“The Ghosts of Strangers”: Hospitality, Identity and Temporality in Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood

This article investigates how Caryl Phillips retells Othello’s story as a creative reappropriation of Shakespeare’s play. In The Nature of Blood, Phillips’s previous ironic stance toward Othello as “a black European success” turns into a more complex response,which implicitly acknowledges that this Shakespearean “other” stands for multiple subject positions. The black general of Phillips’s retelling subterraneously links with the other figures of “dis-location,” which appear in the stories that make up the rest of the novel. These uncanny juxtapositions allow Phillips to explore the interimplication of various forms of marginalisation and displacement, from early modernity to our postcolonial present. The solution to marginalisation and displacement is not to be found, however, in a rigid sense of identity and belonging, or in essentialist notions of “home.” “Home” seems to reside in the imaginative gap between desire and its fulfillment. The fulfillment of the desire for home is equivalent to the marginalisation of a host of others. Inextricably bound with the question of home is the question of hospitality. Phillips not only indicts the hostility and brutalities of the Nazi regime through the story of Eva Stern; he is also sceptical of “liberal” concepts of hospitality. His novel, the article concludes, welcomes the “strangeness” of identity, and repeatedly brings to the fore the “ghosts of strangers.” These are “ghosts” whose traumatic memories cannot be entirely dispelled or wholly assimilated, and do not fit in with the linear, homogeneous and empty time of historicism. Available online in Project Muse: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jem/summary/v006/6.2calbi.html