Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean literary imagination

Caribbean invocations of Anne Frank such as these suggestively illustrate what has been called the “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust memory. In The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider describe Frank as a “Holocaust icon” whose “status as the most important symbol of the Holocaust” has only grown over time (188–89). Indeed, as another critic notes, the global reach of Anne Frank is undeniable: “The book has been translated into dozens of languages; tens of millions of copies are in print. The extent to which the figure of Anne Frank has permeated world culture can perhaps be seen in the fact that, in Japan (where the book was an enormous success, selling 116,000 copies in its first five months in print), to have one’s ‘Anne Frank day’ became a euphemism for menstruation, a subject Anne mentioned in her journal. A variety of rose named after Anne Frank now grows all over Japan” (Prose 20). Other instances of the global appeal of Anne Frank abound. The late Nelson Mandela described how he drew inspiration from the Diary while imprisoned on Robben Island. In one of his portraits of Anne Frank, Ojibway artist Carl Beam employed an ancient technique of narrative pottery to reposition the Nazi genocide within the context of First Nations history (Ryan, The Trickster Shift 258).

The Willemstad Holocaust exhibit not only attests to the global circulation of Frank’s diary but also to its heterogeneous reception.² For, as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler emphasize, “Within its global reach, the Anne Frank phenomenon responds to the particulars of place” (13). How, then, has Frank’s memory been localized in a Caribbean/diaspora setting? To what extent, for example, are Caribbean articulations of Holocaust memory inflected by the deep historical presence of Sephardic Jews in the region that I traced in the first half of this study? How do the colonial ties between the Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles link Frank’s history of oppression to that of the Caribbean? Finally, how can we reconcile some Caribbean writers’ intense identification with Frank with Peter van Daan’s colonial fantasy, recounted in the excerpt from the Diary in the second epigraph to this chapter, of living on a plantation in the Dutch East Indies—a fantasy that, as we have seen, was fulfilled in the colonial era by Jewish settlers of Dutch Antillean colonies such as Curaçao and Suriname?

In chapter 5, I examined how the Holocaust enters the Caribbean literary imagination in the form of refugee Jewish characters who find safe haven in the Caribbean—a historical trajectory that would have been the Frank family’s as well had their Cuban visa not been cancelled in 1941 (Prose 41). In chapter 6, I considered works of Caribbean fiction that more directly engage with the Holocaust both as a historical event and as the object of literary representation and, in so doing, illustrate the palimpsestic operations of genres as well as traumatic memories. In the present chapter, I turn to the writing of Michelle Cliff and Caryl Phillips to deepen this examination of how the Holocaust functions in Caribbean literature as a surrogate for the memory of slavery and as a catalyst for decolonization as well as for the act of writing itself. As we have seen, while some Caribbean/diaspora writers look back to the Sephardic expulsion, others invoke the more recent trauma of the Holocaust. Each of these calamitous moments of Jewish history figures in the oeuvres and biographies of Cliff and Phillips, but what links their writing in particular is their intertextual reference to Frank’s Diary. Both authors situate Frank’s text within long-standing European historical and literary discourses about Black and Jewish Others and suggest that their writing careers are indebted to the Jewish diarist. I argue that Cliff’s and Phillips’s identificatory readings of the Diary are informed by an awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past combined with their educational formation in postwar Britain. Allowing for biographical differences, Cliff’s and Phillips’s responses to the Holocaust ultimately reflect a Caribbean/diaspora sensibility that privileges multiple and complex forms of identification over the dyads of Black-white and victim-perpetrator.

For those critics seeking to break down barriers between Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies, Phillips’s novel The Nature of Blood (1997) has become a kind of touchstone, so much so that it overshadows other examples of cross-cultural identification with Jewishness that are available in the literature of the Caribbean and its diasporas.³ Phillips’s engagement with the Holocaust tends to be presented as exceptional, particularly when read against American literature and its more polarizing approach to Black-Jewish relations.⁴ Rothberg, by contrast, productively locates Phillips in relation to a predominantly francophone anticolonial tradition of multidirectional thinking about imperialism and the Holocaust. More specifically, he identifies Phillips as heir to French Jewish writer André Schwarz-Bart and, to a lesser extent, W. E. B. Du Bois.⁵ Another important context, however, is the postwar Black British setting in which Phillips’s identification with the Holocaust developed. By pairing Phillips with Cliff, a writer who shares his Caribbean heritage and British education, I seek to recontextualize Phillips’s much discussed Holocaust novel as part of the specifically Caribbean/diaspora tradition of engagement with Jewish historical experience that I have been tracing throughout this study.

In his landmark study of Blacks and Jews in U.S. literature, Eric Sundquist contends that the paucity of African American responses to Frank’s Diary “suggests not their inattention or lack of sympathy but their reasonable preoccupation with their own murdered children. Anne’s brief comparison of the Jews being rounded up for transport in Holland to the ‘slave hunts of olden times’…does not provide sufficient basis for analogical thought” (233–34). Sundquist’s commentary implies that such responses would detract from African Americans’ focus on their particular condition. By contrast, Cliff’s and Phillips’s invocations of Frank illustrate an alternative phenomenon of surrogate or multidirectional memory, discussed in chapter 6 and compellingly theorized by Rothberg, in which attention to the Other’s history opens up, rather than impedes, access to one’s own past.

A signature feature of Phillips’s formally experimental novel The Nature of Blood, which interweaves the story of a Holocaust survivor with that of Shakespeare’s Othello, is its self-conscious intertextuality. While critical discussion has tended to focus on the novel’s reworking of Othello, I consider its other major intertext, Frank’s Diary, and identify formal as well as thematic links between the two texts.⁶ The Diary is equally important to Cliff’s 1984 novel Abeng, the coming-of-age story of a light-skinned Jamaican girl who, in the years preceding independence, begins to question the racial and imperialist ideology under which she has been raised. Abeng stages the scene of the colonized subject’s encounter with The Diary of a Young Girl, recalling not only Cliff’s own early contact with Frank’s diary but other Caribbean fictional treatments of this motif such as Pineau’s L’exil selon Julia (see chapter 6).⁷ Two full chapters situated at the heart of Cliff’s novel are devoted to its heroine’s fascination with Frank and her quest to come to terms with the Holocaust. Although Abeng constitutes what is perhaps the most vivid portrayal in Caribbean literature of adolescent cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust, this aspect of the novel has received scant attention, dismissed as inconsequential or treated, like The Nature of Blood, as an isolated case.⁸ In contrast, I understand Cliff’s and Phillips’s novels as two of the most prominent examples of a larger pattern of engagement with the Holocaust in postwar Caribbean/diaspora literature and thought.

