of others)” (xxxii). The metropolitan centre of the imperial power imposes and continues to try to impose this unitary discourse of superiority on a nation and its people, no matter their individual backgrounds and histories. In western countries, immigration on a significant scale has occurred with people moving from the former colonies. These people, who not only have a different identity, with differing values and cultures, but who also differ physically from the dominant native people, suffer from the discourse imposed upon them.
Modern theories of diaspora tend to de-emphasise the binary oppositions inherent in early resistance to this discourse, which by creating essentialised black identities, implied an acceptance of racial difference. In the foreword to Stuart Hall’s
The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Henry Louis Gates Jr. relates how Hall
8 in Hall 54). In the initial phase of European expansion, this was the question being posed, and it seems no coincidence that slavery in the colonies originated in these pre-Enlightenment times. The pre-Enlightenment changed this “discursive mark of difference” from “between two mutually exclusive species” to “differential levels and grades of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ within one system” (Hall 54-5). Thus, theorists looked to new ideas of identity, to try to get past these binary oppositions of race-based
essentialism that had been, and still are, so destructive.
Modern theories of postcolonial identity tend to emphasise complex hybrid and fluid identities, drawn from both the dominant culture and the pluralistic diasporic cultures. Whilst governments use terms like multiculturalism to signal tolerance of difference, the reality is that these communities, composed of various diaspora, suffer disproportionate levels of poverty, health concerns and discrimination. There are boundaries in place, hidden boundaries. Bhabha fears that the term “cultural diversity” gives the false impression that “cultures are holistic, separated and static” and states that, instead, “porous borders” exist between cultures and that interactions between them constitute a “political act” with culture being “interactive” (qtd. in McLeod 263). For him, the “cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world” is key (qtd. in McLeod 264). This is a rejection of purity in identity for both the coloniser and
9 have been significant and, with immigration, growing. The journeys or “crossings” from Africa to the Americas as slaves, back to Africa in new colonies of repatriation such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, from the Americas to Britain, from Africa to Britain, resulted in considerable displacement of peoples from their native lands and a large and
widespread diaspora, and are important for Gilroy who posits that the “transnational quality of black history and experience” led to “myriad ways of thinking” (265). This works in opposition to the idea of one essentialist black culture and stresses the transnational and the intercultural, with cultures cross-fertilising each other, showing the borders between them to be permeable. This concept of transnational “routes”, with its fluid and hybrid identities, by acting against the “roots” of a racial, essentialist and homogenous identity, subverts the colonial discourse of fixed identities with
uncrossable boundaries between them.
Historical and Social Context
10 disturbances there (Olusoga 459). Thus, there was a balance to be kept, between the need to accommodate their American ally’s segregated army and the need to maintain good relations with colonies populated by peoples of different races, by not only projecting an image of a benevolent and paternalistic empire, but also by living up to that image.
In addition to this dilemma, there were the significant and inherent
contradictions at the heart of the empire. On the one hand was the belief, propagated by decades of colonial propaganda, in the superiority of the white Briton: culture, science, industrial power, and military success were linked by pseudo-science to racial and cultural characteristics. Indeed, Stuart Hall’s “sliding signifiers” describe the idea that a concept such as ethnicity, which concerns shared cultural aspects such as language and traditions, “constantly slides – especially through common sense conceptions of kinship – towards a transcultural and even transcendental fix in common blood, inheritance, and ancestry” (Hall 108), creating a link between the separate concepts of nation, ethnicity, and race. On the other hand, to maintain that very same empire, populated largely by people widely thought to be racially inferior, the British government could not be seen to discriminate against those same people too obviously. The colonial narrative was of a civilising mission, trying to raise colonial peoples to a higher level, with British
11 Until the idea of innate British superiority, connected to race, ethnicity, and nation, could be erased, there would always be a barrier, however implicit. Hence, for British authorities this was a delicate issue, and an impossible conundrum: how was it possible to head up a multi-racial empire with justice and at the same time hold on to the deeply ingrained belief that the white man was superior, while endeavouring to keep the most explicit signs of this belief obscured? How was it possible to rule the colonised justly without revealing the deeply discriminatory beliefs at the heart of the imperial mission? British servicemen in the Second World War included non-white volunteers from colonies in the West Indies, the Americas, Africa and Asia, and this time, in an advance from the First World War, some, especially those from the Caribbean, were in crucial combat roles in Britain itself. Arguably, progress for colonised peoples was being made, albeit from a low starting point. Thus, the arrival of a racially segregated army resulted in considerable anxiety for the British authorities since racial segregation being enforced on the streets of Britain was likely to cause discontent and social unrest, both in Britain and in the colonies. The British government could not “oppose
segregation openly” for fear of offending its ally, but nor did it wish to “disaffect” volunteers from the Caribbean (Bland 7); in fact, there was “considerable tension … between the Colonial Office and other departments” on this question (Bland 8).
