Trajectories of Resilience: Indigenous Healing Folkways in the Selected Short Stories of Wilson Harris

Abstract

Trajectories of Resilience:Indigenous Healing Folkways in the Selected Short Stories of Wilson Harris Hannah Regis The Guyanese philosopher and writer Wilson Harris1 has long emphasized in his fiction and theoretical writing the myriad ways in which the Caribbean and South American human and natural worlds are interwoven. The deep impact of the Guyanese topography upon Harris's psyche has its roots in his early vocation as a government land surveyor during the 1940s and 1950s. His connection between the fluidity of the South American landscape and his creative imagination served to unfix reading habits that divided the world into colonial binaries. Inspired by the ancestral faces which he perceived in the ravines, rapids of rivers, tides, waterfalls, and rocks, Harris developed a literary methodology that encoded this reality. This critical process is emphasized in fluid time scales in the narrative, the coexistence of the dead and the living, juxtaposed images, and a dreamlike universe. Historically, European capitalists designated the Caribbean and South American territories as destinations for capital flows and resource extraction. The vast volume of water, hectares of thick tree canopies, and giant freshwater lakes were prime attractions for Spanish, Dutch, and English undertakers. This historical backdrop encapsulates the deterministic cycles of conquest and disempowerment, which decimated the Caribbean's Indigenous people groups and landscapes. From the colonial gaze, the New World was fundamentally perceived as monolith, one-dimensional, and incapable of independent creativity and self-productivity. This led to the European scientific objectification of the Caribbean universe, which translated into conquest and mastery. [End Page 61] Many communities and ecosystems were sacrificed at the altar of relentless production. Although Harris's main focus has been on the South American hinterlands, his planetary and geological turn opens up ways to think about the global, historical, and modern dynamics of neocapitalism marked, for example, by forms of debt and bonded labor, territorial dispossession, and ecological plunder. He searches for a radical change to these tragic fates through the cultural horizons of myth. In the essay, "Profiles of Myth and the New World," he defines myth as the sedimented aspects of culture that pertain to every ethnic group in the Caribbean and South America (1999, 201). He avers that these foundational vestiges, which have been lodged in the Caribbean and South American womb of space, can be retooled in literature as identified in settings or locations that contain spiritual gateways, sacred figures, archetypal characters, totems, spirit companions, and a sense of time that is fluid—all for rebuilding a viable reality (1999, 201–211). The way in which Harris intermixes a diversity of cultural histories in his fiction has been documented by many critics, including Sandra Drake. Drake notes that Harris's deployment of dualities, conjoining motifs, and ambivalences can be read as his rejection of any perspective that resembled tyrannical paradigms (1986, 177). Harris scholar Michael Gilkes also observes that Harris's poetics of "heterogeneity" and "radical dialectic," with its intersecting expressions of Greek deities, West African limbo and Haitian vodun, Meso-American bush babies, resurrection motifs in Christianity, and Indo-Caribbean mythologies (as in the multilimbed Kali goddess), enable a rethinking of worldly dynamics (1989, 10). Guyana's vast sociocultural and ethnically diverse position can consequently be seen to have inspired his global approach. The aim of this essay is in part, to build upon the multicultural and theoretical value system of Harris's aesthetic markers. At this point, it should be noted that while the intended audience for this inquiry encompasses the First communities and people-groups impacted by (neo) colonialism, it does not preclude any other demographic (formerly colonized or otherwise) from meaningful engagement with the work. The tradition of Caribbean literature is a naturally comparative one, particularly within the context of postcolonial critique and the world at large. Given that Harris's concerns have been framed within a cross-cultural ethos, a greater degree of participation and affective understanding of Indigenous communities are afforded. In this vein, Harris is not alone in his literary experimentation with multicultural, theoretical models. In Caribbean Man in Time and Space (1974), the Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite conceptualizes the wholeness of the Antilles as "the curve" sweeping from Florida...