[The survivor's] suffering is deeply connected to memory. To move on is to forget. To forget is a crime. How can they both remember and move on?

(NB 157)

In his ground-breaking and seminal text The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903, the African-American W. E. B. Du Bois made the following statement: ‘I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not’. Three years earlier, at the first organized PanAfrican Association Conference held in London in 1900, Du Bois had declared that the ‘problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line’, thus highlighting the comparable situations of Africans both within Africa and its diaspora and encouraging international contact between activists in America, the Caribbean and Africa. In his novel The Nature of Blood, published in 1997, Phillips engages with Du Bois's comments and embarks upon a creative interaction between the charismatic and mercurial writing of William Shakespeare and the analysis of the unconscious mechanisms of racism and colonialism propounded by the Algerian psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Hence, in The Nature of Blood, the psychoanalytically inspired observations of Fanon are used to read Shakespeare's Othello (1602-4), a play that in turn had been inspired by Girladi Cinthio's collection of Italian stories Hecatommithi, published in Venice in 1566. Seen in dialogue, Phillips's, Fanon's and Shakespeare's texts articulate a sensitive evocation of the ‘neurotic's predicament’ under the conditions of racism and his overwhelming desire to become ‘suddenly white’.

Inspired by the lines in Billie Holiday's song, ‘Blood on the leaves … blood at the root’, Phillips's earlier play, Strange Fruit, had explored and criticized the limitations of ‘négritude’, a movement of the late 1960s and 1970s that had endeavoured to reaffirm the place of African culture within the context of other historical intellectual and cultural struggles within the diaspora. In The Nature of Blood Phillips tackles the question of race and humanism in a more detailed and expansive way, engaging in an archaeological excavation of a literary and cultural past that endeavours to make sense of the present. Phillips's text takes on three very distinct perspectives.