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The reality of trespass: Wilson Harrisand an impossible poetics of theAmericasGemma Robinson aa University of StirlingPublished online: 03 May 2013.

To cite this article: Gemma Robinson (2013) The reality of trespass: Wilson Harris and animpossible poetics of the Americas, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49:2, 133-147, DOI:10.1080/17449855.2013.776372

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The reality of trespass: Wilson Harris and an impossible poeticsof the Americas

Gemma Robinson*

University of Stirling

This article revisits Wilson Harris’s early work from the 1940s and 1950s within thecontext of his interests in the Americas. Looking at his poetry, non-fiction and laternovels, I argue that his “geological turn” opens up ways to think about the wholenessof Guyanese, Caribbean and American identities and poetics. In particular, I considerHarris’s 1949 essay “The Reality of Trespass” in relation to his 1952 short pamphletof poetry, Eternity to Season. I show how the notion of trespass is advanced by Harrisin order to reimagine the apparently fixed cultural logic of conquest, colonialism andindigeneity in the Americas. Furthermore, I link trespass to his defining beliefs incross-cultural bridging. The essay traces how Harris’s cross-cultural poetics are embed-ded in a commitment to intimate, even microscopic, geographies of place as well as tothe transcontinental sweep of land, sea, river and symbols of belonging andwholeness.

Keywords: Wilson Harris; Caribbean poetics; the Americas; New World; Guyana

Caribbean literature is shot through with language of unity and disunity. Although manywriters attempt to understand the abstract and concrete boundaries of the region, work thatresponds to Guyana does not at first seem to fit into the paradigms of fragment, island andarchipelago that dominate the theoretical and descriptive traditions of Caribbean studies.Returning to the subterranean perspective explored in Caribbean Man in Space and Time(1974), Kamau Brathwaite imagines the wholeness of “the Archipelago” as “the curve”sweeping from Florida to the Amazon and Brazil. He continues:

I also began to recognise that these broken islands were the sunken tops of a mountain rangethat had been there a million years before. That in addition to the death of the AmerindiansI was also witnessing the echo of an earlier catastrophe. That the islands had been part of amainland. (“Caliban’s Guarden” 4)

Brathwaite’s figuring of the archipelago – his wish to describe “the curve” – offers a wayfor reconstituting a topography that makes sense of mainland Guyana within the region.Where Brathwaite writes that “the unity is submarine” (Caribbean Man 1), Wilson Harrisproposes:

The great backbone of America has valleys under the sea, and peaks which are islands inthe Caribbean. In what seas shall we find that ancient mountain range that rode once without

*Email: gemma.robinson@stir.ac.uk

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2013Vol. 49, No. 2, 133–147, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2013.776372

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a flow between the extreme points of North and South America? And who but the geologistscan conceive the years, lost by millions, before that huge continuous family of mountainsbroke and fell beneath the sea? It is impossible not to contemplate the anguish and amaze-ment which must have entered the minds of men confronted by a world so old and so new,so stable and so melting, which they discovered almost before they were prepared to do so.(New World)1

Writing in 1956 for a radio programme titled New World of the Caribbean, WilsonHarris was one of the first Caribbean writers to prompt this focus on the submarine inorder to discover alternative perspectives. Harris, the surveyor, writes another version ofthe Caribbean seeking to understand the Americas in terms of both geology and imagina-tive memory.

In Geological Observations on South America, Charles Darwin notes an “astonish-ment” at witnessing the millennia of “wear and tear” affecting the Cordillera which“with its pinnacles here and there rising upwards of twenty thousand feet above thelevel of the sea, ranges in an unbroken line from Tierra del Fuego, apparently to theArctic circle” (353). Even if Harris and Brathwaite’s geology is imprecise – and geolo-gists have still not reached “a general agreement concerning the plate tectonic originand evolution of the Caribbean” (Iturralde-Vinent and Lidiak 3) – their geological turnis part of an attempt to register this “astonishment” and imagine a different kind ofspatial, and therefore social, organization in the Caribbean and the Americas. Harris’svision of the region seeks to render the twinned nature of its oppositions: it is “so oldand so new, so stable and so melting” (New World). He seeks not to jettison historicalvocabularies of the Americas, but to find a way to convert their dualities, ambivalencesand atrocities into a new set of ethical and aesthetic dimensions. The tropes of earlymodern discovery, conquest and terror – when viewed through a lens of geology, land-scape and prehistory – offer only a partial picture of the “New World of the Carib-bean”. Even in his early work Harris was avoiding a language of refusal and workingto hold in tension a contradictory lexicon of the Americas, from Discovery to “ElDesastre” (Fernández Retamar 359).

