Silences that Ride the Air: Soundscaping Slavery in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River

Is anyone listening out there? The artists who write and produce radio dramas believe that a limitless imaginative world is possible. Radio drama is the most flexible of forms, allowing a freedom to experiment usually inhibited by considerations of space, time, and money in live theatre. It is no coincidence that the experimental nature of Caryl Phillips’s radio plays fits perfectly into Brater’s idea of “performative voice” (Brater 1994). Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1985), in particular, illustrates the necessity of filling silence with something, anything at all, by telling the Africans’ trade story and trauma created by way of soundscaping sounds, pauses and silences.