The bestselling author Caryl Phillips has for years written about and explored the experience of migration through his spellbinding and award-winning novels, plays, and essays. In this fascinating collection he looks at the notion of belonging prior to and following 9/11, beginning with a reflection on his own experience as one of the only black boys in his school in the UK alongside his first interaction with a British Muslim boy who joined the school.
Phillips turns to his years of living and teaching in the United States—including a riveting chronicle of the day the two towers fell—as well as historical and literary reflections with James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and other writers who grappled with notions of migration and belonging in their own day.