This essay wishes to recognize the continental shift registered in New World of theCaribbean, and to pursue in Harris’s work an “impossible” poetics of the Americas, onethat never sacrifices the focusing position of the local. It is impossible because, asCharles Bernstein writes, such hemispheric ambitions reveal the Americas to be an “unre-presentable yet ever presenting collectivity” (4). Looking at the “ever presenting” Ameri-cas enables us to locate many of Harris’s preoccupations: recognizing the importance ofeclipsed cultures, hearing the resonance of the pre-Columbian worlds in the present, com-municating the ecological demands placed on society by the “living landscape” (Harris“Music” 40). At times Harris figures the Americas within the autobiographical coordi-nates of his birthplace in “South America” and the imaginative landscapes of his fictionsthat cluster within his native Guyana (“Music” 41, “New Preface” 55). But more expan-sively, the Americas are also viewed as a site of synchronous imagination: Harris locates“a pre-Columbian bridge of myth that runs through the Americas” that is available to theintuitive and receptive (or, to use Harris’s word, “literate”) imagination (“SchizophrenicSea” 105). My interests in Harris’s Americas respond to these different impulses byreprising archival and bibliographical research from the 1980s and early 1990s whichlocated Harris through his early Guyanese writings to describe his shift into a radicallyreformulated fiction (Adams, Cobham, Cribb, Sander). These bibliographical approacheshelp us trace the origins of Harris’s formulations of unity and disunity and thereby

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augment our understanding of these central concepts for “New World studies”. When welook at Harris’s work of the 1940s and 1950s with a reckoning of the Americas as ourtarget, his “cross-cultural” poetics – a term that extends to encompass the infinite connec-tions between apparently different cultures – becomes clearly embedded in a commitmentto the intimate, even microscopic, geographies of place that are born out of an attentionto scale, to human experience and observation, as well as the continental sweep of land,sea, river and symbols of belonging.

“The Reality of Trespass” and the Americas

Harris’s first published piece of non-fiction prose, “The Reality of Trespass”, appeared inKyk-Over-Al in 1949. Before this he had contributed poetry, fiction and a searchingreview of A.J. Seymour’s landmark poetry collection, The Guiana Book (1948) (Sander“Index”). Harris’s 1949 essay takes him away from his immediate locale and, as ReinhardW. Sander notes in passing, is part of Harris’s early formulations of his “social vision”,one “convinced of the potential of the Americas” (“Quest” 22). What a close reading of“The Reality of Trespass” and Harris’s early work affords us now is an insight into hiselastic sense of the Americas and its relationship to the Guyana through which so manyof his sensibilities are articulated. The two page article opens boldly:

The tragedy of America (and we in the Caribbean are a part of the Americas) is that thediverse peoples in the Americas have not yet understood the impulse of movement thatstarted streams of peoples fleeing from institutions of bondage in Europe and Asia. This fatalmisunderstanding is the paradox of the American, who clings to a past security. (“Reality ofTrespass” 21)

At a descriptive level the article is concerned with three writers: Walt Whitman, Archi-bald MacLeish and John Steinbeck. But Harris begins with what Carlos Fuentes latercalled the “failed societies” of the Americas (n. pag.). For Harris this failure is conceivedas a tragedy of migration, where the tragedy is not occasioned by exile but in a distorteddiasporic outlook that yearns for the institutions of a homeland. He identifies a traditionor “spirit of great movement” (thinking perhaps of Odysseus and Rama, the heroic exilesof western and eastern culture) that is under threat, a spirit “which has been flouted anddespised and regarded as evil, which has been reduced to one – not of genuine releaseand change – but rather one that insists upon the transplantation of static disciplines in anew soil and a new world” (“Reality of Trespass” 21).

