Demon Landscapes, Uneven Ecologies: Folk-Spirits in Guyanese Fiction

Abstract

I emphasize the affinity between the Nondescript and the massacouraman since my intention in this article is to move from a consideration of Waterton’s joke as an unconscious expression of the anxieties provoked in colonial explorers by confrontation with the Amerindian spirit landscape of the Guyanese interior – anxieties that often revolved around the potential breakdown of received colonialist understandings of the relationship between human and extra - human natures – to an analysis of the very different significance of the massacouraman for postcolonial authors. In what follows, I first consider the way the Nondescript’s massacouraman - like scrambling of species boundaries and its allusive manifestation of anxieties over the organization of nature might be viewed in relation to processes of uneven and combined development. Drawing on Stephen Shapiro’s claim that Gothic modes and devices tend to flourish during periods of transition in the capitalist world - system, I connect the element of Got hic grotesquerie that surrounds Waterton’s creation to the reorganization of the global economy in the early nineteenth century and its implications for the peoples and landscapes of Guyana. I next examine a selection of Guyanese novels in which depictions of the massacouraman help mediate the felt experience of later periods of ecological change. Focusing on Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder (1964), Roy Heath’s From the Heat of the Day (1979), and Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl (1988), I show how such depictions respond to the upheavals involved in the reconfiguration of Guyana’s economy over the course of the twentieth century, from the decline and subsequent reorganization of its sugar industry in the period 1920 - 1960 to the impact of neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s. My analysis will be framed by the world - ecology perspective, which posits reality as a historically - and geographically - fluid (yet cyclically stabilized) set of actively reproducing relations between manifold species and environments. In this perspective, historical systems are understood as coproduced by humans alongside the rest of nature, such that capitalism, for example, is to be viewed as a world - ecology – as a historically specific, systemically patterned bundle of human and extra - human relations.