In his 1952 Jewish Life magazine article “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto,” W. E. B. Du Bois recounted how his travels to Poland led him to revise his theory of double consciousness so that he came to see the Negro problem no longer as a “separate and unique thing” and “not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics” (472). Du Bois explains that he emerged from his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto with a “broader conception of what the fight against race segregation, religious discrimination and the oppression by wealth had to become” (472). Much as Du Bois’s article had done some decades earlier, Cliff’s and Phillips’s European travel essays depict journeys across a post-Holocaust landscape that bring the histories of antisemitism and anti-Black racism into relation. In “Sites of Memory” (2008), Cliff describes her six-week stint as a guest lecturer at the University of Mainz in Mainz, Germany. Much like the Turkish German students she teaches as well as another guest lecturer at the university, an elderly émigré rabbi who had left Germany in the 1930s, Cliff finds herself an exotic, an outsider. In a rather unflattering portrait of German academia, Cliff complains that her hosts obsess over African American sites of memory while ignoring their own landscapes of trauma. One such local site is the Jewish cemetery to which Cliff is repeatedly drawn during her stay in Mainz. The essay contains a profoundly identificatory moment in which the Jamaican writer sees herself reflected in the gravestones of German Jews:

Cliff’s poem “A Visit to the Secret Annex” (1985) and Phillips’s essay “Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” (1987) each describe visits to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, leading the reader through the rooms of the museum like a tour guide. For both Cliff and Phillips the Anne Frank House is a site of trauma as well as illumination that reveals the interconnectedness of Black and Jewish histories of oppression. In both texts the museum is approached with difficulty. Cliff’s speaker first deliberately walks past the Anne Frank House and then doubles back to make the arduous ascent up the stairs that “stretch up / into perpendicular flights” (9–10). Phillips leaves the museum and then returns only to find it closed; as he recalls in a later essay, on this first visit to the museum he focused on the exterior architecture of the house as an “elaborate way of avoiding the emotional train that I was sure was about to run me down” (“On ‘The Nature’” 7). The hesitancy with which Cliff’s speaker and Phillips enter the space of the museum bespeaks the powerful emotional response that it provokes. While in the museum, Phillips finds himself “torn between feelings of anger and despair,” so much so that after a while he “could not look any more” and must “move away” from a group of American tourists whose callous reaction upsets him (“Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” 67).⁹

Upon entering the Anne Frank House, Cliff’s speaker in “A Visit to the Secret Annex” similarly finds herself overcome by emotion:

Cliff’s “A Visit to the Secret Annex” is the first poem in a series entitled “A Pilgrimage, a History Lesson, Two Satires, and a Vision”. If, for Cliff, the Anne Frank House is the object of a pilgrimage, so too, for Phillips, the museum visit pays homage to The Diary of a Young Girl, which he declares to be “one of the most important books of the century” (“Anne Frank's Amsterdam” 68). Like Cliff, Phillips guides the reader through the physical space of the museum, drawing into relation Black and Jewish experience along the way. As an essayist, Phillips speaks more explicitly to the continuity of antisemitism and anti-Black racism: “In many ways, the black man, while not replacing the Jew as an object of abuse, is more visible, an equally vulnerable target for Fascist propaganda. In the Europe of the 1980s racist graffiti continue to smear synagogues, but are now also daubed on mosques” (70). As in Cliff’s poem, Black and Jewish experiences of racialization are presented as to some extent interchangeable. Looking at a photograph in the museum of an antisemitic banner from a 1924 Berlin demonstration, Phillips comments: “I have seen banners carrying such messages in London, but for ‘Jew’ read ‘black.’ Very little seems to have changed in the heart of Europe” (69).

Such intersections are also evoked by the Antilleans Phillips encounters in Amsterdam whose presence recalls the Dutch colonial enterprise in which early modern Jews played a significant role. As we saw in part 1, in the aftermath of the expulsions from Spain and Portugal Sephardic Jews seeking refuge and opportunity served as traders and brokers of Dutch Caribbean colonial economies, drawing on their linguistic and technical skills as well as their extensive commercial networks. In colonial Suriname Jews also became the proprietors of a number of plantations, establishing the agricultural settlement of Jodensavanne, which flourished until an economic crisis in the late eighteenth century prompted most of the Jewish planters to resettle in the urban center of Paramaribo. In contrast to writers such as Cynthia McLeod and Maryse Condé, however, Phillips leaves this Jewish connection to the colonial history of the Caribbean untapped; instead, what his essays on Frank reveal is the link between The Diary of a Young Girl and his writing career.

Challenging the view that the Diary represents the spontaneous outpouring of a young girl who found herself in extraordinary circumstances, such readings take particular note of the fact that Frank reworked the Diary in its entirety during the period of her hiding with a view to its publication, an act that testified to Frank’s literary aspirations as well as to the artfulness of the Diary’s construction. Although Frank had initially conceived of the diary in more personal terms, her understanding of the purpose of her diary changed after hearing a March 1944 broadcast of an exiled member of the Dutch government who called for eyewitness accounts of the occupation to be collected after the war.¹⁰ Shortly thereafter on April 4, 1944, Frank contemplates her prospects of a literary career:

For a long time I haven’t had any idea of what I was working for any more; the end of the war is so terribly far away, so unreal, like a fairy tale…. And now it’s all over. I must work, so as not to be a fool, to get on, to become a journalist, because that’s what I want! I know that I can write, a couple of my stories are good, my descriptions of the “Secret Annexe” are humorous, there’s a lot in my diary that speaks, but—whether I have real talent remains to be seen…. I am the best and sharpest critic of my own work. I know myself what is and what is not well written. Anyone who doesn’t write doesn’t know how wonderful it is; I used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw at all, but now I am more than happy that I can at least write.

As the entry continues, Frank declares that she can’t imagine following the path of her mother and Mrs. Van Daan “and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten. I must have something besides a husband and children, something I can devote myself to!” (177). The key question for Frank is will she “ever be able to write anything great…?” (177). Earlier entries in the diary about her conflict with Mr. Dussel over access to the work space that they shared (July 13, 1943) and her devotion to her fountain pen (November 11, 1943) also attest to her self-conception as a writer.¹¹ Thus competing with and increasingly displacing the romance with Peter on which the Broadway/Hollywood adaptations focused is the narrative of Frank’s rising literary ambition, which sustains her during her period of hiding: “My greatest wish is to become a journalist someday and later on a famous writer…. In any case, I want to publish a book entitled Het Achterhuis after the war” (210). Yet, while expressing this ambition, Frank simultaneously recognizes that “it’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary” (2). I would argue that it is in the context of such statements that we can best understand how Frank’s example gave both Phillips and Cliff what Cliff describes as “permission to write.”

