The Giving Up of Greer: The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Janus-Faced Empire - DIVA

FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND BUSINESS STUDIES
               Department of Humanities

       The Giving Up of Greer:
The Hypocrisy at the Heart of the Janus-
            Faced Empire

   Writing Back Against the British Imperial Discourse

                      David Woods

                            2021

              Student thesis, Bachelor degree, 15 HE
                              English

                            ENG804

                   Supervisor: Marko Modiano
                    Examiner: Iulian Cananau

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to examine the tension at the heart of the British colonial

discourse as it affects the relationship of Travis and Joyce in the chapter “Somewhere in

England”, in Caryl Phillips’s 1993 novel, Crossing the River. The thesis of the essay is

that the colonial discourse of the British insists on a racial signifier in the imagined

community of the British, and thus resists the idea that a person can be both black and

British. The postcolonial analysis shows that it is Joyce’s rejection of the national

discourse along with the displacement of Travis from a segregated America into a

superficially kinder environment that allows their relationship to develop. Yet, along

with Travis’s death, the contradictions and hypocrisy of the colonial discourse serve to

undermine Joyce’s lack of racial prejudice and contribute to her giving up her baby at

the end of the war.

Table of Contents

Introduction .....................................................................................................................2

Theoretical Framework ..................................................................................................3

   Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory .................................................................3

  Historical and Social Context .........................................................................................9

Discussion .......................................................................................................................14

   A Postcolonial Analysis of the Narrative Structure .....................................................14

   Subversion of the British War Narrative .....................................................................15

   Crossing the Racial Divide ..........................................................................................20

   Joyce’s Submission to Official and Societal Racial Prejudice ...................................23

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................28

Works Cited ...................................................................................................................31

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Introduction

        England’s expansion overseas, first in Ireland and then extending to dominions

around the world necessitated the formation of a national discourse of English, later

British exceptionalism. This constructed image of superiority naturally required the

othering of other societies and cultures, which were rendered as inferior and even

disposable. This national discourse, which merged separate concepts such as race,

ethnicity, and nationality, affected Britons and colonial subjects of every creed and

colour. Part of the postcolonial writers’ mission is to write back against this narrative,

bringing into focus the displaced and marginalised peoples of the empire. This essay

will begin by discussing the major strands of postcolonial theory pertaining to the

chapter “Somewhere in England”, namely: discourse, displacement, marginalisation,

diaspora and identity, before going on to discuss the documented political and social

history of the period of the chapter to show the historical background to the events of

the chapter. These aspects of postcolonial theory and of the historical context will then

be discussed in relation to the chapter. Thus, the way that Caryl Phillips brings to the

fore a forgotten and marginalised event in British history, that of the so-called ‘brown

babies’, using Joyce’s narrative to write back, subverting the national discourse and

exposing the contradictions at its heart, will be demonstrated. The relationship between

Travis and Joyce will be examined to identify the reasons for it being possible, and to

show that the difficulties they face in their relationship are linked to the power of this

national discourse, which projects an image of a superior civilisation, and just overlord

to its mainly non-white colonial subjects, whilst simultaneously maintaining an overt

assumption of white British hegemony. The essay will conclude by demonstrating the

truth of its thesis, that despite the kinder treatment of the African American GIs by the

British populace, the idea of racial mixing is an uncomfortable one for them and it is
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because Travis and Joyce’s mixed-raced relationship threatens the national discourse of

racial hegemony, of a national identity signified by ethnicity and race, that it is resisted

by populace and officialdom alike and is the major reason for Joyce giving up her baby,

Greer. This Janus-faced nature of the British Empire, both allowing the conditions for

the relationship to develop and then rejecting the resulting progeny, is thus made

evident.

                                  Theoretical Framework:

                       Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory

        Postcolonial theory is a complex subject dealing with issues relating to

colonialism and its aftermath. It is broad ranging and has much in common with other

types of theory relating to oppression, such as Feminism and Marxism, and includes

post-structuralist elements such as decentring, and psychoanalytical aspects revolving

around identity and the self. Postcolonial theory works to show how the power relations

between the coloniser and the colonised lead to the construction of racially based

identities. A central tenet of western imperial nations in justifying their right to rule

other peoples was to portray them as somehow less advanced, less civilised, and

culturally backward, thus needing the rule of white Europeans to become civilised.

According to theorist Homi K. Bhabha “[t]he objective of colonial discourse is to

construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin,

in order to justify conquest and establish systems of administration and instruction”

(qtd. in McLeod 63). These “systems of administration and instruction” would also

serve to obfuscate the harsh realities of, and attempt to provide a veneer of justification

for, the exploitation of natural resources that lay at the core of the imperial mission.

                                                                                               3

In a similar way, the stereotype of “the Negro’s animality” (McLeod 65) had

earlier served to justify the cruelties of slavery. Although Edward Said was talking

about Asian and Islamic cultures when writing, his statements referring to Orientals are

applicable to any non-western culture. The Oriental was set up in opposition to what

were thought of as natural European traits: “The Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen),

childlike, ‘different’; thus, the European is rational, virtuous, mature, ‘normal’”

(Orientalism 40). This justified, in Europeans’ eyes, their right to dominate the Oriental,

the ‘Other’. In The Wretched of the Earth, an earlier work, Frantz Fanon writes that,

“[t]he colonial world is a world divided into compartments […] a world cut in two. The

dividing line, the frontiers are shown by barracks and police stations” (29). These

compartments, he insists, “were inhabited by two different species”, explaining the stark

differences in the lives of these two different “species” (30). Fanon was talking

explicitly about the colonial experience in the French colonies, particularly Algeria.