social-12 Darwinian terms, that: “it was fairly obvious that in our present society such [racially mixed] unions are not desirable, since the children resulting from them are neither one thing nor the other and are thus badly handicapped in the struggle for life” (484). Thus, partial but real legal boundaries were put in place by government and official advice that discouraged miscegenation was dispensed.
In the event, the black American GIs proved to be a good deal more popular with the British populace than their white compatriots, who, by their behaviour, often managed to rub their hosts up the wrong way. The black servicemen were considered quiet, polite, smart dressers, and moreover did not complain about “the lack of modern conveniences” and wartime privation in Britain (Bland 4). Nevertheless, official reports noted “a tendency [for the public] to regard the negroes as childish, happy, naïve
fellows”, showing that dated negative stereotypes persisted among Britons, though there was a common belief that “discrimination is undemocratic, particularly when black and white are both fighting for democracy” (4). Indeed, the behaviour of the white GIs towards their black countrymen, with white GIs forcefully intervening to separate black soldiers from white women, horrified many Britons and hostile crowds could form, siding with the black soldiers. The famous pre-war West Indian cricketer, Learie Constantine, later Britain’s first black peer, relates in his book, Colour Bar, how he himself experienced the way the presence of white American officers could influence the behaviour of hoteliers, finding his booking affected despite having specifically checked in advance whether his colour would be a problem. Ultimately, to try to minimise incidents of this sort, a subtler system of segregation was implemented by the US Army using rotational passes: blacks one day, whites another.
13 coloured troops” (Bland 5). Indeed, women in such relationships also found themselves judged harshly, considered “loose women” and “unpatriotic” (11). This deeper hostility showed itself more clearly in the aftermath of the war, when: “many such children were abandoned by their mothers, who had themselves been ostracised by their communities and even families. Most were sent to children’s homes, from which very few were successfully placed for adoption.” (Olusoga 484-5). Whilst some plans were put in place to have the children adopted by their fathers in the US, only very few got there. British politicians, rather than seeing to the children’s welfare, seemed more concerned about how sending away hundreds of mixed-race children, instead of educating and looking after them at home, would look to people in the colonies.
The existence of these children created a further problem: could mixed-race offspring be seen as British? They represented a challenge to national and racial
boundaries and the neat polarity between the white British and the non-white colonized racial ‘Other’, to British identity itself. Although the mothers were urged by the
government to keep their babies, no money was provided to help them, and many children were abandoned to welfare organisations. It is thought that approximately seven hundred and seventy-five so-called “brown babies” were given up to welfare organisations, and, according to Bland, it is likely that a similar number remained with their mothers (19). Bland quotes the Liverpool University Settlement for declaring that “mixed parentage” was considered a “handicap comparable to physical deformity” (16). The hypocrisy was clear: the British had liked to compare their own tolerance
14 Discussion:
A Postcolonial Analysis of the Narrative Structure
Chinua Achebe wrote that, “The writer cannot expect to be excused from the task of re-education and regeneration that must be done” (Ashcroft et al 125). In
Crossing the River, Phillips does just that: he educates his readers. All four of the
15 miserable situations. Thus, Phillips brings the disparate strands of his tale of the African diaspora together and into the present day.
“Somewhere in England” is told in the form of the journal entries of a white English woman, Joyce. She is a homodiegetic narrator, recording her observations and feelings of significant events in her life. These journal entries “jump back and forth in time, as if to indicate that memory is not simply linear but bound up to the emotional importance surrounding any particular event in a person's life”, a challenge to the linear idea of time in western modernity (Low 138). This handling of time in this fragmentary manner is typical of post-modernist novels and appropriate for a post-colonial novel: time is displaced, much like the people themselves, reinforcing the novel’s message of various displacements. Travis is not given a voice and the reader is not party to his thoughts and feelings, only to the words Joyce writes in her journal. This suggests a reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s answer in the negative to the question posed in her famous paper: Can the Subaltern Speak? We cannot hear Travis except through the writings of Joyce, a white woman.