In broad terms, the invocations of Frank in Cliff’s poem and Phillips’s essays participate in the tradition of Caribbean cross-cultural identification with the Holocaust that I traced in chapter 6. In this tradition the lack of a space in which to address the history of slavery and its aftermath encourages the Caribbean/diaspora subject to turn to the Holocaust as a site of identification and surrogate memory. As noted earlier, Phillips explains that he came to develop an interest in the Holocaust because Jews were the only group discussed in the context of racism in the 1960s and early 1970s Britain of his childhood (“In the Ghetto” 54). Indeed, Phillips came of age in a period that, against the background of the Eichmann trial, the Six-Day War, and the Yom Kippur War, saw a marked increase in the publication of Holocaust memoirs and the emergence of the Holocaust as an issue of public concern (Waxman 116–17). Like Gilroy, he was also influenced by direct contact with Jewish refugees while growing up in Britain. In an interview, Phillips recalls the impact of European émigrés such as his history teacher, a Mr. Stern from Berlin, during his grammar school years: “So I began to understand issues of class and other forms of group solidarity, for these guys with weird names, who weren’t English, seemed to be on my side. They were white, but they were on my side, so I didn’t really believe that race was the thing” (“Other Voices” 119–20).¹²

Cliff, who was born in Jamaica in 1946, has described her own encounters with Jewish émigrés in Britain in roughly this same period. While attending graduate school at the Warburg Institute in London in the early 1970s, where she studied Renaissance art history under the Austrian Jew Ernst Gombrich, Cliff found her émigré professors congenial: “it was a very good place for me to be because some of the faculty that I had then…were survivors of the Holocaust…. They weren’t like the English intellectuals who tend to be very specialized and narrow. But they were also people who had survived something pretty awful and were very warm and welcoming” (“The Art” 62). Cliff’s contact with Holocaust survivors in Britain followed on a childhood divided between New York and Jamaica, an island that is home to a long-standing Sephardic Caribbean community whose members were among her classmates (“The Art” 68). While Phillips’s awareness of a Jewish Caribbean past would come later in life, both Phillips’s and Cliff’s relationships to Holocaust memory can be read against this deeper historical background of the Sephardic Caribbean, one that complicates the naively substitutive form of identification with the Holocaust that each writer favored in adolescence.

Characteristic of the phenomenon of surrogate memory that I traced in the previous chapter is a youthful identification with victims of the Holocaust. This pattern of adolescent identification is also evident in Phillips’s and Cliff’s biographies. In his essays Phillips writes repeatedly of the experience of viewing a World at War episode one day after school: “I have a vague recollection of some footage of Dutch Jews in Amsterdam, and it is certainly possible that some reference was made to Anne Frank. But the overwhelming impression that the program made upon me was shock. Utter numbing shock” (“On ‘The Nature’” 6). For Phillips, viewing the episode was a formative experience: “I watched the library footage of the camps and realized both the enormity of the crime that was being perpetrated, and the precariousness of my own position in Europe. The many adolescent thoughts that worried my head can be reduced to one line: ‘If white people could do that to white people, then what the hell would they do to me?’” (“Anne Frank’s Amsterdam” 66–67).¹³ Cliff’s interviews similarly point to the role of mass media in the global circulation of Holocaust memory. She recalls seeing the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank as a child in Jamaica: “I cut school to see the movie. I then read her diary and started to keep my own, the one my parents read—which was based on Anne Frank’s diary. I would never have thought to keep a diary without having read her. She gave me permission to write, and to use writing as a way of survival. My diary kept me separate from my family, just as hers helped her to maintain her identity in a very claustrophobic situation” (“The Art” 68, italics mine). Cliff’s description of her contact with the Anne Frank diary and film, which she would later fictionalize in Abeng, corresponds closely to the larger pattern of cross-cultural identification and surrogate memory that I have been tracing.

What Cliff’s interviews also expose, however, is the particular link between her early contact with Frank’s diary and the onset of her writing career. The central traumatic incident of Cliff’s childhood was her parents’ discovery of her diary, which she had begun to keep after reading Frank’s book. Cliff recalls: “I always wanted to write. Actually there was a terrible incident. I don’t know if I should tell you, but I will. When I was at Saint Andrews, I was keeping a diary. I had been very influenced by The Diary of Anne Frank, and as a result of seeing the movie and reading her diary, I got a diary of my own…. [My parents] went into my room, broke open my drawer, took out and broke the lock on my diary, and read it” (“Journey Into Speech” 273). Cliff’s parents publicly humiliated her by reading her diary out loud to the family—a silencing that prevented her from writing until the mid-1970s.¹⁴

For Phillips, too, writing proves to be deeply connected to his early contact with images of the Holocaust and the figure of Frank. Phillips describes in his essays how he wrote his first story directly following his viewing of the World at War episode in what was for him “a private, annealing act” (“On ‘The Nature’” 7). The subject of Phillips’s first story was a fifteen-year-old Dutch Jewish boy who is rescued by a farmer after managing to escape from a boxcar that is transporting him to a camp. In an arresting example of the operation of surrogate memory, Phillips remarks that “the Dutch boy was, of course, me. A fourteen-year-old black boy, born in St. Kitts in the Eastern Caribbean, now growing up in working-class Yorkshire in the north of England” (“On ‘The Nature’” 6).¹⁵ In “On ‘The Nature of Blood,’” Phillips also explicitly links his writing career to Frank: “I imagine that a tangible legacy of that episode of ‘The World at War’ and the story that it gave rise to is that for the past ten years or so I have worked with a large poster of Anne Frank above my desk. In some strange way she was partly responsible for my beginning to write, and as long as I continue to write her presence is a comforting one” (7). For Phillips, as for Cliff, early acquaintance with mass media images of the Holocaust and with Frank’s memory was generative of writing itself. Fittingly, then, the Jewish diarist figures prominently in both Cliff’s and Phillips’s fiction, in which the naive identifications that characterized their youthful encounters with the Holocaust make way for a more nuanced—and at times more ambivalent—approach to Holocaust memory. Whereas Cliff stages the scene of reading the Diary, however, Phillips incorporates the Diary more fully into the texture of his novel—into its very form.

Cliff’s first novel Abeng is set at the end of the 1950s, the decade in which Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks appeared. Yet Abeng troubles the analogy between colonial and Jewish victims of European fascism favored by some anticolonial thinkers in order to foreground the collaboration of the light-skinned Creole in systems of racial oppression. As previously noted, Phillips’s youthful literary treatment of the Holocaust embraced a substitutive form of identification: “The Dutch boy was, of course, me.” The adolescent protagonist of Abeng, by contrast, does not identify with Frank straightforwardly as victim to victim. Instead, Clare Savage’s encounter with the Diary leads her to consider the complicity of bystanders. Frank’s Diary has a decolonizing impact on Cliff’s Creole protagonist, representing not so much the content of an experience with which Clare identifies but rather a critical minoritarian stance from which it becomes possible to challenge the status quo narrative of History.