However, this separation, this “world cut into two … inhabited by two different

species” not only described the world of the European colonies, it also described

regions of the United States. In the southern states, the ‘two different species’, the white

American and the African American, were increasingly segregated with African

Americans marginalised as the so-called Jim Crow laws whittled away at the rights

gained in the aftermath of the American Civil War and the subsequent emancipation of

the slave population. This segregation extended even to laws against sexual relations or

marriage between the races, termed miscegenation.

        This discourse, or narrative, of cultural and racial differences did not even have

to be explicitly taught, as it would be implicitly understood. Trinidadian writer Sam

Selvon makes this clear in describing his “feelings of fury” as a child when observing a

Trinidadian Indian with a white assistant (qtd. in McLeod 20). Selvon relates that he

had never explicitly been taught a racial ranking system and believed this showed how
                                                                                             4

values could be implicitly understood, or internalised by the colonised, and need not be

expressly taught by the colonisers, a process termed “colonising the mind” in McLeod

(20). Indeed, the converse should also be understood, that the mind of the coloniser has

been colonised with the same value system. Thus, these colonial discourses of racial

superiority and inferiority, of binary oppositions like good and evil aligned with racial

types, like white and black, are internalised by both coloniser and colonised. Boundaries

can be created even without laws.

        One way of challenging these discourses of superiority and inferiority is for

postcolonial writers to ‘write back’ to the so-called metropolitan centre, the seat of

empire, from their marginal positions in the periphery, generally the colonies

themselves, though increasingly from diasporic communities within Europe itself. As

Helen Tiffin suggests, “The rereading and rewriting of the European historical and

fictional record” (qtd. in Tyson 429), is a way to subvert colonialist narratives. In

canonical texts this can be achieved through identifying aspects of colonialism within or

else downplayed or omitted, as with Said’s study of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.

Alternatively, by bringing the decentred subject to the centre, a post-structuralist

technique, the stories of the marginalised, those hidden or side-lined, can be told.

Furthermore, stressing parts of the historical record conveniently and deliberately

forgotten or minimised, reminding the reader and challenging the national historical

discourse and mythmaking, is a central aim. Feminist perspectives may also be

highlighted, and parallels drawn between the marginalisation of women and the

colonised, and the violence meted out to both women and colonised peoples. The

concept of “double colonisation” coined by Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford

(McLeod 201) highlights the lot of the colonised woman, subject to two types of

oppression simultaneously, both racial and patriarchal.

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According to Barry, there are three stages in this writing back, the adopt, adapt

and adept phases. The adopt phase is the initial phase, whereby a writer adopts the

existing form of literature as used by the colonising culture, which is stressed by the

metropolitan centre to be universal and thus the only correct form and writes in these

existing genres. The adapt phase then is when a writer uses this form and adapts it to

start writing about specifically African (or Asian etc.) concerns and matters, rather than

‘universal’ ones with their implication, when relating to the British empire, of British

and white Christian norms. Finally, the adept phase is when the colonial writer

reimagines the form in “a declaration of cultural independence” (Barry 198). However,

this is also an admittance of cross-cultural interactions, an alternative to a nativist

approach, such as rejecting the language of the coloniser, as famously done by Ngugi

wa Thiong’o, who switched from writing in English back to his native Gikuyu for that

reason. However, for Caribbean and British writers, for example, unlike African ones,

rejecting the language of the coloniser is not a practical choice, their displacement from

their distant ancestral African and Carib cultures and languages being too great. This

cross-cultural interaction of the adept stage is key to several aspects of postcolonial

theory, for example hybrid identities, and, in Edward Said’s expression, “intertwined

histories”, the idea that the histories of the coloniser and colonised are interlinked

(Culture and Imperialism 1).

        Said used the expression “Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories” as the

title of Culture and Imperialism’s first chapter (1) to emphasise that, as a result of

colonialism, the coloniser and the colonised each influenced the other, quoting C.L.R

James as saying that “Beethoven belongs as much to West Indians as he does to

Germans, since his music is now part of the human heritage” (Culture and Imperialism

xxxi). Said argued that “[p]artly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one

another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily
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differentiated, and unmonolithic” (xxxii). In western countries, such as the United

States that he was invoking, this heterogenous cultural history competes with a “unitary

cultural identity”, inherited from the metropolitan centre of the imperial entity, that

seeks to “celebrate the uniqueness of their tradition (usually and invidiously at the

expense of others)” (xxxii). The metropolitan centre of the imperial power imposes and

continues to try to impose this unitary discourse of superiority on a nation and its

people, no matter their individual backgrounds and histories. In western countries,

immigration on a significant scale has occurred with people moving from the former

colonies. These people, who not only have a different identity, with differing values and

cultures, but who also differ physically from the dominant native people, suffer from the

discourse imposed upon them.