Harris’s formulation of an American tragedy spirals out from the idea that the NewWorld is premised on notions of freedom and flight from bondage. Yet this very flight andliberatory impulse engenders insecurity about the new identities created in new homelands.William Carlos Williams famously describes American culture’s underlying “fear” (157,174), and, for Fuentes, “failure has created a subterranean language –since the Conquest”(n. pag.). Harris does not land upon Fuente’s “Baroque” or Carlos Williams’s “fear” as theregister for his Americas, but the notion of a creative language twinned to social failingsis at the heart of his exploration in “The Reality of Trespass”. Seeing the possibility forcreation within historical and political tragedy and failure, he encourages us to considerthree generational approaches in American writing: one that senses “the inadequacy of thestatic myths”, a second that “is expressed only in a form of expectancy rather than action,an anguish of longing” (“Reality of Trespass” 21) and a third that seeks “to lay bare thenecessity for movement and a genuine freedom of association” (22). Suggestive more than

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taxonomic, each position is tied to a writer; moreover, I argue, in Harris’s later work eachbecomes embedded in his evolving poetics of a cross-cultural imagination.

Walt Whitman is cast as “the crude pioneer” (“Reality of Trespass” 21) with theselines from his “Song of Exposition”: “Come Muse migrate from Greece and Iona, / Crossout please those immensely overpaid accounts” (Whitman 613). Poetry of the Americasis unthinkable without Whitman. In “The Muse of History” Derek Walcott writes of “thegreat poets of the New World, from Whitman to Neruda” (37). For Harris, the oftendescribed “democratic mythology” (Mack 9–13) of Whitman’s America – the “betterfresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain” (Whitman 613) – is perhaps less impor-tant than the call for the migration of imagination to new locations. In formulating anAmerican sphere Whitman both cites and seeks to displace the old world disciplines ofclassical, Christian and Renaissance culture, leaving “‘To Let’ on the rocks of yoursnowy Parnassus” (Whitman 613). No doubt, the joke of exhausted poetic property wasnot lost on Harris: a year earlier, in his review of Seymour’s The Guiana Book, he usesan architectural vocabulary to criticize “that group of Guianese poets and prose writers”who “add ineffectual ornament upon ornament” to produce only a “façade” (Guiana Book37). Seymour wavers on the edge of this group of formulaic writers, Harris claims, atworst following “a static approach”, but at times showing a willingness for “the explora-tion of the name, the epic tradition, the historical monument” (38). At the heart ofHarris’s concerns for Seymour, “Guianese” writing and Whitman is his sense that it is atyranny for old poetic and social forms to migrate changelessly to the New World, andthat it is the elusive “strange chaos and surprise” of a migrating Imagination or Muse(38) that could define a tradition of movement in the Americas.

To invoke a freeing Imagination as characteristic of a poetics of the Americas bolstersthe historical idea of the New World as the centre of liberty, and part of Harris’s argu-ment fits into this formula of America equalling freedom. However, his two further exam-ples, Archibald MacLeish’s “Epistle to be Left in the Earth” and John Steinbeck’s TheGrapes of Wrath, help Harris stage the complexities attending his emerging sense of aradical Imagination able to articulate the Americas’ contradictory tradition of migration.MacLeish’s poem is conceived by Harris as part of “a watershed of expectancy” (38). Hequotes the final section of the poem:

they are voices:

They are not words at all but the wind rising.

Also none among us has seen God.

(… We have thought often

The flaws of sun in the late and driving weather

Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)

As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:

The wind changes at night and the dreams come.

It is very cold,there are strange stars near Arcturus,

Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky (Collected Poems 162)2

The possible New World readings of this poem of imagined chronicle and prophecy aremultiple, especially when we remember its home in New Found Land (1930). Why