Abeng is the first of two novels about the Savages, a middle-class, light-skinned Jamaican family. Clare, the elder of two daughters, has been thoroughly inducted into the ideology of colorism to which her father, Boy, subscribes. Clare’s mother, Kitty, favors Clare’s darker-skinned sister and has a deep affinity with the African elements of Jamaican society, but fails to challenge her husband’s worldview. Cliff’s bildungsroman depicts Clare’s growing awareness of the inequities in Jamaica as well as her burgeoning sense of her own sexuality. The thematic links with Frank’s Diary are readily apparent: Cliff’s attention to family dynamics, a remote mother figure, adolescence, menstruation, sexuality, and rebellion all resonate strongly with the Diary, which is directly invoked in the novel.¹⁶ Yet the significance of the Diary as an intertext extends beyond these kinds of thematic resonances, only fully coming to light when we approach Abeng as a novel of decolonization.

Abeng is fundamentally preoccupied with historiographical questions. From the outset, the novel disturbs conventional modes of narrating Jamaica’s colonial past by crosscutting between individual and collective histories—between the story of Clare’s upbringing in preindependence Jamaica and episodes of anticolonial resistance such as that of Nanny of the Maroons. In the first half of the novel especially, such counterdiscourses do not penetrate Clare’s consciousness. Instead, Clare is characterized by her “naivete” (121), for she “was a colonized child, and she lived within certain parameters—which clouded her judgement” (77). As her rural, darker-skinned friend Zoe recognizes, Clare is “limited” by her class and color status (119). She is a good girl, deferential to her teachers, her father and other authority figures and passively accepting of her society’s dominant narratives and power structures. This compliant disposition is particularly dangerous given the Savage family’s proclivity for self-mythologization. The Savages maintain the fiction of their whiteness and excise undesirable episodes of the family history such as the suicide of Clare’s homosexual uncle. The novel suggests that the Savages’ distortion of their family history is symptomatic of Jamaica’s broader condition as an “island intent on erasing the past” (128).

Midway through Abeng, however, Clare has a transformative experience that begins to alter her relationship to narratives of familial and collective history. She buys herself a copy of Frank’s Diary, experiencing a sense of recognition when she gazes at the photograph on its cover: “Clare recognized the sweetness in that face, although she never named it as such, and often when reading the diary she would shut the book, her forefinger marking the place, to stare at the face of the writer of the diary and wonder about her and what if she had lived, had survived, and why did they kill her?” (68).¹⁷ Then, just as Cliff herself had done, Clare cuts class to see the film adaptation of the Diary—an act that literally disrupts her colonial schooling.¹⁸ This episode catalyzes a process whereby Clare begins to question the dominant beliefs of her society:

This twelve-year-old Christian mulatto girl, up to this point walking through her life according to what she had been told—not knowing very much about herself or her past—for example, that her great-great-grandfather had once set fire to a hundred Africans; that her grandmother Miss Mattie was once a cane-cutter with a cloth bag of salt in her skirt pocket—this child became compelled by the life and death of Anne Frank. She was reaching, without knowing it, for an explanation of her own life.

After viewing the film, Clare undertakes an intensive study of the Holocaust against her father’s wishes, secreting library books under her mattress. Her self-directed study of the Holocaust is a form of adolescent rebellion, for “to find out why Anne Frank had died had become connected to a forbidden act” (76). “Clare had been so quiet, so girlish, so ‘demure,’” her father remarks, “and except for her strangely sympathetic interest in the Jews…she had been until now an exemplary child, an intelligent child. A reader. A winner of prizes. A girl who could recite all the monarchs of England in consecutive order when she was ten years old” (149). Now, however, Clare begins to emulate Frank’s self-described “talkative and unruly” nature (Diary 162).

Clare’s interest in the Holocaust and Frank represents a nascent critical, interrogatory mode of thought that begins to emerge in her adolescent consciousness. In this regard, the impact of the Diary in catalyzing Clare’s coming to consciousness closely parallels that of the Holocaust survivor Mrs. Blewchamp on Margaret in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Harriet’s Daughter and of the camp experience on Sidonie in Michèle Maillet’s L’étoile noire. Clare’s frustration with her teachers’ emphasis on British war heroism over Jewish suffering also resonates with Gilroy’s recollection in Between Camps of a Jewish school friend who was ridiculed for wearing a tallis. Gilroy remembers that his friend “was especially acute at diagnosing the casual anti-semitism of some of our teachers who had, of course, all distinguished themselves in the real manly business of war against the evil Germans” (4). In Between Camps Gilroy identifies this contradiction as the origin point of his critique of race-thinking. Similarly in Abeng, Clare’s contact with the Diary, alongside other influences such as her failed friendship with the darker-skinned Zoe and her meeting with the supposedly mad Mrs. Stevens, has a radicalizing impact on her colonized Caribbean consciousness.¹⁹

In anglophone Caribbean literature, scenes of reading and recitation are often introduced to illustrate the colonial education system’s deployment of the English book as a means of social control. At the same time, such scenes attest to the destabilizing and contestatory potential that is inherent in the colonized subject’s reception of the English literary canon. Although Abeng follows this pattern in its intertextual reference to Scott’s Ivanhoe (discussed further on in this chapter), the sections of the novel dealing with Frank’s diary adopt an alternative strategy by staging a scene of reading in which the colonized subject engages with a book that is not sanctioned by the colonial authorities. Clare’s subversive choice of texts and disruptive reading practice challenges the idea of the colonized subject as a passive consumer of an approved European literary canon. Moreover, Clare’s reading of Frank’s diary encourages her to become a diarist herself in an empowering shift from passive reader to active writer.

It is through Clare’s unauthorized reading of the Diary that she begins to question and resist the structures of thought and power into which she has been so thoroughly inducted. After poring over the Diary and other Holocaust memoirs, Clare projects scenes from these texts onto the shantytowns that populate her local surroundings in a variation on V. S. Naipaul’s childhood practice of superimposing Dickens’s novels onto his childhood Trinidadian environs.²⁰ Although Clare’s understanding of the relationship of the Caribbean shantytown to the European death camp remains incomplete, this process of melding together two landscapes signals the operation of a relational logic that is beginning to alter her way of seeing. In Abeng this relational logic is also expressed through landscape imagery in a resonant passage that employs tropes commonly associated with Holocaust narratives to assert the interconnectedness of European and New World histories of suffering:

At the same time, Abeng does not reductively equate the Holocaust and slavery but instead aligns them as “unspeakable” events (to use Naomi Mandel’s term [5]) that suggest forms of knowledge that are occluded by the idea of History that both Clare’s teachers and her father promote. Clare is made uneasy by the manner in which her teacher assimilates the two traumas: “Out of all this came the crystallization that the Jews embraced suffering. They were born to it…. The suffering of the Jews was similar, one teacher went on to say, to the primitive religiosity of Africans, which had brought Black people into slavery…That is, both types of people were flawed in irreversible ways” (71). In the teacher’s reading of both the Holocaust and slavery, the victims bring their fate upon themselves, while the perpetrators and bystanders to their oppression are exonerated from blame. Abeng, by contrast, foregrounds the complicity of bystanders. Rather than establishing a direct analogy between the colonized subject and the Holocaust victim, Cliff introduces a third term, the light-skinned Creole bystander, that significantly complicates the opposition of victim and perpetrator as well as facile comparisons of histories of oppression.²² Cliff’s novel thus participates in what one historian identifies as a “recent and dramatic shift in the construction of responsibility for crimes against humanity, in particular away from the perpetrator-victim dyad to a special emphasis on prospective or potential ‘bystanders’” (Dean 77).

