Book Review: Colour Me English by Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips’ latest book is a collection of essays, (Colour Me English) many of which were published in The Guardian during the early 2000s, although the oldest entry was written long before that in 1995. Phillips was born in St Kitts and arrived in England four months old, he says, ‘as hand luggage’ when his parents came to Leeds in the late 1950s.

The essays all explore identity and belonging to a great or lesser degree, often the Black British experience, but Phillips also considers what it means to be American, based upon his own decision to move there. He’s currently professor at Yale University and a visiting professor at Columbia University. This week he began the BBC’s 9/11 Letters series on Radio Four, in which he described seeing the first plane hit the tower. This talk on the radio is the basis of the essay Ground Zero. Information here  

Many of the essays feel like lectures (the kind that you would never want to miss!) or even as though you are beside Phillips while he is doing his research. I found these really informative as they give great insight into the work of other writers. These other writers include, Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, ER Braithwaite, Joseph Conrad, Colin MacInnes, Angela Carter, and Claude McKay, a Jamaican-American Harlem Renaissance writer and poet. I had not heard of before. McKay's Wikipeda profile says that he was (in 1920) the first black journalist in the England.

Phillips’ enthusiasm for writing and writers shine through, his essay Shusaku Endo: Confession of a True Believer is a fan’s tribute to a Japanese author that continues to inspire him every time he starts a new book of his own.  I particularly enjoyed the review of Coloured People where he considers Henry Louis Gates’ 1994 bestselling memoir, he sets outs its faults, but nonetheless charts its success as “…one that offers the black intellectual a way to reclaim the romance of his past without giving up the perks of his present.”

Another of Gates’ work is also reviewed in the essay Literature: The New Jazz?  Essentially Phillips takes apart the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and by way of music (‘… music is the art form which has benefited most from African American genius in the twentieth century’), he links it to the fact that Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize for Literature (the first African American to be awarded the Nobel) could only have been for a book entitled Jazz. Phillips goes on to state that literature will be the African American art form of the twenty-first century. One tip though, if Terry McMillan is your heroine, you might want to avoid this particular essay.

I really loved the essays where Phillips writes about growing up in Leeds and his relationship with his parents. It is important to have the non-London black experience shared. Rude I am in my speech takes you from Othello’s isolation in Venice to explore the differences between the first generation and second generation West Indian in the UK, highlighting degrees of belonging. As with his life story A Life in Ten Chapters, I winced with recognition of similar experiences.

My favourite piece of Phillips’ writing is the tribute/obituary to Luther Vandross. Read this essay and then go the Guardian website (or a national newspaper of your choice) and put in Luther Vandross. Then read the Phillips piece again. How can it be that this well-loved and multi-million selling composer and singer’s actual music had been so rarely reviewed during his lifetime. Reader, I would have bought this book for this essay alone.

It is always a particular pleasure to celebrate the work of Phillips, since as a half-Kittian myself, he’s the only writer that I know of from there. (In fact, my Phillips relatives say that we are related – who knows.) Even with that allegiance and that the most recent essay was completed as long ago as 2008, I still do think it wonderful to have these pieces all in one place. Phillips describes Vandross as ‘a master craftsman.’ I say, it takes one to know one.

Caryl Phillips latest piece for The Guardian is a book review in today’s (10 September 2011) paper: book review.