Postcolonial Subversion of the Official British War Narrative
In “Somewhere in England”, Phillips focuses his tale on the arrival of the
descendants of slaves in the United Kingdom, as US soldiers, around two hundred years after Captain Hamilton’s slaving mission. Thus, Phillips symbolically completes the Atlantic Triangle of the slave trade, the sudden and unannounced arrival of the GIs in the unnamed northern village like an irruption from the unconscious of long-repressed memories, a ghostly reminder of slavery: “Some of the villagers couldn’t contain
16 to subvert the official wartime narrative, revealing the inconsistencies and racism at the heart of the British narrative and suggesting their roots in slavery and imperialism.
This subversion of the narrative is achieved in several ways. Firstly, by inverting the stereotypes of black and white masculinity, portraying white men such as the
American MPs, Len, and the veteran of Dunkirk who murders his wife, as the violent and criminal ones and Travis as the gentle one, in a clear reversal of Orientalist stereotypes. Secondly, Phillips points out the discrepancies between the British
government’s wartime discourse and the reality. For a Briton to write about the Second World War, for which there are national myths aplenty, and have Joyce see the disparity between them and the actuality, is a clear undermining of both contemporary
propaganda and national mythmaking. Phillips casts doubt on the unity and the all-in-it-together myth by having the evacuee children eyed up for cheap labour and then sent back to their homes because “we’re not in the charity business” (Phillips 140). This selfishness of taking what they want is reinforced by Len’s farmer friend getting Sandra pregnant while her husband is away fighting in France and carrying on as usual in the immediate aftermath of her resulting murder, without apparent qualms. A further reinforcement is when Len and his friends, having witnessed an air raid over the town, leave for the pub, laughing, once the bombing is over, seemingly unaffected by the destruction they have witnessed. The picture painted is not one of a society pulling together in a united war effort, in contrast to the proclaimed togetherness of the official narrative that lingers in the collective British memory.
17 and any number of Indians” (Phillips 164), this civilisational hierarchy being consistent with British imperial discourses. Instead, Phillips portrays British soldiers as more effective at murdering their wives than defending the nation. While Len “laps up” (164) government lines such as “We English lose every battle except the last” (165), lacking the imagination to see them for the nonsense they are, Joyce does see through them and swears in her despair. When she goes to the cinema to view the newsreels in the forlorn hope of catching a glimpse of Travis, she sees that it is apparently only British soldiers who are fighting the war. Even if American soldiers are shown, they are uniformly white. In the United Kingdom, in the First World War, it had seemed to be official policy to “write the role of black sailors and soldiers out of the official memory and memorialization of the war” (Olusoga 448). In this respect, nothing much has changed twenty-five years later. Joyce’s noticing the exclusion of the Americans, let alone black Americans, is just one example of Joyce seeing through official propaganda. Indeed, this facility, this “getting good at learning the difference between official stories and the evidence before my eyes” establishes her as a free thinker, making it clearer how she is able to conceive of a relationship with Travis (Phillips 165). In an understated style, Phillips weaves his subversive lines, quietly re-writing a period often looked back on with sepia-tinged pride by Britons.
18 beaten by white men for daring to be with a white woman, husbands and wives
separated, and babies taken away. Slavery is a historical fact de-emphasised in official British history, with the emancipation of slaves in the British empire overshadowing and obscuring, in the official line, the savagery of what had gone before.
19 Travis, too, is not like his fellow soldiers. This is difference is emphasised in the narrative by the mention of a gap in his bottom teeth: “It’s unusual … But that was all right, it was different and I liked that” (162). However, there is more than that. Being someone who is not impressed by British society, and with her negative experiences of British men, the idea of someone who is different is attractive to Joyce. Travis dresses very smartly, and he “doesn’t chew gum when he talks”, which the other GIs do, and which Joyce feels is “vulgar” (167). He is also thoughtful, bringing her flowers. Travis also fulfils a psychological need in Joyce. She had lost her father in the Great War, and this had resulted in her losing her mother too, who retreated into religion. Her mother had warned her not to marry a soldier, because Joyce “will be left alone”, as her mother herself had been (133). Yet she ignores her mother’s advice: Travis fulfils a need in Joyce. She never knew her father and when she assumes that he would want her to get her school certificate, her mother’s retort of “How do you know?” suggests that Joyce idealises him, projecting her own hopes onto her idea of him (190). Indeed, the dream she has of ‘her’ father and of Travis, and their acceptance of each other in this dream, emphasises this association of the two.
