Mind the Gaps: Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow (2009) and the generational Approach to the Black Diaspora

Résumé 0

In spite of the theoretical success of the notions of migration, diaspora and globalization, it is not always easy in practice to clearly delineate the boundaries between these concepts. In this essay, I argue-through a reading of Caryl Phillips’s latest novel In the Falling Snow (2009)-that fiction might be a useful tool to help us explore the articulations between these three terms and take a fresh look at them. Phillips’s book examines the lives and the degree of belonging of three generations of black men of Caribbean descent living in Britain, of three individuals whose condition might be respectively labelled as migrant, diasporic and global. Throughout the novel, Phillips draws the reader’s attention to the divides between the different age groups and how their diverging experiences shape their perception of their own identity. At the same time, however, he suggests commonalities between the three men, who all partake of a culture of displacement in which race, among other factors, still plays a major role. In other words, by asking us to ’mind the gaps’ between his three protagonists, Phillips validates their specificities and endorses the changes that have affected the lives of displaced individuals of Afro-Caribbean descent over several decades; simultaneously, he also calls these generational divergences into question by hinting at a form of existential continuity between his characters, and as a consequence between the labels that might be used to describe their situations.