Caryl Phillips Critical Essay | Critical Review by Barbara Smith

SOURCE: "The Past Has Fled," in New York Times Book Review, September 24, 1989, p. 7.

In the following review, Smith laments the lack of "a vision of transformation" in Higher Ground.

Caryl Phillips's novel Higher Ground recounts a tragically familiar tale three times over. Through his subtle portraits of an African go-between for British slave traders in the 1080's, an African-American prisoner during the late 1960's and a Jewish woman from Poland exiled in London following World War II, Mr. Phillips—the author of The European Tribe and two previous novels—creates a complex chronicle of oppression. The focus is not on the politics of those who have used racial, religious and sexual differences as a rationale for hatred and injustice, but instead upon the internal impact of oppression, especially its numbing effect on the individual spirit.

The unnamed narrator of the novel's first section, "Heartland," has been taught English in...
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