Len and Joyce’s marriage is a sham with no love on either side. In a telling scene, where Len punches and kicks Joyce after she tells him that he is her husband “in name only”, and he then retorts that he is her husband “[i]n law and in fact”, it seems that for Len the truth of the state of their marriage seems less important than
20 to this impression of true faith by spontaneously offering up a prayer at her mother’s graveside. Overall, the Americans have an authenticity lacking in the locals, which is attractive to her. Ultimately, Travis seems true in a way the English men in her life have not been.
Crossing the Racial Divide
As narrator, Joyce gives only the tiniest of hints as to the reasons why the villagers were so curious about the new arrivals. Gail Low suggests that it is Joyce’s unconventionality, and, in particular, her “color blindness” (138) that allows her relationship with Travis to develop. Whether Joyce is truly colour blind is debateable; that she “wanted to warn them” (Phillips 129), the “them” being the GIs, suggests that she is aware that the soldiers’ colour might be an issue for the villagers, but it is striking that the fact that the American GIs are black is only made clear in a belated and initially, veiled manner: it seems their colour is of little consequence to Joyce herself. However, as the relationship develops, events mean that the significance of Travis’s colour to others begins to intrude upon Joyce’s consciousness. After the first oblique mention of the GIs’ different and diffident behaviour, the first more concrete suggestion of colour is in referring to Travis’s hair as being “like thin, black wool” (167). The next, more explicit, is in an entry a month later, when admitting she “didn’t like to ask too much because I don’t know too much about Americans. Or Coloureds.” (202). Nonetheless, it is significant that she identifies him as an American first, then as coloured. For Joyce personally, colour is not a significant issue.
21 ask the girls to dance is understandable. They are experiencing and navigating a change in the social rules in comparison to home, as part of their displacement from the United States and are experiencing dislocation: “A lot of the boys are not used to us [the locals] treating them as equals”, Joyce recounts a white officer explaining to her (Phillips, 145). Hence, the soldiers observe that their treatment by the white villagers is markedly different from home, and they are uncertain as to what they can now do, where the limits lie. Joyce had earlier observed that the GIs were “polite” and “lower their eyes” when passing, and Joyce noticed that a soldier seemed “slightly frightened” when greeted by her (134). This subservient behaviour relates to the way black Americans had learned to behave in certain parts of the United States. Indeed, “such attributes [as politeness] were essential for survival in the regions in which black communities lived under the shadow of the Jim Crow laws” (Olusoga, 471). For the other young women in the room, the reluctance to initiate proceedings could be partly explained by social norms: it is the men who generally ask the women to dance. Nevertheless, the novelty and strangeness of the men being black American GIs must surely contribute to their reluctance: in the Britain of the time, inter-racial marriage was rare but known, and the women are no doubt conscious of the likely disapproval of others in society and
22 allowed, but to be seen together in public, to begin a relationship, is hard for him to imagine. Nevertheless, encouraged by Joyce’s boldness and, perhaps, the lack of overt hostility from the villagers towards the GIs, in their limited dealings with them, Travis begins to see that a relationship with a white woman might indeed be a possibility here in England. He thus accedes to Joyce’s suggestion to spend some time together.
23 (206). These incidents are also an acute comment on the different ways racism can be displayed, from the overt and violent racism of American MPs to the locals’ looks, silences, and comments filled with meaning, as when the midwife says of Greer, “He’s like coffee, isn’t he love” (228). After realising how things stood between Travis and Joyce, Len beats his wife rather than Travis. There is dishonesty, cowardliness, and a two-facedness in the English characters’ racism.
Joyce’s reluctance to accept the official line is another factor in later helping her cross the unmarked but widely understood racial boundary and start a relationship with Travis. In fact, this boundary, this river to be crossed, is a significant one. It is
symbolically, a Rubicon, a declaration of war on London, the metropolitan centre and contemporary Rome, and against the overarching colonial narrative, enforced by US military authorities and villagers alike. However, Joyce does not appear to notice or realise this. Travis joins her in crossing the Rubicon, as we can see in his beating of, and threat to kill, Len: in the US, it is the blacks that get lynched, not the whites, but Travis, at least, is more conscious of what he is doing. Later, Len tells Joyce she is a “traitor to [her] own kind” and “no better than a common slut. And everybody in the village agrees with him” (217). There may be no laws against miscegenation in the United Kingdom, but the same feeling that drives the white American MPs enforcement of it in England, inhabits Len, and by extension, the villagers. Beneath the more racially equitable surface, it seems, the British are no less racist than the Americans.
