From Mary Prince to Joan Riley: Women Writers and the ‘Casual Cruelty’ of a West Indian Childhood

Abstract

In this observation from a recent interview, a self-reflexive Caryl Phillips explains how childhood trauma defines him as a postcolonial writer. The circumstances of his ‘massively dysfunctional and traumatic’ childhood were shared by many of his generation of children of West Indian immigrants who came over to England in the 1950s. This statement from Phillips is part of the continuum of writing about childhood trauma which both men and women have articulated. When writing about his traumatic childhood experience in an essay from Colour Me English (2011), Phillips employs the distancing effect of a third-person narrator:

He is only ten years old when his father decides that it is fine to leave him all alone in his spartan flat while he goes to work the night shift in the local factory. There is no television. No radio. Nothing to seize his attention beyond the few soccer magazines that the son has brought with him from his mother’s house. Then, late at night, alone in the huge double bed, he leans over and he begins to read the book. […] The ten year old boy reads John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and, alone in his father’s bed, he tries hard not to be afraid. That night he leaves the lights on, and in the morning he is still awake as his exhausted father slides into bed next to him.²

Objectively, my childhood was massively dysfunctional and traumatic. I have no happy memories of it. But I never felt deprived; I played with the cards I was dealt.

(Caryl Phillips)¹