Caryl Phillips’ collection of essays is a broad-ranging and thought-provoking examination of the migrant experience and attitudes towards immigrants, both before and after the 9/11 attacks. Born in the Caribbean, raised in the UK and now a citizen of the United States, Phillips’ perspective is informed by his personal experience as an immigrant and black man, a well-traveled author, and a scholar of literature.

Phillips begins by putting a personal face on his childhood perceptions of race as a defining factor in life, sharing anecdotes of his own experience as a black immigrant child in a predominantly white neighborhood, and the bullying and rejection imposed by his peers on a young Muslim boy. In considering the changes that recent immigration has brought to Europe, he asserts that what is new is not the prejudice traditionally encountered by each successive wave of peoples, but rather the forcefulness of response from new arrivals who feel under attack, their cultures disrespected.

Phillips was living in lower Manhattan at the time of the 9/11 attacks and laments the changes in national mood that occurred in their wake. As many others have, he came to America believing in the ideal of E Pluribis Unum – One Out of Many- only to suffer the disillusionment of discovering it to be a myth. Phillips is harsh in his judgments of the United States, noting its divisions along racial, cultural and religious lines, unequal distribution of wealth and persistent inequality of minorities. He raises many valid points, but lapses into exaggeration when he goes on to describe an America where “Gated communities, in which homogeneous groups with siege mentalities cluster behind guarded and patrolled walls, are the norm from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” And even though writing in the context of Bush-era politics, his labeling of the United States’ military, economic and cultural power as imperial, empire building seems still to greatly oversimplify complex matters of international relations.

But fortunately, the main thrust of this collection is not political, but cultural. Phillips dreams of a multicultural world where successful assimilation is based on mutual adaptation by the migrant and the host country. His primary theme is the importance of the writer as a positive force for the change necessary to achieve this state.

I believe passionately in the moral capacity of fiction to wrench us out of our ideological burrows and force us to engage with a world that is clumsily transforming itself, a world that is peopled with individuals we might otherwise never meet in our daily lives. As long as we have literature as a bulwark against intolerance, and as a force for change, then we have a chance.

In this context, he discusses a broad diversity of writers and performers who have dealt with issues of race and migration through literature, music and theatre, ranging widely in both time and nationality, and including Henry Louis Gates, Luther Vandross, E.R. Braithwaite, Chinua Achebe, Shusaku Endo, Ha Jin, Hillel Halkin, Colin MacInnes, Angela Carter, James Baldwin and many others. In the process, he touches also upon aspects of history, such as in his discussion of W. Jeffrey Bolster’s research on African-Americans, both free men and slaves, who found liberty and prosperity as seamen during the period between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Phillips has much to say on the importance of immigration to continual societal renewal, but he also provides some respite to the reader through pieces that share the background of his development as a writer of fiction, providing fascinating glimpses into his writing and personal lives. This is an author who when ready to settle into concentrated writing, travels to a different city or even country, checking into a hotel for weeks at a time in order to avoid all distractions, and repeating this cycle until the book is finished. He reads Shusaku Endo’s work, usually Silence, before writing any book, was James Baldwin’s friend, and has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with the author, Russell Banks.

Phillips has clearly thought deeply about the issues he addresses and these are intelligent, probing essays that I want to return to as companion narratives to the many authors and works he discusses. But what sets this collection apart from others that I have read is the sense of personal connection to his subjects that is present on every page. ( )