After reading the Diary, Clare asks her father whether, had they had Jewish neighbors, he would have turned them in. Throughout Abeng Clare wrestles with the issue of bystanders, provoked not only by her study of the Holocaust but also by local cases such as a man whose sexual abuse of his daughter is tolerated by his community. Above all the question of collaboration arises in relation to the privilege that Clare enjoys as a light-skinned Jamaican who capitalizes on her wavy chestnut hair and green eyes. After an incident in which Clare accidentally shoots her grandmother’s bull, causing her to lose Zoe’s friendship, she comes to feel that she herself “had switched to the other side without meaning to” and is no longer worthy of having Frank as her heroine (146). I would suggest that this vacillating identification with Frank reflects Clare’s incomplete decolonization and split Creole self.

In Cliff’s poem “A Visit to the Annex,” the speaker wonders with regard to Frank: “Would I have changed places / were that the only choice?” (38–39). Correspondingly in Abeng, when Clare palimpsestically projects scenes from the camps onto local Jamaican shantytowns, she imagines herself and her mother as Holocaust victims while ignoring the actual inhabitants of the shantytowns. By contrast, Clare’s hypothetical question to her father later in the novel regarding whether he would have betrayed a Jewish neighbor notably positions the Savages in the potential role of Miep Gies, one of the Franks’s Gentile saviors, rather than that of Jewish victim. This pattern also applies to a second major intertext of the novel that raises the question of Jewish literary Others, Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819). In one scene, unsatisfied by her father’s responses to her questions regarding the Holocaust, Clare changes tack and turns to Scott’s medieval romance, debating with her father how to interpret the relationship between Ivanhoe and Scott’s Jewish heroine Rebecca. According to the ideology of colorism that her father espouses, Rebecca cannot marry Ivanhoe, for to do so would be racially contaminating:

Moreover, just as the novel’s intertextual invocation of the Diary links the Holocaust and slavery, the Ivanhoe episode suggests parallels between England’s internal (Jewish) and external (Black) Others as objects of literary representation. Notably, however, in the discussion of Ivanhoe Clare is (once again against the reader’s expectations) identified with the Saxon hero rather than his Jewish lover: “She knew, that when the time came, should she choose a husband darker than herself, it would be just as if she were Ivanhoe choosing Rebecca rather than Rowena” (99). Thus while Clare, as a reader of Frank’s Diary, becomes what one critic calls the “internal witness of the Jew in his/her darkest moment” (Zayzafoon 73), she does so not so much as a fellow sufferer but as one who is complicit in the oppression of racialized Others. This self-critique of the Creole subject recalls Cliff’s own statement in an interview that “I think when you contend with your own racism and work towards ridding yourself of it, then you’re able to feel with another human being. I felt with Anne Frank” (“The Art” 68).

Cast as Miep Gies or Ivanhoe rather than Anne Frank or Rebecca, Clare is positioned in Abeng not as a fellow sufferer but as a bystander. While this schema serves to advance Cliff’s critique of the Creole’s collaboration in racist ideology, it also relies on an understanding of Jewishness as morally unassailable. Accordingly, while the question of collaboration arises in Abeng in relation to the light-skinned Creole, it is not raised with regard to the Jamaican Jewish colonial presence that the novel also registers. And yet, as we saw in chapters 3 and 4, in an early modern Atlantic world context in which Jews were both the agents and the objects of imperial power, Jewishness also potentially undermines the opposition of oppressor and victim. As members of a near-white trading diaspora, Jews occupied an ambiguous position within the colonial power structure, facing limitations on property and civil rights while at the same time benefiting from the plantation economy.

Accordingly, just before the Anne Frank motif is introduced in Abeng, the narrator calls attention to the double resonance of 1492, the conjunction of the Sephardic expulsion with the onset of the era of exploration and slavery. As I discussed in chapter 2, the narrator then proceeds to invoke the theory that Columbus himself may have been Jewish. Cliff’s allusion in Abeng to Columbus’s possibly crypto-Jewish origins invites a more ambivalent reading of Jews as themselves complicit in the colonial project, a perspective that potentially would align Jewish and light-skinned Creole subjects. So, too, does the novel’s reference to a Jewish overseer who is employed on the Savage family’s ancestral plantation. Yet Cliff portrays the Jewish overseer as a scapegoat and victim of the Savages: “The family’s loss of wealth was put on the reputation of one individual—Mr. Levi, a Jew who was hired as an estate manager in 1845, eleven years after these events were set in motion. The Savages saw themselves as blameless for any downward turn in their fortunes” (29). Thus, although Cliff complicates the slavery/Holocaust analogy by triangulating it with the intermediary figure of the bystander, she preserves the narrative of Jewish victimhood, reserving a more complex, layered treatment for her investigation of the light-skinned Creole.

Back then I knew very little about my own Caribbean heritage. Some years later I saw a photograph of my father’s mother and was shocked to discern traces of East Indian in her face. Soon after I was sitting in a bar in St Kitts with my brother and a friend told us that our grandfather had just walked in and taken a seat in the corner. My brother and I looked quizzically at each other, for we “knew” that our grandfather, our mother’s father, was dead. We had grown up in England with this “knowledge.” But sure enough, seated in the corner was Emmanuel de Fraites, a Jewish trader with Portuguese roots that reached back to the island of Madeira. I now understood that the cultural hybridity that is the quintessential Caribbean condition had certainly marked my person, and the quality of the blood that flowed through my veins was doggedly “impure.”