        Modern theories of diaspora tend to de-emphasise the binary oppositions

inherent in early resistance to this discourse, which by creating essentialised black

identities, implied an acceptance of racial difference. In the foreword to Stuart Hall’s

The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Henry Louis Gates Jr. relates how Hall

was troubled by this and wanted to find a “more just, more reliable signifier of cultural

difference” (Hall xii). Science has long since debunked the idea that the concept of race

is anything but a social construct, consigning to history the Victorian pseudoscience that

decreed a racial hierarchy of civilisation. Yet, as Hall recognised, people of colour are

visible, and the old stereotypes are persistent and grounded in “discourses of difference”

(51). The differences, as W.E.B. Dubois explained may be “subtle, delicate and elusive”

(qtd. in Hall 33) but they nevertheless result in people being separated into groups, with

decisive relations of power between them. The persistence of stereotypes may in part be

due to how deeply entrenched and ancient this discourse of difference is: “Are these true

men? Or are they born of another creation?” asked Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in his

debate with Bartolomé de Las Casas in front of the Holy Roman Emperor in 1550 (qtd.
                                                                                            7

in Hall 54). In the initial phase of European expansion, this was the question being

posed, and it seems no coincidence that slavery in the colonies originated in these pre-

Enlightenment times. The Enlightenment changed this “discursive mark of difference”

from “between two mutually exclusive species” to “differential levels and grades of

‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ within one system” (Hall 54-5). Thus, theorists looked to

new ideas of identity, to try to get past these binary oppositions of race-based

essentialism that had been, and still are, so destructive.

        Modern theories of postcolonial identity tend to emphasise complex hybrid and

fluid identities, drawn from both the dominant culture and the pluralistic diasporic

cultures. Whilst governments use terms like multiculturalism to signal tolerance of

difference, the reality is that these communities, composed of various diaspora, suffer

disproportionate levels of poverty, health concerns and discrimination. There are

boundaries in place, hidden boundaries. Bhabha fears that the term “cultural diversity”

gives the false impression that “cultures are holistic, separated and static” and states

that, instead, “porous borders” exist between cultures and that interactions between

them constitute a “political act” with culture being “interactive” (qtd. in McLeod 263).

For him, the “cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world” is key (qtd. in

McLeod 264). This is a rejection of purity in identity for both the coloniser and

colonised. From a more material perspective, Paul Gilroy’s writing emphasises how

much of the work of “black radical thinkers […] was bound up and contributed to the

development of Western modernity” claiming that this “makes a nonsense, both of the

sense of the West as ethnically and racially homogenous, and of ideas concerning an

essentialised common ‘black’ community separated from Western influence: black

people have been at the heart of Western modernity since its inception” (McLeod 265).

Once contact had been made, even if the interactions were often of an unequal nature,

the contributions made by the African diaspora to the Western world and modernity
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have been significant and, with immigration, growing. The journeys or “crossings” from

Africa to the Americas as slaves, back to Africa in new colonies of repatriation such as

Liberia and Sierra Leone, from the Americas to Britain, from Africa to Britain, resulted

in considerable displacement of peoples from their native lands and a large and

widespread diaspora, and are important for Gilroy who posits that the “transnational

quality of black history and experience” led to “myriad ways of thinking” (265). This

works in opposition to the idea of one essentialist black culture and stresses the

transnational and the intercultural, with cultures cross-fertilising each other, showing

the borders between them to be permeable. This concept of transnational “routes”, with

its fluid and hybrid identities, by acting against the “roots” of a racial, essentialist and

homogenous identity, subverts the colonial discourse of fixed identities with

uncrossable boundaries between them.

                               Historical and Social Context

        Four days after the events of Pearl Harbor on 7th December 1941, Adolf Hitler

declared war on the United States, bringing the US into the European theatre, much to

the relief of both the British government, which had long been working for this aim, and

the British people. When the US army began to arrive in 1942, approximately ten per

cent of the troops were African American, which caused the British government

considerable concern because, owing to the southern states of the United States being

segregated along racial lines, the US Army was also segregated, with African American

units officered by white Americans. The British government’s concern was due to the

awareness of events in the aftermath of World War I, when competition for scarce jobs

and “opposition to inter-racial relationships and marriages” had led to race-riots and

racial murders, leading in turn, as news reached the colonies, to resentment and
                                                                                               9

disturbances there (Olusoga 459). Thus, there was a balance to be kept, between the

need to accommodate their American ally’s segregated army and the need to maintain

good relations with colonies populated by peoples of different races, by not only

projecting an image of a benevolent and paternalistic empire, but also by living up to

that image.

        In addition to this dilemma, there were the significant and inherent

contradictions at the heart of the empire. On the one hand was the belief, propagated by

decades of colonial propaganda, in the superiority of the white Briton: culture, science,

industrial power, and military success were linked by pseudo-science to racial and

cultural characteristics. Indeed, Stuart Hall’s “sliding signifiers” describe the idea that a

concept such as ethnicity, which concerns shared cultural aspects such as language and

traditions, “constantly slides – especially through common sense conceptions of kinship

– towards a transcultural and even transcendental fix in common blood, inheritance, and

ancestry” (Hall 108), creating a link between the separate concepts of nation, ethnicity,

and race. On the other hand, to maintain that very same empire, populated largely by

people widely thought to be racially inferior, the British government could not be seen

to discriminate against those same people too obviously. The colonial narrative was of a

civilising mission, trying to raise colonial peoples to a higher level, with British

civilisation as its shining example. In Beyond a Boundary, C.L.R. James describes how

his “[school]masters, curriculum, our code of morals, everything began from the basis

that Britain was the source of all light and leading, and our business was to admire,

wonder, imitate, learn; our criterion of success was to have succeeded in approaching

that distant ideal – to attain it was, of course, impossible” (39). The problem, as James

writes, is that this “distant ideal”, implying the possibility of equality, could never be

attained.

