Sonorous Temporality and Affective Memory in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore

Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore maps the psychological landscapes of displacement and trauma through the intersecting lives of Dorothy Jones. She is a retired English schoolteacher filled with grief and societal alienation. Gabriel/Solomon is an African refugee fleeing genocide and navigating the precarious liminality of asylum. This study argues that Phillips employs a fragmented narrative structure not merely as a formal device, but as a profound embodiment of sonorous temporality. It is a concept denoting how traumatic memory resonates and reverberates across time. Sonorous Temporality disrupts chronological order and manifests as intrusive, affect-laden sonic and sensory fragments. The novel’s alternating perspectives and temporal shifts function like echoes, where the silenced histories of colonial violence, familial loss, and racist aggression surface. The temporal shifts act not as coherent narratives but as haunting, dissonant sounds and visceral sensations. These sensations overwhelm the protagonists’ present. Dorothy’s insomnia and hallucinations, and Solomon’s flashbacks are textual performances of trauma’s enduring, non-verbal affect. Their tentative, ultimately tragic connection underscores the failure of conventional communication to bridge the chasms carved by personal and historical trauma. By analysing Phillips’s use of silence, ambient sound (the canal, the pub, the prison), and the characters’ internal soundscapes, this paper demonstrates how A Distant Shore theorizes trauma as an embodied, temporal dissonance, where the past is not recalled but sonically re-experienced, shaping relationality in the fractured present.