Caryl Phillips Critical Essay | Critical Review by Farah Jasmine Griffin

SOURCE: A review of Crossing the River, in Boston Review, Vol. XIX, Nos. 3-4, June-September, 1994, pp. 45-46.

In the following review, Griffin gives a favorable assessment of Crossing the River, concluding that "the book's final pages [are surely among the most powerful and beautiful pages written in contemporary literature."]

Caryl Phillips's stunning novel [Crossing the River] begins in a painful act of abandonment: the anonymous narrator, a father on West Africa's Pagan Coast, sells his three children into slavery. Through this desperate act, he unwittingly initiates a "many-tongued … chorus of common memory" that extends from the Middle Passage, through Liberia, across the United States to Colorado, and to World War II Britain. The voices that comprise this chorus bear eloquent witness to the disruption, displacement, and loss of Diaspora—and to the common humanity of the enslaved, the enslavers, and their common descendants.

James Hamilton, slave trader and captain...
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