Joyce’s Submission to Official and Societal Racial Prejudice
24 permission needed and not often granted (Bland 12), to marry Joyce, now divorced from Len, and visibly pregnant with Travis’s child, “as long as he didn’t try and take me back to America with him. They weren’t having any of that. Me, I wasn’t right over there” (Phillips 227). There are hints, though that Joyce does not have the strength to go through with this without Travis. This may seem surprising given her earlier boldness, but her colour blindness, her unconventionality, her naivety, can only take her so far in the face of the disapproval, both official and societal, that she faces. “The doctor had said that I was having a breakdown, and a baby” (225) is how Joyce reports the prelude to Travis’s return. However, the reason for the breakdown is likely to be twofold rather than simply about race. Joyce is divorced from Len but not yet married to Travis. At this time there was huge social pressure to be married, and being an unmarried mother was to be a social outcast. Nonetheless, race is a major factor and without Travis, Joyce struggles. The poignant reunion at the railway station shows Travis’s sincerity and commitment, as well as his love. “And then he reached out and pulled me towards him. I couldn’t believe it. He’d come back to me. He really wanted me. That day, crying on the platform, safe in Travis’s arms” (226). The contrast with the previous time she had been pregnant could not be starker. Travis seeing her pregnant, wanted her, unlike Herbert. The marriage helps reassure her, but Travis’s death removes her key support, and Joyce will have to raise their child, Greer, alone. How alone she feels, or is made to feel, is shown during the euphoria of the VE day celebrations in the village, when “some of them [the villagers] even spoke to me and smiled at Greer”, the “even” emphasising the rarity of this event (220).
25 moreover, considered a race traitor by them, according to Len. Recently widowed and grieving, without income after Len’s return to take over the shop, she faces the task of raising Greer alone. It is at this vulnerable time that the forces of the centre move into action, in the form of “the lady with the blue coat”: “You’ll be better off, love, with somebody else looking after him. Trust me. I know what I’m on about. I mean, how are you going to cope? You won’t know what to do now, will you. Let’s be sensible. You’re going to have to start a new life on your own.” (228). This feels very much like a cleaning up operation. The lady’s dog is even called Monty, the nickname of the best known and most successful British general of the war, suggesting she represents the centre. Taking Greer displaces him from the centre and moves him to the margins, out of sight and, for all but Joyce, out of mind. Indeed, it carries an eerie echo of the separation of the child from the mother during the slave era. Despite Joyce not being black, having a mixed-race child appears to taint her in the eyes of her compatriots, and she is thus doubly colonised, in Peterson and Rutherford’s expression, as a woman and as an honorary black woman. This explains Joyce’s inclusion as one of the ancestral African man’s children in the epilogue. The official narrative seems to be saying that it is not possible to be both British and black. A nation is an imagined construct, an “imagined community” and, as Phillips has made clear, Len and Herbert,
26 According to Althusser, ideology “promotes false consciousness and recruits people by a process of ‘interpellation’” (Davis 47), and this is something “internalised and rationalised” (48). By stating that individuals are “already subjects who are called into a relationship with an ideological viewpoint”, he implies that this call can be resisted, but that “those who fight … against the system, are nevertheless crushed by it, and may end up colluding with the very practices they seek to resist” (48). Joyce has fought her interpellation as an English woman, yet she ends up crushed by the system and withdraws back into the safety of this label. This is signalled in her changed, more favourable reaction at the end of the war to both Churchill and the royal family, representatives of the centre she had “never had much time for” earlier in the story (Phillips 230). Thus, Joyce appears to be coming to accept the official narrative that she had earlier derided.
