Preserving our literary heritage
(Excerpt of an interview with Lori Shelbourne, Georgetown, Guyana, May 20, 2009. Shelbourne is doing her PhD dissertation on Wilson Harris at the University of Leeds.)
PP: THERE IS a perception that Wilson Harris is difficult to read, but the expanding scholarship is making it easier and easier to tap in to the fullness, the colour, the grandeur, the infinite imagination of Harris’ work. The bottom line, however, is that perception that reading his work is difficult.

Wilson Harris

LS: Yes…

PP: Let’s ease into Harris. He generally focuses on the ordinary, but his imagination runs riot (but like in a control experiment; his imagination runs riot where it explodes and implodes, taking us to different worlds as in his own words, “The so-called simple people are more complex than we think.” He was born in New Amsterdam, Berbice in the year 1921; he attended Queen’s College, spent a lot of time in the interior of Guyana as a surveyor, perhaps, the genesis of his oeuvre. In Georgetown, he was a part of a number of groups; literary and intellectual groups. He was here until 1959, when he migrated to England; so he is Guyanese as well as a British citizen. Lots to go on in this simple introduction. Now, for the complex Harris, we turn to Ms. Lori Shelbourne, who is doing her PhD dissertation on the cross-culturalism in the works of Harris.

LS: Well, Petamber, my dissertation is on Wilson Harris’s work, and it is more specifically concerned with defining what I’ve been calling the ‘cross-cultural practice’ that runs throughout his poetry, essays and novels. Critics, such as Hena Maes-Jelinek, have been arguing for quite some time that Harris’s work provides an original approach to questions of cultural inter-relation and exchange. And I would agree with this argument. As I see it, however, no one as yet has properly defined Harris’s approach: What makes it different from other theories or generic innovations, as well as, of course, the points of similarity, or agreement, between Harrisian and other perspectives. So that is the aim of my thesis.

On the one hand, to define Harris’s cross-cultural approach through readings of his literary and theoretical texts, and, in doing so, to consider the ways in which this approach might enable us to read other texts, histories, and situations in new ways. And, on the other hand, to delineate the points of difference and comparison between this approach and others, to set them in dialogue as it were.

PP: I am curious. Why have you gone down this line of cross-culturalism?

LS: The term cross-culturalism is one that Harris repeatedly returns to when talking through his ideas, and even in the novels themselves. And the elaboration of his idea of cross-culturalism can be seen to be an effort fundamental, I believe, to his entire oeuvre. I am not sure whether it was his overt intention or not to distinguish himself in this way from other schools of thought, perhaps from post colonialism in particular, but certainly this concept, and its centrality to his work, provides us with a way of naming the difference between his imaginative practice, and the theories that are most usually grouped together as postcolonial theory, or magic realism in the novel tradition for example. Though, of course, naming is only the beginning of the task.

PP: He is a part of this cross-culturalism. Let’s look at his background: He’s part European, part African, part Amerindian. He grew up in a culture of peoples who came from Africa, Asia, Europe. Later, he gravitated to England. Draw for us the difference between cross-culturalism and multiculturalism.

LS: The distinction between multiculturalism and cross-culturalism is one that Harris himself has delineated in various moments in his essays and lectures. Broadly speaking, we might say that the concept of multiculturalism rests upon ideas of the toleration and coexistence of different cultures: Different cultures co-exist side-by-side with each other, but they remain implacably different, and the relationship between them is, in that sense, static. The principal difference of cross-culturalism, then, is that it assumes a more dynamic relationship between different cultures; it implies that those cultures interpenetrate and engage with each other in far-reaching and mutually transformative ways. And this is implicit, perhaps, in the term itself, which carries in it an idea of a ‘crossing’; the journey, or movement of ideas, traditions, legacies between different cultures, which shapes those ideas and traditions and so on.

