Caryl Phillips on writing, travelling and the image of black men

Caryl Phillips has a thing about blackness. As a former student of his once told me: "Everything Caz owns is black. His laptop is black, all his clothes are black. He drove a black Mercedes."

Even in Manhattan, where hepcats and heiresses still cloak themselves in black, this makes Phillips an easy mark. Stepping into Le Monde, a bistro near Columbia University, the 47-year-old novelist arrives in a ripple of blackness. He doesn't simply wear the colour — although he is, of course, dressed in all black — but disappears inside it.

It was Phillips, when he was here earlier in the year for the Writers and Readers week, who rattled Kim Hill when he declined to agree to her proposition that he was angry about racism.

The way blackness can swallow at a man is at the heart of Phillips' latest novel, Dancing in the Dark, a mournful tale about turn-of-the-century stage performer Bert Williams. A gifted pantomime artist who read Goethe in his leisure time, Williams performed in blackface, which meant the West Indian-born star prepared for work by rubbing cork on his already black skin, exaggerating the sweep of his lips with red gloss.

The minstrel face this created appears "ghastly to us today", says Phillips, putting it lightly. But during the early 1900s Williams made a fortune doing it. He performed on Broadway long before whites were rushing up to Harlem. In fact, he was the highest-paid member of the Ziegfeld Follies.

The Faustian nature of this bargain intrigued Phillips, who has written about race and identity his entire career. "The more I read about him, the more I thought to myself: what on earth was he thinking?" Phillips takes a sip of lemonade and cringes. "I mean, what on earth would make somebody go against the grain — and continue to perform and embrace the mockery of this image?"

Some of the answers can be found in Dancing in the Dark, which turns Williams' life into a three-act of novelettes. The first section describes Williams' journey to the stage. The second introduces his rise to fame, his weakness for drink, his sexless marriage, and the problems that developed with his African-American co-star, George Walker. In the final section, Williams has a short, lonely ride at the top, a stranger to everyone, including himself.

Phillips began his literary career as a playwright, so the rhythms and form of stage life came naturally to him. The trick was inverting the novel's traditional arc toward self-knowledge. "I wanted it to seem as if he was disappearing," says Phillips.

And so as it progresses, Dancing in the Dark gives us less and less access to Williams' inner life. By the end, we are literally in the audience, regarding the mask he has adopted.

Phillips doesn't want the reader to take in this spectacle and judge Williams, but empathise with him. "The tragedy isn't just the reality of the situation at the time. The tragedy is when someone like Williams takes on some of the responsibility for [this compromise] all by themselves."

Since Williams left so little written record of his true thoughts — his autobiography was ghost-written, just one of the films survives — Phillips had to study Williams' external persona for cracks. He found very few.

"I talked to a woman who had performed with him," says Phillips. But there were no gems there. "She said he was always a gentleman. And that he didn't talk much."

The most telling anecdote Phillips turned up is already well known. After a performance, Williams walked into a bar near Baltimore with W.C. Fields and ordered drinks. Fields was served, Williams was told his would cost $50.

"Williams pulled out $500 and laid it on the table. He told the bar man, that's fine. I'll take 10."

The comparison between this behaviour and the bling-bling lifestyle of today's rap stars is worth thinking about. MCs such as Jay-Z or 50 Cent have made millions selling albums mostly to white Americans so long as they keep rapping about thug life, violence, and hustling.

"There is a built-in commercial imperative to rap," says Phillips, digging into a plate of pasta. "But it's not much different to back then. Only now you are given a vulgar, violent, contemporary minstrel role to play — this is the dominant image of black men in our age — and whites say we will believe you more if you behave this way."

Phillips isn't the only writer in America to make this connection to the past. Stanley Crouch, the outspoken African-American jazz critic has done so as well, arguing that blacks have taken a step backwards since jazz figures of the 20s and 30s eclipsed minstrel shows.

"The problem is that the conventions of rock'n'roll, the conventions of rebellion have been projected as the identity of jazz," Crouch said in a recent interview. "In other words, people don't know that Duke Ellington and all of those guys were dressing beautifully, speaking perfectly, and playing all of that extraordinary music, that they were rebelling against the minstrel images that now dominate us again in the form of gangsta rap videos."

Whereas Crouch comes at this from within American life, Phillips does so as an outsider.

He moved from St Kitts in the Caribbean to Leeds as an infant in 1958 and grew up in England, reading little literature by black writers.

Since he came into adulthood, Phillips has learned how to protect and explore his identity at the same time: travelling in life, and through books.

The two came together quite early for him. It was on a trip to America during the 70s that he discovered the work of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. "If I was going to continue to live in Britain," he once wrote, "how was I to reconcile the contradiction of feeling British, while being constantly told ... that I did not belong."

Reading black writers was one way. Another way of course was to keep moving. Shortly after graduation, he moved to Edinburgh, where he lived while writing plays and film scripts for the BBC — which, he reminds me, was running a minstrel programme as late as the 70s. In the early 80s, Phillips returned to St Kitts for the first time, and came away from the experience with a novel, A State of Independence, which retraces a couple's journey from the Caribbean to London in search of a better life.

Although some writers would have embraced London at this point, Phillips squirmed. So, on receiving the advance for his first novel he went on the longest trip he'd taken to date. For almost a year he wandered, down to Morocco, up to Spain, over to America. The result was The European Tribe, whose meditations about the tribalism that defined life in Europe remains just as fresh today.

In the 20 years since then Phillips has produced six more works of fiction (including Crossing the River, a Booker Prize finalist, and A Distant Shore, in 2003, winner of the Commonwealth Prize); a volume of criticism; two anthologies; The Atlantic Sound, another continental meditation on travel and rootlessness; and the film script to Ismail Merchant's adaptation of V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur.

Nearly all of these projects have involved travel of some sort or other, which has made Phillips a frequent-flyer pasha. One of his biggest upcoming trips involves ferrying students from Bard College, in New York, where he taught until recently, over to Ghana, where they meet local writers and artists, but more importantly, to learn a thing or two about blackness.

One can detect a certain edge of sympathy in his voice, perhaps a nod to Williams' plight by putting students in his shoes. "They learn more during this one week than they do thinking about identity all semester."

*  Secker & Warburg, $45