Joyce, in her decision to give up her child, retreats back across the Rubicon she had crossed. She seeks safety in the colonial discourse, marries a white man and has white children. Joyce’s decision may elicit sympathy for her invidious position, a single mother of a so-called ‘brown baby’ in a society unready for, indeed hostile to, inter-racial relationships. Nevertheless, this is the legitimate child of a man beloved to her, and the reader may take a more disapproving position. In this story, the normative colonial discourse reasserts itself, the authorities, in the shape of “the lady with the blue coat” (Phillips 230), come in to take away the ‘problem’ of Greer, someone “neither one thing nor the other” as the pamphlet produced for British servicemen put it (Olusoga 484). Yet this is only a temporary displacement. In 1963, Greer returns to seek his mother. In a book with a strong theme of fathers seeking lost children, Greer turns the tables and shows he has agency. He is a survivor, survival of the lost child also being a theme of the book. He experiences an ambiguous reception from his mother,
27 British, and a living embodiment of Said’s overlapping territories and intertwined histories. He is a survivor, as are the entire diaspora who are the symbolic children of the ancestral African man. Greer will have to build his hybrid identity, finding where exactly he fits, because he is, to echo Phillips’s own words, both “of, and not of ” this place (qtd. in McLeod 245).
When Joyce confesses to the reader that she had burnt all her photos of Travis, this should be understood as a deliberate act of forgetting, albeit one she later regrets. The echoes with the history of slavery and the displacement and marginalisation of so many peoples are clear. This deliberate act of forgetting or minimising of the history of slavery by the British, is part of the official narrative of the country’s history. Like her mother retreating into the church in her grief, Joyce retreats into the security of the normative narrative. In her earlier boldness, Joyce symbolises the promise, to the periphery, of acceptance by Britain, yet in her failure, she represents the hypocrisy of the British colonial discourse. The discursive racial narratives of both the US and UK have common origins. For white Americans, the descendants of slaves stare them in the face. The African diaspora has been ever present, almost from the first days of the colonial period. For the British, the connection is less visible, less obvious; these same descendants of slavery remained in the peripheries of the empire, in the Caribbean and elsewhere, out of sight and out of mind, below the consciousness of the general British populace. The arrival of Greer on Joyce’s doorstep signifies change: the Rubicon remains crossed, despite Joyce’s personal retreat. Greer’s attempt to find his mother is him seeking his birth family, his roots, which are partly here in England. Greer and Travis are reminders to the British people of an issue that has not been faced up to let alone resolved. Greer might have been pushed away, displaced to the margins by Joyce and by officialdom, but she is his mother, as Britain is the mother to the
28 trader, Captain Hamilton, make Britain so. That Hamilton’s Janus-faced character, loving to his wife and cruel to slaves and crewmen alike, is reflected in the
contradictions of Britain, is a point made clear by Phillips. That Hamilton is father to these contradictions as well as to the African diaspora is also clear. This inconvenient history is not to be buried.
Conclusion
In Crossing the River, Caryl Phillips writes back against the centre to tell the stories of the marginalised. In the chapter “Somewhere in England” he brings to the fore the stories of wartime mixed-race relationships and of the so-called ‘brown babies’. Unlike in the United States, in the United Kingdom, needing to keep peace and harmony in what had become a largely coloured empire, a formal colour bar was not enacted. However, beneath the politeness and gratefulness for aid in a time of war, those same objections, to racial mixing and marriage between the races, existed. Through the displacement of the African American GIs into a milieu where the harsh realities of racial separateness are not as obvious as in their homeland, and where, on the surface at least, they were treated as people, indeed, in many ways as equals, new possibilities suggested themselves. The similar displacement of an unconventional and bold woman, possessed of imagination, one who can see through the falseness of the government discourses of racial superiority and British exceptionalism, and who thus when she sees a man possessing a kindness and authenticity lacking in the men she had known
hitherto, does not permit his skin colour or nationality to be a barrier, allowing a
29 the colonial discourse that permitted this, help her boldness. However, with her growing awareness of these matters, and the social ostracization she faces, as well as the
disapproval from officialdom, she lacks the strength and endurance to raise Greer by herself once Travis is killed. It is the Government’s attempt to project a view of a benevolent empire, and of portraying itself as being a superior civilisation than America, plus the basic humanity shown by the British people to African Americans, that lead to fewer obvious obstacles to the relationship being able to happen. Yet, the state and the people work to undermine the inter-racial relationship. Officialdom in the form of “the lady with the blue coat” steps in to take Greer off Joyce’s hands and hide him away, out of sight. In a final act of disremembering, of displacing his memory, as the British have similarly disremembered the cruelties of slavery and their part in them, Joyce burns her photos of Travis.
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