Caryl Phillips: Dancing in the Dark

In his latest novel, Caryl Phillips attempts to bring to life the coloured entertainer Bert Williams (1874-1922), whose minstrel performances in blackface made him the most successful and highly-paid performer — black or white — in the United States during the early part of the 20th century.

In front of predominantly white audiences, Williams transformed himself from a tall and dignified West Indian into a shuffling, dull-witted, clumsy, watermelon-eating Negro of questionable intelligence.

With his partner George Walker in tow, the duo played up to stereotypical black characters in shows like The Two Real Coons. Walker received the better end of the stick, perfecting the role of the dapper, city-slick Negro dude. Their all-black cast flourished, even travelling by request across the Atlantic to perform at Buckingham Palace.

With each application of burnt cork to his face, Williams — understandably — becomes alienated from himself, an effect that lingers long after he wipes off his stage makeup. "And the first time he looked in the mirror his heart sank like a stone for he knew that this was not any man that he recognised. This was     somebody else's fantasy."

British Caribbean author Caryl Phillips, winner of the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize for A Distant Shore, is acclaimed for exploring the complexities of migration, displacement and identity, particularly on characters who were part of the African diaspora. It is no wonder, then, that Phillips has chosen Williams, born in the Bahamas and taken to the United States when he was 11 years old, as the focus for his latest novel.

Despite the inclusion of some newspaper reports and extracts of plays, Phillips admittedly takes full creative licence in (re)imagining the rarely documented life of Williams, his wife Lottie, George Walker and his wife Ada. What Phillips accomplishes extremely well in this novel is the examination of Williams' disintegrating inner life. What readers receive is a disheartening picture of a man divided by his onstage persona and the one he knows to be his true self.

At times, the novel suffers from heavy-handedness. Williams' state of melancholia is increasingly portrayed in overwrought prose. "At the end of the day Bert needs time to think about what he is doing. He needs time to consider and reconsider everything that he has done, and to turn his short life over in his mind and think and drink and drink and think for there is nobody with whom he cares to talk."

Moving from the moody inner dialogues of Williams to the first-person narratives of George, Lottie and Ada can be disorienting. In previous novels Phillips balances multiple voices with ease, but in Dancing in the Dark the shift to various characters is more than a little awkward. This novel — in comparison to Phillips' prior efforts — feels forced, no doubt a result of the sheer effort of trying to reconstruct the problematical life of Bert Williams. Overall, though, an interesting read.


* Gail Bailey is an Auckland reviewer
* Secker & Warburg, $45