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Harris might be drawn to a mock record of a culture’s gathered knowledge can also befound in MacLeish’s letters where he describes the poem as an attempt to answer a seriesof unanswerable questions about how humans respond to the “earth and a life in theearth”: “Why should they scratch upon the rocks: Here I saw rain; Here I loved; Here achild died?” (MacLeish, Letters 253). In the poem knowledge is framed as partial, endan-gered, inaccessible or faulty, soon to be forgotten, lost or rendered anachronistic. Harris,we know, was already concerned with sites of knowledge in British Guiana. In an auto-biographical essay he describes Queen’s College as “a vessel of learning linking oldworlds and new”; he emphasizes the varied ethnic backgrounds of both staff and pupils,and repositions his colonial education as a “cross-cultural” experience (“Wilson Harris”131). In a later setting of British Guianese anti-colonialism, the Americas emerge again.Harris recalls that people “paraded carrying banners adorned with pictures of Stalin,Lenin, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Trotsky. It was a heady, chaotic loveaffair with Liberty that was to have its tragic consequences” (“In the Name of Liberty”213). In each of these examples, Harris hints at the potential for cross-cultural learningand understanding, but also the disappointments and failures attending these fragile“vessels of learning”, understood either as a colonial institutional education or theprotesting political education of the parade and party.

As MacLeish’s poem both opens up and closes the ground for a “new found” body ofknowledge, the word play in the title encourages us to consider what can be done withthis “left” letter, and Harris notes its circumspection about accreted knowledge. However,Harris does not focus on the absurdities of human exchange and encounter. Instead heoffers a different scale of analysis, encouraging us

to study in the poetry and art of the Americas as a whole how this watershed of expectancyruns down the length of two continents and what resolution is emerging to demand fulfil-ment creatively so that the full streams of life may spill across the ridges of inaction into thefamished and bitter wells of isolated peoples in the Americas. (“Reality of Trespass” 22)

MacLeish becomes only one proponent of an Americas sensibility defined by expec-tancy. On one level Harris’s optimism lacks the pragmatism or cynicism needed toapproach the limitations of human knowledge, but this is precisely the mindset thatHarris is, in an exploratory way, seeking to undermine. In 2003 he revisited the ques-tions he asked during this period: “how does one combine with, and transfigure, a cul-tural fixity that passes for action ingrained into one’s education? How does one bringinto play – through various aspects and layers – a sense of profoundest cross-culturalitybeyond the immobility of habit or of virtue?” (D’Aguiar n. pag.). Where MacLeish’spoem might be said to deflate and estrange our confidence about human knowledge,Harris’s argument pulls in the opposite direction to inflate – or in his words “fulfil” –our expectations in creative language and being. Note the wording: Harris is not cele-brating an achievement but rather detecting an emerging resolution within the Americas“to demand fulfilment creatively”. Through this formulation of a demand Harris avoidssentimentality about the power of art. His metaphors of hydrology and topography –central to his training as a surveyor (Cribb 34) – also show how that demand mightstart to be expressed out of the multiple idiolects of the Americas. “Watershed” is usedhere both to suggest the figurative and the material: MacLeish’s poetics is part of acritical turning point, but as Harris knew, watersheds are both fixed and fluid, depend-ing on topographical variety and riverine seasonality. Therefore, even as he imaginesways to describe continental affinities – to create these “full streams of life” that will

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connect “isolated peoples in the Americas” – Harris’s metaphor works by forgingcross-cultural unity across differences.

The final aspect of American literature that Harris considers is its associative possi-bilities. His compression of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath pushes us towards char-acters that challenge or uphold “the myth of possession and private property” (“Realityof Trespass” 22). For Harris, Tom Joad’s sense of “social responsibility” is heroic, butalso represents the “naked insecurity of the people” – he can only lead a life of flight.In contrast, Preacher Casey is defined as “the intellectual decision on the part of Stein-beck that the people have faith in each other and in the earth” (22). Of course, thisoptimism potentially disavows Steinbeck’s insistence on social torment, from Casey’sdeath to Rose of Sharon’s stillborn child, and the final scenes of devastation throughflooding. However, Harris seeks a conciliatory perspective that nevertheless holds intension and sees clearly the injustices of the contemporary world. Goals remain unac-hieved by the novel’s characters, but Harris chooses an unusual phrase to describe theircondition. They are people unable “to discover the inner reality of their movement,who are unable to discover the comprehensive reality of trespass and the comprehen-sive reality of the human person” (22). Harris offers no gloss for this, but by making“the reality of trespass” the title of his essay he forces us to pause. We are encouragedto think about trespass as an overarching condition for the creative fulfilment of a liter-ature of the Americas and its social structures. Harris puts it another way at the end ofthe essay: “Steinbeck has sought to lay bare the necessity for movement and a genuinefreedom of association to bring the most fruitful and far-reaching contacts between per-sons – between man and man – and between man and his environment, the world”(22). This is the groundwork that Steinbeck lays for “the poet of the new world”.

