6 - ‘Daughters Sacrificed to Strangers’: Interracial Desires and Intertextual Memories in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge

Summary

What [the slave] could propose to himself by telling a lie which must be so soon detected, I cannot conceive; but I am assured, that unless a negro has an interest in telling the truth, he always lies – in order to keep his tongue in practice.

– Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor

You … become aware of the possibility of being somebody who can … perhaps do something about redressing the imbalance of some ills and falsehoods that have been perpetrated by others about your own history.

– Caryl Phillips, interview with Carol Margaret Davidson

‘Wordy War’: Rewriting the Archive

Like much other postcolonial literature, including the poetry examined in the previous chapter, Cambridge is a work in which intertextuality plays a vital role. As Lars Eckstein has shown, the novel incorporates into itself a dizzying array of sources, drawing chiefly on white and black first-person accounts of Caribbean slavery produced during a period from the 1770s to the 1840s. Prominent among these writings are Lewis's Journal and Equiano's The Interesting Narrative, texts respectively discussed in detail and more briefly earlier in this book. The first of these works is integral to Part I of the novel, which consists of the diary of Emily Cartwright, a thirty-year-old middle-class English spinster, deputed by her father to inspect his West Indian sugar estate at an unspecified moment after abolition.