Exploring Personal Trauma and Resilience in Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage

Abstract

This paper is a critical analysis of Caryl Phillips’s The Final Passage (1985) through the lens of the postmemory theory developed by Marianne Hirsh, and the resilience theory of Ann Masten. Caryl Phillips is a black British writer of Caribbean origin. His personal biography greatly influences his works, which mainly develop trauma and identities in the diaspora context. This article uses the principles of the postmemory concept of inherited trauma to examine Phillips’s first novel, The Final Passage (1985). The analysis is centred on the main protagonist, Leila, who faces adversity in her native Caribbean village, and whose life is a succession of traumatic situations from her conception, her childhood, up to her adulthood. Her trauma results from the lack of knowledge of her father, her challenging marital relationship with an irresponsible man, and her difficult relationship with her mother. The study offers a nuanced and complex way of understanding Leila’s trauma and resilience to fatality, especially emphasizing her ability to navigate between uncertainties in search of home and a sense of identity. Leila’s fight to overcome her trauma, her determination to pursue well-being for her son and her baby to come, and her emotional resistance to despair, fatality, and failure supported by inner strength and guided by her agency can be used to instil resilience into the Sahelian populations, who survived insecurity and have been victims of terrorism hostilities, and compelled live everything behind to find refuge.   

Keywords: personal trauma, migration, emotional resilience, home, identity.