In The Nature of Blood Phillips creolizes the memory of Frank by elaborating a multivocal narrative structure and by pursuing what Édouard Glissant (following Deleuze and Guattari) would term a rhizomatic approach to intertextuality and identification (see Glissant, Poetics of Relation 11). A multiperspectival text that weaves together several temporally and geographically disparate stories, the novel opens in the voice of Dr. Stephan Stern, a volunteer who is helping to prepare Jewish refugees for life in Palestine. It then shifts to the first-person narration of his niece Eva at the moment of her liberation from a concentration camp. Roughly one quarter of the way through the novel, the narrative voice moves to the third person to chronicle a blood libel that is leveled against a Jewish community in fifteenth-century Portobuffole, near Venice. At its halfway point, after returning to Eva’s voice and then back to the Portobuffole story, the novel introduces a new first-person narrative, that of Shakespeare’s Othello. The remainder of the novel alternates among these four narratives while also incorporating brief interjections from the psychiatrist who tends to Eva after her arrival in London and an Afrocentric figure who attacks Othello’s assimilationist ways.

One of the hallmarks of Phillips’s The Nature of Blood is its self-conscious intertextuality. The texts that it alludes to and reworks include Shakespeare’s Othello and Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl. I want to focus, however, on what is alongside Othello the novel’s most prominent intertext, Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. While the Diary shadows Phillips’s earlier novel Higher Ground (1989), one of whose protagonists is a Polish Jewish refugee sent to England on the Kindertransport (see Ledent, Caryl Phillips 68), the reference becomes much more pronounced in The Nature of Blood. Indeed, whereas Cliff’s Abeng thematizes the colonial subject’s reception of the Diary, Phillips’s The Nature of Blood incorporates the Diary much more thoroughly in both thematic and formal terms. Moreover, while Cliff withholds Clare’s diary entries from the reader, Phillips supplies the first-person voice that is absent from Abeng. In so doing, Phillips echoes not just the content but also the form of Frank’s Diary. Like Maillet’s L’étoile noire, The Nature of Blood fully and unapologetically inhabits the genre of Holocaust fiction, incorporating four elements that standardly pattern Holocaust narratives: innocence, initiation, endurance, and escape (Foley 339). The Nature of Blood also displays many of Holocaust fiction’s characteristic features, including intertextuality, the fracturing of time, a hallucinatory atmosphere, and crematory imagery. Above all, it engages the testimonial mode and in particular the diary genre.

In The Nature of Blood Phillips attempts to imagine what Frank’s diary would have looked like had she been able to continue its writing after her deportation to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The novel portrays Frank’s life beyond the limits of the Diary, which necessarily ends at the moment of her arrest and deportation. Some critics have attributed the popularity of The Diary of a Young Girl to the fact that it allows readers to consider the Holocaust without confronting the concentration camps. Sundquist summarizes this view that “with the death by starvation and illness awaiting Anne at Bergen-Belsen placed beyond the boundaries of the narrative, the voice recorded in the Diary never entirely surrenders its girlish charm” (232–33). Phillips, by contrast, does not shield the reader from the horror of the Holocaust, but instead shows us what the Diary cannot: the boxcar deportation to the camp, the camp experience itself and its aftermath. He does so by supplying the missing diary entries that Frank was unable to compose after her arrest and deportation.²⁶

A number of biographical correspondences link Phillips’s Eva to Frank, including an older sister named Margot, the imperfect marriage of Eva’s parents, and Mrs. Stern’s remoteness from her daughters. The resonances with the Diary are particularly strong in the second section of Eva’s narrative, which looks back to the period before her deportation. Here we find her living in a small apartment in a “voluntary captivity” (60) that recalls the Frank family’s living entombment in the secret annex:

Like Dabydeen’s reworking of Hogarth’s Jew in A Harlot’s Progress, Phillips does not construct a one-to-one relationship between Eva Stern and the historical Anne Frank, but instead adopts a more dynamic and allusive approach. This slippery and dissonant mode of intertextuality is in keeping with Phillips’s broader analogical method in The Nature of Blood, which operates according to a metonymic rather than metaphoric logic, working through asymmetry and (dis)association rather than the assertion of direct correspondences between Black and Jewish experience.²⁷ Accordingly, Phillips resists the trope of interracial romance that governs his earlier novel Higher Ground, in which a Jewish refugee has a brief, abortive affair with a Caribbean immigrant. As Craps notes, Phillips also abandons the metaphorical mode of his first short story, whose Dutch Jewish protagonist substituted directly for Phillips himself (“Linking Legacies” 199). Instead in The Nature of Blood Phillips holds his Jewish and Black protagonists at a remove from one another by situating them in separate temporal and geographical planes—Eva in postwar Germany and London and Othello in early modern Venice. Just as this approach undermines the charge of appropriation infamously leveled by Hilary Mantel in her review of the novel, so does Phillips’s loosely allusive reworking of Frank’s Diary. His fiction generates complex analogical structures that enable him to draw different terms into relation without collapsing the differences among them.

In her illuminating discussion of The Nature of Blood, Anne Whitehead suggests that Phillips’s deeply self-conscious form of trauma fiction signals its mediated relationship to the Holocaust. Through his intertextual technique, “Phillips distances his text from the reality of the Holocaust, providing a space for reflections on the ethics of representation involved in his writing” (Whitehead 106). Yet I would add that the choice of Frank’s Diary as intertext is not incidental to the self-conscious character of the novel.²⁸ As noted earlier, Phillips suggests that Frank bears some responsibility for his literary career. In fact, he goes so far in “On ‘The Nature of Blood’” as to describe his novel as a repayment of “a small part of the personal debt that I owed to the remarkable young girl who used to live next door to what is now the Caribbean Rum Runners Bar and Restaurant” (7). Several years later, in A New World Order (2001), Phillips again invokes Frank in a passage in which he muses on his career as a reader and writer:

A life lived along the twin rails of reading and writing. The one act informing the other. And all the while a particular interest in the work of those who have been dealt the same ambiguous hand. Who am I? How do I explain who I am? How do I come to be here? Frantz Fanon lying in the shallow stony soil of Algeria. Ignatius Sancho standing behind the counter of his Mayfair grocer’s shop. On a hot summer’s day in St Paul de Vence, a grinning James Baldwin threads his way through the Frenchmen playing petanque and sits as “his” table outside the café. The puzzled anxiety on the brow of a young John Coetzee in “white” South Africa. All of them writing about their condition. Reading about their condition and then writing about my own. Developing a passion for literature. Developing a passion for transgression. A confused fifteen-year-old boy is confronted with the reality of Anne Frank and realises that he is not alone. He begins to recognise the laborious certainties of the old order. A life lived along the twin rails of reading and writing. The one informing the other. A passion for literature. Travelling furiously across borders and boundaries.

