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Chloé Williams

Professor Cynthia Quarrie

ENGL470: Contemporary Black British Literature

6 February 2023

The Negative Spaces of Speech: Performance and Dissociation in Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child.

Caryl Phillips, in The Lost Child, weaves together three stories all situated in Britain

during different time periods. What links these stories together is not only the essence of family

that can be found in all of them (a poor mother and her child (i.e. Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff),

Monica and her two sons, and finally the short intermission by the Bronte family), but the trauma

which the characters all endure. However, in The Lost Child, bad things seem to happen

off-stage; Phillips focuses most of his narrative in the banality of daily life, which in turn

highlights how trauma can be found in the mundane. This point is essential to conversations

about race, especially in a post-colonial environment; in a world where microaggressions are

widespread, sometimes even more common than macroaggressions, it is imperative that we open

our eyes to the subtleties of discriminatory and racist ideologies.

Phillips addresses these issues through general themes of performance and dissociation.

The idea of portraying a certain role, putting on a show, playing a part, and more… When one

performs, they are inherently dissociated from their “true” self, and therefore alienated from their

peers. In The Lost Child, characters are always either performing, or watching the world as

though it were a performance; it is not only people of color who are affected by this, but they are

affected the most.

By playing with this idea of constant performance, Phillips is able to give us a glance at

the “behind the scenes” of mundane life, and how it consequently might affect the human
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psyche. Perhaps the most striking consequence of constantly performing (and therefore

dissociating) becomes what I would call the “negative spaces of speech”; in other words, the

things that are left unsaid. Indeed, in The Lost Child, words that are unvoiced become the most

important.