Color Me English

March 7, 2011
In these nearly 40 essays on migration, literature, and politics, novelist Phillips (A Distant Shore) revisits his youth in Leeds, recalls visits with other writers (e.g., Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin), recollects travels in disparate lands (Israel, France, Sierra Leone, Belgium), and meditates on the perspectives of the displaced—exiles, refugees, immigrants. He reassesses writers as diverse as Lafcadio Hearn, Claude McKay, and Shusaku Endo, along with a number of British writers. While most essays are compelling, two groupings stand out: "Beginners" for what it shares about Phillips's writing process, and "Homeland Security," the book's most memorable section, which moves from a personal and very moving account of September 11 to a blistering account of the "discriminatory legislation enacted in wake" and the "changes in the national mood" that threaten American pluralism. All of the essays, regardless of topic, reflect upon Phillips's "triple heritage"—"British, African diasporan, Caribbean"—and brim with curiosity and cosmopolitanism.

April 15, 2011

A collection of essays on the themes of race, the African diaspora, otherness and identity, from a Caribbean-born, British-raised, and United States–based writer with a sharp eye for the tensions of modern society.

In what could be seen as a sequel to A New World Order: Essays (2001), Phillips, who is better known as a novelist (In the Falling Snow, 2009, etc.), again explores issues of migration and shares his insights into writers and their role in shaping their world. Written over nearly two decades and seemingly for a variety of publications, these highly personal musings open with Phillips's childhood in Leeds, where for a time he was the only black child in his school. For a Muslim newcomer, Ali, the difference was culture and religion. Though Phillips found he was "being coloured English," he saw that Ali remained an outsider. "Distant Shores" contains six pieces on his perceptions and experiences in both Europe and Africa. Europe, he writes, is no longer white and no longer Judeo-Christian, and it never will be again. However, with the help of literature as a bulwark against intolerance, societies can make the necessary transition and transform themselves. The longest section, titled "Outside In," looks at writers in exile—e.g., James Baldwin in France, Ha Jin in the United States and Chinua Achebe in Canada. The four essays in "Homeland Security," written between 2001 and 2006, show Phillips' disappointment over the failure of America to live up to its image as a land of freedom and equality, but also his hope that storytelling will restore the spirit of the country. Profiles, movie and book reviews and autobiographical and journalistic sketches complete the collection.

Although linked by the author's sense of history and his awareness of being an outsider, these pieces seem uncomfortable together, as though forced to migrate from earlier settings to this new home.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011
In his most personal book, an arresting collection of supple essays political, critical, and personal, internationally renowned novelist Phillips (Foreigners, 2007; In the Falling Snow, 2009) elucidates the significance of literature as a force for change. Ferried away from St. Kitts to England as a baby, Phillips grew up in dismal Leeds, where, until his younger brothers caught up to him, he was the only black student in his high school. Reading was his refuge from racism overt and insidious, and as he tells the story of his call to writing with finesse and wider purpose, Phillips shares his conviction of the moral capacity of literature to wrench us out of our ideological burrows. Yet Phillips is concerned about the state of the art of storytelling as fiction becomes ever more packaged and obedient in the corporatized twenty-first century. In contrast, he reflects on the valor and intensity of Anne Frank, James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, and Ha Jin. Musings on world travel, Luther Vandross, film, and how his own novels have been born of water, blood, and fire reach critical mass in this bracing and affecting volume. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Phillips stature of a writer of artistic excellence who speaks to such universal matters as immigration and identity makes this a key acquisition.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)