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Until the idea of innate British superiority, connected to race, ethnicity, and

nation, could be erased, there would always be a barrier, however implicit. Hence, for

British authorities this was a delicate issue, and an impossible conundrum: how was it

possible to head up a multi-racial empire with justice and at the same time hold on to

the deeply ingrained belief that the white man was superior, while endeavouring to keep

the most explicit signs of this belief obscured? How was it possible to rule the colonised

justly without revealing the deeply discriminatory beliefs at the heart of the imperial

mission? British servicemen in the Second World War included non-white volunteers

from colonies in the West Indies, the Americas, Africa and Asia, and this time, in an

advance from the First World War, some, especially those from the Caribbean, were in

crucial combat roles in Britain itself. Arguably, progress for colonised peoples was

being made, albeit from a low starting point. Thus, the arrival of a racially segregated

army resulted in considerable anxiety for the British authorities since racial segregation

being enforced on the streets of Britain was likely to cause discontent and social unrest,

both in Britain and in the colonies. The British government could not “oppose

segregation openly” for fear of offending its ally, but nor did it wish to “disaffect”

volunteers from the Caribbean (Bland 7); in fact, there was “considerable tension …

between the Colonial Office and other departments” on this question (Bland 8).

        However, whilst many were unhappy about American segregation, British views

on inter-racial relationships in general, both in government, and among the public, were

much closer to their American counterparts. Government officials, including Herbert

Morrison worried about “the procreation of half-caste children” and took steps to

minimise that prospect (Olusoga 484). Women found they could be prosecuted “for

trespass or loitering” under The Defence of the Realm Act “if found with Black GIs on

military premises” (Bland 6), and pamphlets produced for British service personnel

discouraged such relations and stated in stark, and as Olusoga himself notes, social-
                                                                                           11

Darwinian terms, that: “it was fairly obvious that in our present society such [racially

mixed] unions are not desirable, since the children resulting from them are neither one

thing nor the other and are thus badly handicapped in the struggle for life” (484). Thus,

partial but real legal boundaries were put in place by government and official advice

that discouraged miscegenation was dispensed.

       In the event, the black American GIs proved to be a good deal more popular

with the British populace than their white compatriots, who, by their behaviour, often

managed to rub their hosts up the wrong way. The black servicemen were considered

quiet, polite, smart dressers, and moreover did not complain about “the lack of modern

conveniences” and wartime privation in Britain (Bland 4). Nevertheless, official reports

noted “a tendency [for the public] to regard the negroes as childish, happy, naïve

fellows”, showing that dated negative stereotypes persisted among Britons, though there

was a common belief that “discrimination is undemocratic, particularly when black and

white are both fighting for democracy” (4). Indeed, the behaviour of the white GIs

towards their black countrymen, with white GIs forcefully intervening to separate black

soldiers from white women, horrified many Britons and hostile crowds could form,

siding with the black soldiers. The famous pre-war West Indian cricketer, Learie

Constantine, later Britain’s first black peer, relates in his book, Colour Bar, how he

himself experienced the way the presence of white American officers could influence

the behaviour of hoteliers, finding his booking affected despite having specifically

checked in advance whether his colour would be a problem. Ultimately, to try to

minimise incidents of this sort, a subtler system of segregation was implemented by the

US Army using rotational passes: blacks one day, whites another.

       Many Britons, whilst determined to be hospitable to the black GIs, were

nevertheless “often hostile to inter-racial sex and marriage”, with a Home Intelligence

Report of August 1942 mentioning “adverse comment […for] girls who ‘walk out’ with
                                                                                12

coloured troops” (Bland 5). Indeed, women in such relationships also found themselves

judged harshly, considered “loose women” and “unpatriotic” (11). This deeper hostility

showed itself more clearly in the aftermath of the war, when: “many such children were

abandoned by their mothers, who had themselves been ostracised by their communities

and even families. Most were sent to children’s homes, from which very few were

successfully placed for adoption.” (Olusoga 484-5). Whilst some plans were put in

place to have the children adopted by their fathers in the US, only very few got there.

British politicians, rather than seeing to the children’s welfare, seemed more concerned

about how sending away hundreds of mixed-race children, instead of educating and

looking after them at home, would look to people in the colonies.

        The existence of these children created a further problem: could mixed-race

offspring be seen as British? They represented a challenge to national and racial

boundaries and the neat polarity between the white British and the non-white colonized

racial ‘Other’, to British identity itself. Although the mothers were urged by the

government to keep their babies, no money was provided to help them, and many

children were abandoned to welfare organisations. It is thought that approximately

seven hundred and seventy-five so-called “brown babies” were given up to welfare

organisations, and, according to Bland, it is likely that a similar number remained with

their mothers (19). Bland quotes the Liverpool University Settlement for declaring that

“mixed parentage” was considered a “handicap comparable to physical deformity” (16).

The hypocrisy was clear: the British had liked to compare their own tolerance

favourably with that of the United States, whose racism was rooted in the history of

slavery, whilst ignoring the fact that their own prejudices, deriving from imperialism as

well as a nearly forgotten history of slavery, meant that their great empire was, in effect,

and underneath a friendlier, more tolerant surface, one great colour bar with racist

attitudes at its heart.
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Discussion:

                   A Postcolonial Analysis of the Narrative Structure

        Chinua Achebe wrote that, “The writer cannot expect to be excused from the

task of re-education and regeneration that must be done” (Ashcroft et al 125). In

Crossing the River, Phillips does just that: he educates his readers. All four of the

chapters tell of different stages in the history of the African diaspora: the links between

the Atlantic crossing, slavery in the American colonies, and after independence, the

southern states of the United States, the abolitionist movement ‘returning’ freed US

slaves to Liberia, the supposedly free African Americans living as second-class citizens

in the segregated southern states. These four chapters are sandwiched within a frame

narrative which consists of a short prologue describing an African father selling his

children, two boys and a girl, to a slaver, Captain James Hamilton, albeit with regret and

a heavy heart. The stories are not in chronological order, with the story of Captain

Hamilton displaced from its logical chronological position as the first of the four stories

and placed after the first two and before the ultimate one, “Somewhere in England”.

