Philip Phillips The Atlantic Sound

Phillips’s book The Atlantic Sound is related to the history of slavery and its impact on contemporary socio-cultural environment. It is a travel book but it is not only confined to non fictional narrative of travelled places. The book is a mixture of geographical portraits, historical events, interviews, letters, newspaper articles, speeches, poems and so on. Phillips decides to visit the three points of triangular trade that linked America, Africa and Europe. He juxtaposes the stories of past with his own present experiences. The book presents a personal insight into history and culture. The Atlantic Ocean is not only seen as a vast geographical structure that has separated the lands and people around it but is also presented as an entity
The postcolonial anthropological studies can not be fully understood without an eco-critical attention. The sea plays an important role in shaping the text of the Atlantic sound. Knepper metaphorically calls the Atlantic Sound as “embodying a poetic of seascapes” (qtd in Maufort 156). Phillips gives a more precise geographical orientation in his essay “The ‘High Anxiety’ of Belonging”. When his lawyer asked a question about how his body should be disposed of, Phillips answered that, “Ί wish my ashes to be scattered at the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at a point equidistant between Britain, Africa and North America” (Eckstein 63). Benedicte Ledent tries to find the reason behind the will of Caryl Phillips, “The choice of this watery grave is no doubt the expression of his being forever enmeshed in the complexities triggered off by the Middle Passage and the triangular trade. It also marks a development from a feeling of being homeless and existentially “adrift” to a sense of having finally found an anchorage in the ocean, albeit of an ambiguous kind since the sea implies constant movements and fluctuations” ( Ledent 199). In an interview with Clingman Phillips also talks about it:
Then there is a literal question of speaking to my lawyer about a will. Like most people, I felt I had to make a will, and sitting across the desk from my lawyer, my mind returned to the moment when I was on the banana boat – which I relate in the prologue to The Atlantic Sound, when I was retracing the journey my parents took when they came with me to Britain. Although that was a hellishly miserable journey, when I was on the ship I did try to calculate that mid point in the ocean.