Crossing the river: Movement, Transgression and Liminality
Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips deals with complex spatial-temporal perspectives on the lives of three black people whom Phillips connects not only through their similar fates (or rather dooms) but also through their crossings of different thresholds, which will be discussed in this essay. In between each crossing or during them, all three characters reside (for long or short) in a so-called liminal phase, which is, in my opinion, the major part of their 'going-beyonds'.
Nash, Marta and Travis are assumingly two brothers and a sister living divided by space and time which makes it impossible for them to be biologically connected, yet their common father of Africa interconnects them in their fate of being in between two worlds: the white and the black one. All three of them travel in their lives and the journeys they undergo are significant, not necessarily in their purpose nor content, but rather in the fact that they are not simple movings from A to B. In effect, after every one of them reaches point B, the journey continues or transgresses beyond that point opening space for something important to happen or to be seen. The goal of their traveling, therefore, becomes not to arrive at point B, but rather to cross it. Now, prior to exemplifying my thoughts, let me define the highlighted terms.
Going-beyond or transgressing is an interesting concept used by many, yet explained by a few. It is a phenomenon well-seen in Phillip’s essay ''Introduction to a new world order'', where he describes his traveling (s) to the ancestors’ land with his mother, by an airplane. (Phillips 2) There he explains his feelings about not only reaching a final point of the journey but going beyond it in order to reach a greater (not necessarily positive) conclusion. Phillips is a black man who lives in a predominantly white society and struggles to identify himself, and so he travels a lot in order to find a way to classify himself. When he reaches point B of his journey, Africa, he transgresses it in a dialogue with a waiter, who says:
I am so sorry to hear about your princess. You must be very upset. (Phillips 5)
This is an exact point of transgression or going beyond by realising a new concept unexpected in the current circumstances. A black man in Africa is receiving condolences for Princess Diana’s death by yet another black African. Phillips is neither African nor British, but he is at the same time both African and British, and it takes additional transgression in his journey to understand this.
Transgression, or going beyond, needs to be differentiated from moving or mobility. In his book On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, Cresswell suggests that mobility involves a simple displacement of an object. (Cresswell 2) In the movement are involved both time and space, i.e. it is the spatialization of time, and temporalization of space (Cresswell 4), but no notion beyond a final point is mentioned. However, there is another significant point to state. Namely, the points A and B are up until now considered to be the most significant coordinates because they are alpha and omega of a kind, but what happens in between them over the course of a journey needs to be defined, too.
The time or space between two points is known as a liminal phase. (Thomassen, 12) Both people and objects can be in a space or time of liminality. Some of the examples of this phenomenon are an airport terminal, a lift, a teenage boy and a pregnant woman. What do all of these liminal objects and personas, as Turner (234) defines them, have in common? They are all in the state of not belonging to the proper space or time. They are unclassified in the sense that they are no longer and not yet classified. An airport terminal is a place which connects land and air, and it is a bridge between these two. A lift is a part of a building, yet it does not belong to any of the floors. A teenage boy is no longer a boy, yet he is not a man. Finally, a pregnant woman is not a mother, but she is also not a not-mother.
Now, let us go back to the story and analyse these three concepts – movement, transgression and liminality – in terms of the three main characters.
Nash, a former slave, travels from America to Africa to educate people about Christianity. He is a sort of a missionary sent by his former owner to proliferate his newly accepted beliefs. After traveling from point A to point B and arriving in Africa, Nash exhibits his true nature and behaves in a ‘non-Christian way’. He does not answer his former owner’s letter, so this Christian fundamentalist decides to search after him and travels to Africa. When he arrives there, he is told that Nash had died. This information becomes the point B for a slave owner. However, he is furthermore told that Nash had not behaved in a Christian manner (taken that he’d had many wives), and that is a threshold point, after which begins transgression: going beyond and seeing a new reality, which in the case of the slave-owner is very traumatic.
Furthermore, Martha, an old black woman, who attempts to move from Virginia to California in order to escape another enslaving, shares Nash’s fate of a slave, yet lives in a different spatial and temporal setting. She retrospectively thinks of her life and the mistakes she has committed, and this introspection happens while she is in a liminal phase just before she dies as a stranger. Namely, when Martha dies, a woman who is about the bury her body does not know Martha’s name and decides to personally name her in order to mark the grave. Paradoxically, over the course of her life as a slave Martha’s names have been changed several times, but after her journey from her birth (A) to her death (B) is finally completed, dead Martha transgresses the threshold and is about to be given a name once again.
Finally, Travis, a black U.S. soldier in England who fought in the Second World War, is a character who encompasses all three phenomena we have been discussing. After he, a black American, moves to England to fight, he has an affair with a white woman, who gets pregnant. A baby born out of this affair is both a liminal persona and a transgression element, originating from a movement of its father, another liminal persona who ‘goes beyond’.
In conclusion, in this book, Phillips manages to depict how it is to be an unclassified, liminal person who transgresses over a border of death or deliverance. Nash, Martha and Travis’s lives are physical and mental movements filled with a feeling of not belonging, which always end after the end; they transgress.
Bešlija Damir
REFERENCES
C. Phillips. A new world order. Vintage International. New York. 2001.
C. Phillips. Crossing the River. Routledge. New York. 1995. Reference to a whole book.
B. Thomassen. Liminal Landscapes. Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between. Routledge. London. 2012.
T. Cresswell. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. Routledge. New York. 2006.
V. W. Turner. Betwixt and Between the Liminal period in the Rites de Passage. The symbolic Analysis of Ritual. London. 1979.