This has the effect of suggesting that Greer not only has an ancestral African father, but

also an ancestral British one, the slave trader, Captain Hamilton, who by transporting

slaves to America and displacing them from their homelands, is party to the creation of

the diaspora. This emphasis on “intertwined histories” is a marker of the ‘adept’ stage of

postcolonial writing. The book ends with the epilogue where the spiritual African father

talks of his symbolic ‘children’, notably including Joyce, a white woman, and others,

members of the African diaspora not otherwise mentioned in the book, whether famous

black figures, such as Toussaint L’Ouverture, or speeches by them, as with fragments of

Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, or unknown people in
                                                                                         14

miserable situations. Thus, Phillips brings the disparate strands of his tale of the African

diaspora together and into the present day.

        “Somewhere in England” is told in the form of the journal entries of a white

English woman, Joyce. She is a homodiegetic narrator, recording her observations and

feelings of significant events in her life. These journal entries “jump back and forth in

time, as if to indicate that memory is not simply linear but bound up to the emotional

importance surrounding any particular event in a person's life”, a challenge to the linear

idea of time in western modernity (Low 138). This handling of time in this fragmentary

manner is typical of post-modernist novels and appropriate for a post-colonial novel:

time is displaced, much like the people themselves, reinforcing the novel’s message of

various displacements. Travis is not given a voice and the reader is not party to his

thoughts and feelings, only to the words Joyce writes in her journal. This suggests a

reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s answer in the negative to the question posed

in her famous paper: Can the Subaltern Speak? We cannot hear Travis except through

the writings of Joyce, a white woman.

                  Postcolonial Subversion of the Official British War Narrative

        In “Somewhere in England”, Phillips focuses his tale on the arrival of the

descendants of slaves in the United Kingdom, as US soldiers, around two hundred years

after Captain Hamilton’s slaving mission. Thus, Phillips symbolically completes the

Atlantic Triangle of the slave trade, the sudden and unannounced arrival of the GIs in

the unnamed northern village like an irruption from the unconscious of long-repressed

memories, a ghostly reminder of slavery: “Some of the villagers couldn’t contain

themselves. They began to whisper to each other, and they pointed” (Phillips 129). With

this arrival and in the subsequent relationship between Joyce and Travis, Phillips writes
                                                                                        15

to subvert the official wartime narrative, revealing the inconsistencies and racism at the

heart of the British narrative and suggesting their roots in slavery and imperialism.

        This subversion of the narrative is achieved in several ways. Firstly, by inverting

the stereotypes of black and white masculinity, portraying white men such as the

American MPs, Len, and the veteran of Dunkirk who murders his wife, as the violent

and criminal ones and Travis as the gentle one, in a clear reversal of Orientalist

stereotypes. Secondly, Phillips points out the discrepancies between the British

government’s wartime discourse and the reality. For a Briton to write about the Second

World War, for which there are national myths aplenty, and have Joyce see the disparity

between them and the actuality, is a clear undermining of both contemporary

propaganda and national mythmaking. Phillips casts doubt on the unity and the all-in-it-

together myth by having the evacuee children eyed up for cheap labour and then sent

back to their homes because “we’re not in the charity business” (Phillips 140). This

selfishness of taking what they want is reinforced by Len’s farmer friend getting Sandra

pregnant while her husband is away fighting in France and carrying on as usual in the

immediate aftermath of her resulting murder, without apparent qualms. A further

reinforcement is when Len and his friends, having witnessed an air raid over the town,

leave for the pub, laughing, once the bombing is over, seemingly unaffected by the

destruction they have witnessed. The picture painted is not one of a society pulling

together in a united war effort, in contrast to the proclaimed togetherness of the official

narrative that lingers in the collective British memory.

        The propaganda of the official British narrative is clearly portrayed in the

chapter. Joyce notices that the servicemen returning after the evacuation from Dunkirk

look “drawn and defeated …starving…and too ashamed to even look you in the eye”

yet the official line, “all over the papers” emphasises a national, racist superiority:

“[O]ne Englishman is worth two Germans, four French, twenty Arabs, forty Italians,
                                                                                          16

and any number of Indians” (Phillips 164), this civilisational hierarchy being consistent

with British imperial discourses. Instead, Phillips portrays British soldiers as more

effective at murdering their wives than defending the nation. While Len “laps up” (164)

government lines such as “We English lose every battle except the last” (165), lacking

the imagination to see them for the nonsense they are, Joyce does see through them and

swears in her despair. When she goes to the cinema to view the newsreels in the forlorn

hope of catching a glimpse of Travis, she sees that it is apparently only British soldiers

who are fighting the war. Even if American soldiers are shown, they are uniformly

white. In the United Kingdom, in the First World War, it had seemed to be official

policy to “write the role of black sailors and soldiers out of the official memory and

memorialization of the war” (Olusoga 448). In this respect, nothing much has changed

twenty-five years later. Joyce’s noticing the exclusion of the Americans, let alone black

Americans, is just one example of Joyce seeing through official propaganda. Indeed,

this facility, this “getting good at learning the difference between official stories and the

evidence before my eyes” establishes her as a free thinker, making it clearer how she is

able to conceive of a relationship with Travis (Phillips 165). In an understated style,

Phillips weaves his subversive lines, quietly re-writing a period often looked back on

with sepia-tinged pride by Britons.