PP: Inasmuch as he is elusive, let’s use his work or character/s to concretise this concept; we could start at Yurokon and the bone- flute or any other point of entry you’re comfortable with…

LS: Well, the bone-flute is a really interesting and important example, because, through Harris’s discussions of it over the years, the bone-flute has become, if you like, a key concept-metaphor in his work that contains a local or specific re-thinking of cross-cultural relations between the Caribs and their adversaries (initially other Amerindian groups, then later the European colonizers), which then expands in its implications — as often happens in Harris’s work — into a concept that enables us to reconsider cross-cultural relations more generally. Harris draws the beginnings of his interpretation of the Carib bone-flute from writers such as the Schomburgks, Walter E Roth, and Michael Swan, who had begun to revise, in their work, prevailing representations of Caribs ‘cannibalism’; representations, of course, that had been used to demonize the Caribs, and often, by extension, other Amerindian groups, in ways that suited an imperial agenda.

What these writers had suggested was that the practise of anthropology amongst the Caribs did not — as had often been alleged — involve the voracious and indiscriminate eating of their enemies in war; it was rather a complex cultural ritual that revolved around the construction of a flute out of a piece of bone taken from one of their battle victims, and the consumption of a morsel of flesh taken from the bone. Drawing on these writers, Harris suggests that the idea of the practise was to ‘digest’, as it were, the enemies secrets; their future plans and strategies. He suggests, however, that this ‘consumption’ of the other — the inner secrets of the adversary — brings the practicant to realise their own commonality with their enemy; the proximity or even identity between their own violence and lust for power, and that which impels their enemies’ plans and actions. It becomes, in other words, a medium of compassion and compassionate self-criticism.

This interpretation then provides the basis of Harris’s cross-cultural connection of the Carib bone-flute to the ritual Christian Eucharist — in which, of course, it is the consumption of a ritual morsel of flesh and blood that enables the practicant to imagine or partake in the sufferings (or passion) of Christ — to be drawn into a compassionate relationship with Christ, and with others. In fact, Michael Swan, whom I mentioned above, had described the practice as “transubstantiation in reverse,” and Harris has regularly repeated this description.

Now, there are many facets to this cross-cultural connection that Harris has elaborated over the years — too many to go into all of them now. However, we might briefly reflect on a few of its key implications. Firstly, by the very act of drawing this intimate comparison between the two rituals, Harris’s reconsideration works to unsettle a lynchpin of Christian, colonial discourse; one that used the stories and images of Carib cannibalism to construct a moral dichotomy between the savage Carib, or often more extensively native Amerindian peoples, and civilized and enlightened Christians. And this dichotomy worked, of course, to justify colonialism in important ways.

The comparison that Harris draws obviously unsettles this one-sided morality by suggesting that the Christian Eucharist and the Carib bone-flute are comparable traditions, and the role of anthropology within them equally savage, or equally ritual, depending on how you decide to read it.

Moreover, Harris takes this further in a number of essays by suggesting comparisons between the ideas of cannibalism that were used to demonize the Caribs, and the ‘appetite’, as it were, for devouring and destroying other cultures that characterise colonial exploits. In other words, he begins to suggest that the image of the Carib cannibal might be, at least in part, an image forged out of the colonizer’s own violence and material greed, projected onto their enemy. And indeed, other writers, such as the anthropologist, Michael Taussig, have suggested this too.

So, the way that Harris revisits this practice, and the cross-cultural comparison he draws, begin to suggest that we can detect two kinds of ‘hunger’ — if we use this as a metaphor for the desire to consume other cultures or adversaries — within both cultures: The native Caribs and the European colonizers. And we remember, of course — as Harris often reminds us — that the Caribs were themselves conquerors of the Caribbean before the Europeans arrived. He, in fact, distinguishes between an appetite for conquest (which we can see as an impulse to annihilate or destroy) and what he calls subsistence of memory. This latter, then, which is an element of the Eucharistic and Carib bone-flute rituals, we might think of as the drive to digest, or share in, the opposing culture in a way that enables the finding of some sort of community with one’s adversary. For, in both rituals, the ritual importance of consuming a part of another body is, at least in part, that it brings the practicant into community with another social group — or corpus, if you like: The Christian community, the enemy community, through an act of compassion. And the point is really that these two hungers can be a part of each other. In other words, acts driven by an appetite for conquest, by both groups, might be re-read, he suggests, for the ways in which they generated moments, or possibilities of, cross-cultural understanding, commonality, and even community. (To be continued.)

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