Here Frank occupies a privileged position in Phillips’s pantheon of literary heroes. While in Abeng Frank’s Diary jostles for space on Clare Savage’s bookshelf alongside classic works of British literature by Scott and Stevenson, in A New World Order Frank finds her place in an alternative canon of what Phillips elsewhere calls “Extravagant Strangers.”²⁹ The Diary emerges in Phillips’s nonfiction essays not simply as a source text but as a text that licenses the act of writing itself. Thus it is not only (as Whitehead argues) that Phillips’s relationship to the Holocaust is mediated by existing narratives such as Frank’s but also, conversely, that his relationship to writing is mediated by the Holocaust. Read from this vantage point, The Nature of Blood expresses a desire to repay the debt and to come to terms with the experience of cross-cultural identification that launched his literary career.³⁰

In The Nature of Blood Phillips acknowledges his debt to Frank not only in thematic terms but also by referencing the diary genre. Through its multiple narrative strands, the novel catalogues different kinds of chronicles, personal and public. Included among these is the Holocaust diary. Like Frank, Phillips’s Eva bears witness to everyday life as it is radically transformed and deformed by the war. She is frequently described in the act of observing; the first line of her narrative is “I watch as the trucks come roaring into the camp, dust and mud flying up behind their wheels” (12). Moreover, like Cliff’s Clare and Maillet’s Sidonie, Eva is not only an observer but also a chronicler of the events she witnesses.

While the diary is one of the most prominent genres of Holocaust writing, few diaries were written by camp inmates, who lacked the opportunity, means, and energy to engage in such an activity and who feared reprisals should their writing be discovered. Instead, diaries were more prevalent among those who lived in Nazi-enforced ghettos or in hiding.³¹ It is appropriate, then, that Eva keeps a diary only before her deportation. Moreover, she quickly abandons it in another dissonant displacement of the Diary: “I sobbed all night. And then, in the morning, I began to keep a journal, but within a week I gave it up, for I could no longer summon the energy to maintain the daily pretense that I was writing to my sister” (67). Yet although Eva discards her diary, her narrative remains haunted by the diary form.

As a nonteleological mode that “takes on special importance at times when subjectivity is perceived to be under threat” (Stewart 418), the diary proves well suited not only to Frank’s chronicle of her seclusion in the secret annex but also to Phillips’s portrait of the camp survivor. In The Diary of a Young Girl, Frank recorded her descent from the relative normalcy of her prewar childhood to the deprivations and distortions of her living entombment: “I can’t imagine that the world will ever be normal for us again,” she wrote on November 8, 1943. “I do talk about ‘after the war,’ but then it is only a castle in the air, something that will never really happen. If I think back to our old house, my girl friends, the fun at school, it is just as if another person lived it all, not me” (103). Bookending Frank’s Diary, which breaks off three days before her arrest, Eva’s narration in The Nature of Blood begins at the moment of the camp’s liberation to convey in a painfully immediate fashion her (ultimately unsuccessful) struggle to recover the sense of self and vision of a postwar future that the war has irreparably ruptured.³²

In the first portion of Eva’s story, which details the period immediately following her liberation, her first-person narrative adopts an episodic, diarylike structure with entries separated by ellipses. Providing a close-up view of the texture of daily life in the newly liberated camp, Eva’s narration obliquely invokes the diary entries that her material and psychological condition prevent her from composing. In taking up the genre of the Holocaust diary, however, Phillips once again effects a series of displacements, omitting the dates that structured Frank’s original narrative, blurring dream and reality, and at times confusing the first and third person. Unlike The Diary of a Young Girl, Eva’s testimony is lacking in authorial control. While the diary is a genre that promises to bring the subject into being, Eva’s chaotic and uneven diaristic reflections register the fragmented sense of self that results from the depersonalizing effect of the camps. These alterations to the diary form convey the mental confusion brought on by the camp and the extreme difficulty of returning to what Eva describes as “strange visions of normal life” (44). The disorderliness of Eva’s narrative is in keeping with the mental deterioration and loss of the ability to concentrate that camp inmates experienced (see Waxman 79).

After Eva’s narrative breaks off briefly to make way for the Portobuffole story, it returns in a more distanced and retrospective mode that bears a stronger formal and thematic resemblance to Frank’s Diary. In this section of the novel, Eva’s memories of her voluntary captivity before her arrest reassert themselves, unreeling progressively backward from her confinement in the small apartment, to the family’s move from their house into the apartment, to the period before this move. These memories are ordered according to seasonal markers, such as “It was almost December” and “Spring arrived” (64–65), that replace the diurnal markers of sunrise and sunset that punctuate the opening portion of her narrative. Yet this temporal order, too, is threatened by the disintegration of Eva’s living conditions. In a passage that echoes the malfunction of the Westertoren clock in Frank’s Diary, time is arrested at the moment of Eva’s deportation: “I gazed up at the church clock. It read five o’clock…. For almost two years, it had read five o’clock. Here, among these houses which had become our prisons and our tombs, there was no midnight, there were no bells, there was no time” (70).

The cohesion of the second portion of Eva’s account is profoundly disrupted by the events that follow. After breaking away again to follow the Othello and Portobuffole stories, Eva’s narrative resumes to detail her deportation. In the boxcar scene the narrative notably shifts to the third person, heralding the loss of voice that her incarceration in the camp will bring.³³ Here Eva’s and her family’s identities begin to erode as the markers of their individuality break down: “Humiliation had descended upon their lives, and they sat huddled and indistinguishable from the others” (156). Once arrived at the camp, the inmates’ shorn hair transforms them into grotesque beings who “all look the same” (164). Eva’s first-person narration subsequently returns, but now abandons paragraphing and shifts to short, disjunctive sentences, becoming virtually unreadable in the face of the loss of meaningful reference points in the campscape that surrounds her. The staccato rhythm of this section recalls Frank’s June 5, 1944 entry, two months before her arrest, in which, during a period of increasing despair, she discarded her normally fluid prose in favor of point form.

Ultimately what Phillips stages here is the collapse of the diary as a mode of self-realization, as Eva finally fails to recover a sense of identity and reality. Eva’s inability to overcome the trauma of the camps is expressed through her departure from realist modes of narration. At the outset of the novel she hallucinates that her mother has returned from the dead; by the end of the novel she is no longer able to “stop dreaming” because she lacks the mental control (184). For Eva, the dreamworld is preferable to an unbearable reality: “She prayed that she might be left undisturbed, for everybody knew that one should never wake anybody having a nightmare. Reality was much worse. Nightmares were acceptable” (166). This turn to the surreal is characteristic both of the “irrealistic tendency” of Holocaust fiction (Foley 349) and of camp diaries, which conveyed the otherworldly quality of what Holocaust victims witnessed through science fiction and horror movie analogies.³⁴