        A third way of subverting the narrative is achieved through the telling of the

story of Travis and Joyce’s relationship. This exposes the racism at the core of the

British empire, undermining the imperial discourse which portrays the British empire as

just and benevolent. With this relationship, Phillips brings two figures from the margins,

the black man, and the white woman, to the centre of the story. In this way he connects

the racial and gender oppression by the patriarchy, showing, with the beatings of Travis

and Joyce, by MPs and by Len respectively, the spectre of the violence inherent in

imperialism and slavery: women beaten and murdered by their husbands, black men
                                                                                          17

beaten by white men for daring to be with a white woman, husbands and wives

separated, and babies taken away. Slavery is a historical fact de-emphasised in official

British history, with the emancipation of slaves in the British empire overshadowing

and obscuring, in the official line, the savagery of what had gone before.

        It is through the relationship between Joyce and Travis that the depth of the

resistance, in both government and society, to the idea of inter-racial relationships and

marriage is revealed. There are reasons for this relationship developing in the first place.

Firstly, once the troops have disappeared into their barracks after their arrival, the reader

is shown that it is Joyce who is “the object of curiosity. The uninvited outsider” (129).

In this way, Joyce’s status as someone who also does not belong, who is displaced from

her home is made clear. It is not because she is from a higher class; she is ordinary,

referring to herself as a commoner. She is simply from somewhere else, from the town.

To emphasise the point, Phillips even has Joyce wonder whether Len married her to

have someone work in his shop once Sandra had left, as if she were a kind of indentured

labourer. This status as an outsider is key to the relationship with Travis that later

develops; Joyce, too, is not of this place. It shows in the way she refers to villagers and

the US GIs alike as “them” in phrases such as “two of them” for villagers (135) and for

the American soldiers (149), without any previous context, when, for the sake of clarity,

using ‘two of the villagers’ or ‘two of the Americans’ might be preferable. In this way,

Joyce establishes the idea that there are two separate groupings, and that she, belonging

to neither, observes each from a distance, from neutral ground. This idea of a conscious

divide between the two groups, the GIs and the villagers, is made clear: “To most folks’

relief, they appear willing to keep themselves to themselves” (134). In turn, Travis

recognises her difference, and courage: “You don’t seem shy and uneasy like the rest of

them… I guess you don’t act like them in some ways.” (163). She also appreciates that

he notices this, wanting to be seen as distinct from the villagers.
                                                                                          18

Travis, too, is not like his fellow soldiers. This is difference is emphasised in the

narrative by the mention of a gap in his bottom teeth: “It’s unusual … But that was all

right, it was different and I liked that” (162). However, there is more than that. Being

someone who is not impressed by British society, and with her negative experiences of

British men, the idea of someone who is different is attractive to Joyce. Travis dresses

very smartly, and he “doesn’t chew gum when he talks”, which the other GIs do, and

which Joyce feels is “vulgar” (167). He is also thoughtful, bringing her flowers. Travis

also fulfils a psychological need in Joyce. She had lost her father in the Great War, and

this had resulted in her losing her mother too, who retreated into religion. Her mother

had warned her not to marry a soldier, because Joyce “will be left alone”, as her mother

herself had been (133). Yet she ignores her mother’s advice: Travis fulfils a need in

Joyce. She never knew her father and when she assumes that he would want her to get

her school certificate, her mother’s retort of “How do you know?” suggests that Joyce

idealises him, projecting her own hopes onto her idea of him (190). Indeed, the dream

she has of ‘her’ father and of Travis, and their acceptance of each other in this dream,

emphasises this association of the two.

        Len and Joyce’s marriage is a sham with no love on either side. In a telling

scene, where Len punches and kicks Joyce after she tells him that he is her husband “in

name only”, and he then retorts that he is her husband “[i]n law and in fact”, it seems

that for Len the truth of the state of their marriage seems less important than

appearances and legal status (214). This idea of roles being performed is emphasised by

Phillips in the moment that Len and Joyce are distracted by the “performance” of the

piece of coal in the fireplace (214). The performance is over; their marriage is at an end.

It is different with Travis. Joyce had earlier noticed that the GIs’ singing is the singing

of true believers, far removed from the worship of the villagers, which is a pretence, a

performance, a continuance of forms that no longer have meaning to them. Travis adds
                                                                                   19

to this impression of true faith by spontaneously offering up a prayer at her mother’s

graveside. Overall, the Americans have an authenticity lacking in the locals, which is

attractive to her. Ultimately, Travis seems true in a way the English men in her life have

not been.

                                    Crossing the Racial Divide

        As narrator, Joyce gives only the tiniest of hints as to the reasons why the

villagers were so curious about the new arrivals. Gail Low suggests that it is Joyce’s

unconventionality, and, in particular, her “color blindness” (138) that allows her

relationship with Travis to develop. Whether Joyce is truly colour blind is debateable;

that she “wanted to warn them” (Phillips 129), the “them” being the GIs, suggests that

she is aware that the soldiers’ colour might be an issue for the villagers, but it is striking

that the fact that the American GIs are black is only made clear in a belated and initially,

veiled manner: it seems their colour is of little consequence to Joyce herself. However,

as the relationship develops, events mean that the significance of Travis’s colour to

others begins to intrude upon Joyce’s consciousness. After the first oblique mention of

the GIs’ different and diffident behaviour, the first more concrete suggestion of colour is

in referring to Travis’s hair as being “like thin, black wool” (167). The next, more

explicit, is in an entry a month later, when admitting she “didn’t like to ask too much

because I don’t know too much about Americans. Or Coloureds.” (202). Nonetheless, it

is significant that she identifies him as an American first, then as coloured. For Joyce

personally, colour is not a significant issue.

