The Cross Roads of Divergent Culture in Caryl Phillips’ The Final Passage

Abstract

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –––

I took the one less travelled by

And that has made all the difference.”

These words of Robert Frost shed light on the importance of taking decisions at crucial moments. Though the journey of life is undulating, it is also wavering. For immigrants, it is an expedition that puts down their culture, identity, and elevates the eminence of the host country. The choices to live a better life are few and harrowing. Caryl Phillips, being a Caribbean writer, explicates in his works the turmoil of being an expatriate, the struggles of the psyche and the cultural cringe. Culture to Raymond Williams was a collision of the way of life and signs that dominate society. He states in his books Culture and Society that culture exists in such collision and the determinants like art, class and others have been shaping it from time to time. As per his records, class prejudice, class legislation, class consciousness, class conflict and class war are much debated only after the nineteenth century. Richard Hoggart has stated that culture did not consist of free-floating ideas; it had to be understood as embedded in social practices. But it was something other than a reflection of some more determinate base in some dependent superstructure. Phillips’s works are the looking glass through which the experiences of the immigrants, especially of the Caribbean settled in England, are examined. His novel, The Final Passage, echoes the cultural inflictions that wreck the life of a young girl, Leila. The insinuated narration brings out the distress caused by an insentient and dominant white community. Leila, who encounters the plight of ambivalent identity and racial incongruity, is denounced by both ‘the home’ and ‘the host’. This paper purports to trace the swaying cultural conflicts in the novel and to show how hybridity affects and curbs the development of humans as an ‘individual’.