Brenner suggests that Frank’s Diary is best understood as undertaking “a quest for a ‘new narrative form’ which would make it possible to ‘share an experience’ to which a parallel cannot be found” (109). She argues that, while the stage and screen adaptations attempted to confine the Diary within standard literary categories, the Diary itself strains against the limits of language and form to convey a reality that Frank was aware would seem unreal to most readers (110). Frank’s quest for a new literary form is shared by Phillips, who in The Nature of Blood elaborates a highly innovative narrative structure. While imitating the Holocaust diary, Phillips also creolizes this narrative form by intertwining Eva’s testimony with other private and public chronicles, including Othello’s memoir of his initiation into Venetian society and a more impersonal, scholarly-sounding account of the Portobuffole blood libel.³⁵

In affiliating his novel with Frank’s diaristic practice, Phillips constructs a relationship, not of Bloomian anxiety of influence or competition, but of homage. This relationship between author and literary precursor is thematized in The Nature of Blood in a scene that takes place in the Venetian ghetto. Here, instead of the Black writer serving as amanuensis of the Jew, we find the inverse scenario. While wandering the city of Venice, Othello ventures for a second time into the Jewish ghetto, a powerful spatial signifier in Phillips’s work of linkages between Jewish and Black experience.³⁶ In the Venetian ghetto Othello seeks out a Jewish scribe who can help him to decipher Desdemona’s letter:

Once inside [the synagogue], I encountered a weather-beaten, warp-faced Jew toiling over a book in the semi-darkness…. I offered up the letter to the Jew and he immediately understood what I expected of him. While he scanned the letter, he gestured to me that I should sit. Then, having examined it, he looked up at me. He did not betray any emotion, but simply began to recite to me the contents of the letter. As he began, I almost asked him to stop in order that I might press upon him the knowledge that I could read, and inform him that it was only this dense and unclear script that had defeated me. But it was too late. Once he had begun, I was intoxicated. The lady stopped short of professing a love for me, but her desire to see me again, and as soon as possible, was clearly articulated.

What is the meaning of this transaction between Othello and the Jew? While the scene has been understood in negative terms as exposing Othello’s inability to make connections between his condition and that of the Venetian Jews (Whitehead 102), I read it as an allegory of the relationship of the Black writer to his Jewish literary antecedents. In this scene, Othello is aided in his quest to access “the heart of society” (144) by a fellow outsider who has greater familiarity with the “dense and unclear script” of European culture. As he avows, the Moor is a reader himself, but he nonetheless requires the Jew’s help to decode the European text. In the Venetian ghetto scene the Jew and the Moor are sympathetic allies who conduct a transaction that is not so much financial (indeed the Jew refuses additional payment for delivering the letter to Desdemona) as it is textual and scribal. The Jew as an interpreter of European texts and as a writer assists the Moor in articulating his own literary missive, recalling some of the neoslave narratives examined in chapter 3 in which the port Jew facilitates the slave’s acquisition of literacy and serves as broker of the dominant culture. The Venetian ghetto scene thus recalls Phillips’s account of how his early contact with Jewish experience and the Holocaust served as a midwife to his literary career.³⁷

In The Nature of Blood the relationship between Jewishness and textuality is further highlighted by a second Shakespearean reference. When Othello first arrives in Venice, he is aided by a retired merchant who informs him about the Jewish ghetto. The Venetian ghetto scenes necessarily allude not only to Shakespeare’s Othello but also to Shylock, who emerges alongside Frank as another member of Phillips’s literary pantheon. “Shylock has always been my hero,” Phillips avers (“In the Ghetto” 55).³⁸ Much as Cliff cites Frank’s Diary alongside Scott’s Ivanhoe, Phillips pairs the Diary with The Merchant of Venice. These choices of secondary intertexts are significant, for through them Abeng and The Nature of Blood engage what are arguably the two most prominent and influential treatments of Jewishness in the English literary canon.³⁹ Cliff and Phillips thus not only invoke Anne Frank but also foreground “the Jew” more broadly as a figure of otherness in English literature through an intertextual strategy that underscores the association of Jewishness in both authors’ work with questions of literary representation, canonicity, and authorship. As secondary intertexts, Ivanhoe and The Merchant of Venice reveal how the Caribbean/diaspora subject’s reception of the English literary canon simultaneously entails an encounter with the constructions of Jewishness that are embedded in that canon.

I have argued that Cliff’s and Phillips’s cross-cultural engagements with the Holocaust are not isolated quirks of the literary imagination. Rather, they may be understood as part of a larger Caribbean/diaspora intellectual tradition, one that extends beyond the early postwar francophone anticolonial context that has thus far been the focus of critical attention. I have further suggested that Cliff’s and Phillips’ articulations of Holocaust memory need to be read against an additional frame of reference: that of the deep historical presence of Sephardic Jews in the Dutch and British Caribbean. This historical consciousness, most dramatically embodied in Phillips’s chance meeting with his Sephardic grandfather in a St. Kitts bar, at once supports and complicates the identification with the Holocaust in Abeng and The Nature of Blood.

Situating Abeng and The Nature of Blood within the broader historical and cultural landscape of the Sephardic Caribbean lends insight into the modes of comparison Cliff and Phillips pursue. In their novels, both writers eschew the naively substitutive form of identification they had favored in their adolescent encounters with the Holocaust. Yet, as we have seen, although Cliff resists a direct identification between Clare and her Jewish heroine, her reluctance to allow Jewishness any of the contradictions that she discerns in Creole subjectivity flattens the Jewish term of her analogy. In Abeng Cliff relies heavily on a narrative of Jewish victimhood despite her awareness of the historical participation of Jews in the plantation economy. Cliff’s later fiction similarly privileges Jewish victimhood, countering the Black-Jewish tensions that came to a head in the early 1990s in her adoptive home of the United States.⁴⁰

In The Nature of Blood, by contrast, Phillips presents his Jewish heroine as a morally ambivalent figure, a member of Primo Levi’s “gray zone” in which “the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge” (Levi 42). A rhizomatic logic governs Phillips’s approach to intertextuality in the novel, which entangles Frank’s story with those of several other figures. As critics have discussed, a complex network of resonances and dissonances emerges among these narratives that simultaneously invites and discourages the association of Black and Jewish experience. The desire for identification with the Holocaust victim is further challenged by the revelation late in the novel that Eva had been a member of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners who were forced to dispose of corpses from the gas chambers, making them unwilling auxiliaries in the murder of their own people.⁴¹ Thus, instead of pursuing what Levi terms a “Manichaean” reading of history, one that “shuns half-tints and complexities,” Phillips affirms Levi’s observation that in the Lagers “human relations…could not be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors” (Levi 37). Ambivalence also enters Phillips’s novel through the figure of Malka, the Ethiopian immigrant to Israel with whom Eva’s Uncle Stephan has an encounter that calls into question the project of Israeli nationhood. Phillips’s attention to the intra-Jewish racism that oppresses Malka and other Ethiopian Jews signals a nuanced, critical reading of Jewishness and its relationship to dynamics of inclusion and exclusion.