        Two events emphasise Joyce’s unconventionality and especially her boldness,

which is the key to the relationship developing. Firstly, she starts the dance at the GIs’

party, when the other women and the GIs feel unable to. The reluctance of the GIs to
                                                                                           20

ask the girls to dance is understandable. They are experiencing and navigating a change

in the social rules in comparison to home, as part of their displacement from the United

States and are experiencing dislocation: “A lot of the boys are not used to us [the locals]

treating them as equals”, Joyce recounts a white officer explaining to her (Phillips, 145).

Hence, the soldiers observe that their treatment by the white villagers is markedly

different from home, and they are uncertain as to what they can now do, where the

limits lie. Joyce had earlier observed that the GIs were “polite” and “lower their eyes”

when passing, and Joyce noticed that a soldier seemed “slightly frightened” when

greeted by her (134). This subservient behaviour relates to the way black Americans had

learned to behave in certain parts of the United States. Indeed, “such attributes [as

politeness] were essential for survival in the regions in which black communities lived

under the shadow of the Jim Crow laws” (Olusoga, 471). For the other young women in

the room, the reluctance to initiate proceedings could be partly explained by social

norms: it is the men who generally ask the women to dance. Nevertheless, the novelty

and strangeness of the men being black American GIs must surely contribute to their

reluctance: in the Britain of the time, inter-racial marriage was rare but known, and the

women are no doubt conscious of the likely disapproval of others in society and

uncertain, like the GIs, just what was possible, and of where the boundaries lie. Joyce’s

crossing from the group of white women to the group of black men to ask Travis to

dance is a symbolic crossing of a boundary, and, indeed, a prolepsis, or pointer, to the

second more significant crossing of boundaries, as, later, Joyce initiates the relationship

with Travis. She sees that if she “didn’t ask him then nothing was going to happen”, so

she “just asked him outright” (Phillips 167). In response, Travis “looked confused. As

though I was trying to trick him into something” (167). The seeming impossibility of

her request makes him suspicious: the rules here in England are hard to understand.

Dancing with a white woman at an event when overseen by his officers seems to be
                                                                                           21

allowed, but to be seen together in public, to begin a relationship, is hard for him to

imagine. Nevertheless, encouraged by Joyce’s boldness and, perhaps, the lack of overt

hostility from the villagers towards the GIs, in their limited dealings with them, Travis

begins to see that a relationship with a white woman might indeed be a possibility here

in England. He thus accedes to Joyce’s suggestion to spend some time together.

        Events during their trip to town contribute to Joyce’s growing awareness of

what colour means in English society. Initially, Joyce seems unaware of this boundary.

Indeed, there is a naivety to her. When with Travis at the bus stop, she excuses the fact

that passers-by do not greet them by stressing their generally unfriendly behaviour

towards herself: “It was nothing to do with him. They didn’t talk to me anyhow”

(Phillips 201). However, later in town, she notices that passers-by “were looking at me

not him […and that when stopping and asking Travis for cigarettes …] nobody would

say anything to me” (202). She “knew what they were thinking. That he was just using

me for fun” (202). Later, though, she is still in denial: “[I]t was nothing to do with him.

Honestly” (203). She is truly shocked when Travis tells her of being beaten “so hard I

thought my kidneys were going to burst” (207). Travis receives his beating for being

with a white woman, something not permitted in the segregated regions of the United

States, with laws against miscegenation in force. As a black American, Travis had no

doubt understood that what happened to him was conceivable, even likely: “he seemed

to take it as a matter of course”, but to Joyce this visible proof of the seriousness of the

situation she was getting into comes as a genuine shock (207-8). Indeed, she confesses

her ignorance and wants Travis to understand that she “needed to know more about him,

otherwise [she] would […] just make more mistakes” (208). After visiting Travis’s

commanding officer to try to help Travis, she realises that she was “attracting attention”

even among the villagers, who, in a scene reminiscent of when the GIs had first arrived,

“stopped and stared at me. They pointed by simply nodding their heads in my direction”
                                                                                    22

(206). These incidents are also an acute comment on the different ways racism can be

displayed, from the overt and violent racism of American MPs to the locals’ looks,

silences, and comments filled with meaning, as when the midwife says of Greer, “He’s

like coffee, isn’t he love” (228). After realising how things stood between Travis and

Joyce, Len beats his wife rather than Travis. There is dishonesty, cowardliness, and a

two-facedness in the English characters’ racism.

        Joyce’s reluctance to accept the official line is another factor in later helping her

cross the unmarked but widely understood racial boundary and start a relationship with

Travis. In fact, this boundary, this river to be crossed, is a significant one. It is

symbolically, a Rubicon, a declaration of war on London, the metropolitan centre and

contemporary Rome, and against the overarching colonial narrative, enforced by US

military authorities and villagers alike. However, Joyce does not appear to notice or

realise this. Travis joins her in crossing the Rubicon, as we can see in his beating of, and

threat to kill, Len: in the US, it is the blacks that get lynched, not the whites, but Travis,

at least, is more conscious of what he is doing. Later, Len tells Joyce she is a “traitor to

[her] own kind” and “no better than a common slut. And everybody in the village agrees

with him” (217). There may be no laws against miscegenation in the United Kingdom,

but the same feeling that drives the white American MPs enforcement of it in England,

inhabits Len, and by extension, the villagers. Beneath the more racially equitable

surface, it seems, the British are no less racist than the Americans.

