Lives Fractured: Re/Naming and Identity in the Writing of Caryl Phillips

The novels of Caryl Phillips often deal with the experiences and identities of those displaced and marginalized by society. Caryl Phillips is well known for employing different textual strategies such as spatiotemporal fragmentation, intertextuality, naming, and point of view shifts in order to portray the struggles and suffering of his characters. The aim of this article is to examine how Phillips uses naming of his characters to depict the effects exile, slavery and other forms of oppression may have on their lives and identities. In order to accomplish this, different characters from Phillips’s novels Cambridge (1991), The Nature of Blood (1997), Crossing the River (1993) and Higher Ground (1989) will be discussed. The analysis of the characters will draw upon three concepts of naming first proposed by Bénédicte Ledent (2002): anonymity, (re)naming and name alteration.