Lots of good bits in this feature on Caryl Phillips.
Phillips, 66, knew the loose ends demanded a novel “because the engine room for fiction, for me, is character. If I hear a character’s voice or if I can imagine what anxieties a character might have, then I figure I’m dealing with fiction. A piece of non-fiction can take a walk around a subject. But as soon as you start to do a deep dive, what I think of as pressing the down button on the lift, it becomes fiction.”
“The hardest thing about writing a novel isn’t telling the story; it’s how you tell it,” he adds. “Each story demands a different structure. There’s obviously some similarity, like with an architect. An architect doesn’t build the same building twice, but when you’ve seen enough of their buildings, you’re able to say, ‘I think it was built by that person’. Which is no bad thing.”
James Baldwin — who Phillips remembers as an “open, friendly, incredibly generous” mentor (the pair met in 1983 when the BBC expressed interest in a programme on Baldwin that later went out on Radio 4) — observed that “people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them”.
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“Nobody in Oxford understood my story: not just as somebody whose parents migrated, but as a northerner,” he reflects. “I used to take the train and come down here and in my mind try to stitch together the world I was living in with this world I thought I was about to graduate into, and I couldn’t see a bridge or a tunnel that connected them,”
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Debates about which books should be on the curriculum have intensified since Phillips joined Yale, where he stresses to students that “reading is an act of empathy”. Dismissing claims that writers cannot voice the experiences of people of different identities, Phillips admits he can be “blunt” with young people who tell him they are unsure if they are allowed to tell certain stories.
“Your job as a writer is to imagine yourself into the lives of people who are not you . . . and, that way, provide a gateway for readers to also imagine themselves into the lives of others so that we can build up a community of shared understanding.’”