                   Joyce’s Submission to Official and Societal Racial Prejudice

        Despite Travis asserting that “the army only used them for cleaning and the

like”, he is sent away to Italy to fight (Phillips 208). The suspicion that this was done to

separate them is hard to avoid. Yet, Travis is granted permission by his officer, a
                                                                                            23

permission needed and not often granted (Bland 12), to marry Joyce, now divorced from

Len, and visibly pregnant with Travis’s child, “as long as he didn’t try and take me back

to America with him. They weren’t having any of that. Me, I wasn’t right over there”

(Phillips 227). There are hints, though that Joyce does not have the strength to go

through with this without Travis. This may seem surprising given her earlier boldness,

but her colour blindness, her unconventionality, her naivety, can only take her so far in

the face of the disapproval, both official and societal, that she faces. “The doctor had

said that I was having a breakdown, and a baby” (225) is how Joyce reports the prelude

to Travis’s return. However, the reason for the breakdown is likely to be twofold rather

than simply about race. Joyce is divorced from Len but not yet married to Travis. At

this time there was huge social pressure to be married, and being an unmarried mother

was to be a social outcast. Nonetheless, race is a major factor and without Travis, Joyce

struggles. The poignant reunion at the railway station shows Travis’s sincerity and

commitment, as well as his love. “And then he reached out and pulled me towards him.

I couldn’t believe it. He’d come back to me. He really wanted me. That day, crying on

the platform, safe in Travis’s arms” (226). The contrast with the previous time she had

been pregnant could not be starker. Travis seeing her pregnant, wanted her, unlike

Herbert. The marriage helps reassure her, but Travis’s death removes her key support,

and Joyce will have to raise their child, Greer, alone. How alone she feels, or is made to

feel, is shown during the euphoria of the VE day celebrations in the village, when

“some of them [the villagers] even spoke to me and smiled at Greer”, the “even”

emphasising the rarity of this event (220).

       Joyce has always been alone. She herself admits that she is not someone who

has friends, but this seems to be something more. To be alone and friendless is one

thing, to be ostracised another entirely. The villagers disapproved of Joyce not standing

by Len when Len was imprisoned. Len is one of the villagers; she is not and is,
                                                                                           24

moreover, considered a race traitor by them, according to Len. Recently widowed and

grieving, without income after Len’s return to take over the shop, she faces the task of

raising Greer alone. It is at this vulnerable time that the forces of the centre move into

action, in the form of “the lady with the blue coat”: “You’ll be better off, love, with

somebody else looking after him. Trust me. I know what I’m on about. I mean, how are

you going to cope? You won’t know what to do now, will you. Let’s be sensible.

You’re going to have to start a new life on your own.” (228). This feels very much like

a cleaning up operation. The lady’s dog is even called Monty, the nickname of the best

known and most successful British general of the war, suggesting she represents the

centre. Taking Greer displaces him from the centre and moves him to the margins, out

of sight and, for all but Joyce, out of mind. Indeed, it carries an eerie echo of the

separation of the child from the mother during the slave era. Despite Joyce not being

black, having a mixed-race child appears to taint her in the eyes of her compatriots, and

she is thus doubly colonised, in Peterson and Rutherford’s expression, as a woman and

as an honorary black woman. This explains Joyce’s inclusion as one of the ancestral

African man’s children in the epilogue. The official narrative seems to be saying that it

is not possible to be both British and black. A nation is an imagined construct, an

“imagined community” and, as Phillips has made clear, Len and Herbert,

representations of Englishness, both lack the imagination to see beyond themselves,

representing here a white Britain (Hall 109). Hence, the underlying racism of both the

British state and the public conspire to remove the evidence of inter-racial relations.

Joyce put it this way herself, “Later they took him away from me” (Phillips 223). Yet,

she also admits her collusion in the act, confessing that she “turn[ed] him over to the

lady with the blue coat” (228). Her tragedy in having suffered so much is deepened by

being complicit in the further tragedy of her rejection of Greer.

                                                                                             25

According to Althusser, ideology “promotes false consciousness and recruits

people by a process of ‘interpellation’” (Davis 47), and this is something “internalised

and rationalised” (48). By stating that individuals are “already subjects who are called

into a relationship with an ideological viewpoint”, he implies that this call can be

resisted, but that “those who fight … against the system, are nevertheless crushed by it,

and may end up colluding with the very practices they seek to resist” (48). Joyce has

fought her interpellation as an English woman, yet she ends up crushed by the system

and withdraws back into the safety of this label. This is signalled in her changed, more

favourable reaction at the end of the war to both Churchill and the royal family,

representatives of the centre she had “never had much time for” earlier in the story

(Phillips 230). Thus, Joyce appears to be coming to accept the official narrative that she

had earlier derided.

        Joyce, in her decision to give up her child, retreats back across the Rubicon she

had crossed. She seeks safety in the colonial discourse, marries a white man and has

white children. Joyce’s decision may elicit sympathy for her invidious position, a single

mother of a so-called ‘brown baby’ in a society unready for, indeed hostile to, inter-

racial relationships. Nevertheless, this is the legitimate child of a man beloved to her,

and the reader may take a more disapproving position. In this story, the normative

colonial discourse reasserts itself, the authorities, in the shape of “the lady with the blue

coat” (Phillips 230), come in to take away the ‘problem’ of Greer, someone “neither one

thing nor the other” as the pamphlet produced for British servicemen put it (Olusoga

484). Yet this is only a temporary displacement. In 1963, Greer returns to seek his

mother. In a book with a strong theme of fathers seeking lost children, Greer turns the

tables and shows he has agency. He is a survivor, survival of the lost child also being a

theme of the book. He experiences an ambiguous reception from his mother,

symbolically standing in for England here, but he exists, a mixed-race child, black and
                                                                                       26