Tracing trespass in the Americas

To trace the imaginative connections of “trespass” it is necessary to look backward andforward to Harris’s creative writing and non-fiction. In 1947 Harris published his secondshort story, “Fences Upon the Earth” in Kyk-Over-Al. It describes an encounter at a creekin the Guyanese “hinterland” between John Muir, a mining company representative, andan unnamed “man” who the narrator assesses has “lived there all his life”. Muir’s com-mand and threat – “Get the hell off this land! [ … ]. I shall chase you and your peopleoff the land. I shall put up fences.” (21) – voices the colonial project of the de facto land-lord. In “The Reality of Trespass” Harris claims that “the naked insecurity of the peoplehas its everyday drama in the landlord and tenant relationship” (22). But Harris’s work inthis period and beyond reveals the difficulties of ascribing absolute roles in places andfor people with a colonial past, even if we want to view colonialism as a form of contin-uing trespass. This is more than to say, as Catherine Hall does, that colonial histories are“entwined” (85, 284); it also shows how colonial vocabularies are unstable. In Palace ofthe Peacock (1960) Donne’s rhetoric of belonging is premised on a notion of trespassencompassing both land and people:

Who would believe that these devils have title to the savannahs and to the region? A stupidlegacy – aboriginal business and all that nonsense: but there it is. I’ve managed so far tomake a place for myself – spread myself out amply as it were. (51)

However, the novel’s resolution renders this acquisitiveness absurd, describing the “eter-nal possession” of a numinous architecture of waterfall and El Doradean palace that even

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Donne – the ur-colonist, conquistador and Kurtz figure – is offered and is able to accept(117).

Harris knew during the 1940s that he had not yet found a voice fitting to “theliving landscape” and its human relationships (“Music” 40–6). “Trespass” becomes aterm to help us reimagine the apparently fixed cultural logic of the Americas thatmaintains “the myth of possession and private property” (“Reality of Trespass” 22).“Fences Upon the Earth” challenges us to judge the landlord/tenant relationship andto undermine the direction of trespass that Muir upholds. As Harris renders it, theman’s silent permission to Muir to build his fences is premised on an indefeasiblebirthright, on a legal notion of jus tertii, and on a spiritual belonging: “Let the stran-ger build his fences. [ … ] I shall trust to the deep things that tie me to the earth togive me my rightful place in the sun” (21). Autochthonous identity is privileged here,and the implication is that rights to land cannot be simply bestowed by humans onother humans. Yet Harris’s body of work suggests something more: that a resolutionof contradictory claims to possession lies in understanding how trespass can elude itsreified historical meanings. The Oxford English Dictionary shows that since enteringEnglish in the 14th century, “trespass” has been associated with transgression, viola-tion, offence, and the sins confessed in the Lord’s Prayer of the King James PrayerBook. It is perhaps a model term for the act of colonialism in the Americas, both inits attention to people and land, and its structuring of a hemisphere defined by demo-graphic incursions into forbidden zones, and across hostile topographical barriers.Trespass appears categorically aligned to the negative, appropriate to the violations ofNew World conquest and land exploitation. However, its etymology suggests some-thing more nuanced. Its meaning in Old French and Medieval Latin is “to passbeyond or across” (leading to the modern French trépasser meaning to pass way;die), and is closely associated with the Classical Latin passus meaning step or pace.In choosing this word to describe the “comprehensive reality” of the Americas, Harrisintroduces the idea of material and immaterial connection and movement withoutglibly eliding the negativity of encounter within the Americas. Thus many of Harris’scharacters and narrators can be redescribed as trespassers, from the archetypal villainDonne in Palace of the Peacock, to the comedic, time-travelling Francisco Bone inJonestown (1996) and the invading Cortez in The Mask of the Beggar (2003).

Furthermore, we can push the term and consider how it gestures out to, and helpsdefine, the more familiar Harrisian model of the cross-cultural “bridge”. Trespassing andbridging are twinned opposites, underpinning the opportunities and problems of Harris’svision of global connection. Exploring Harris’s modernist inflections, Anita Pattersoncomes close to this by identifying the “frontier violence” involved in Harris’s cross-cultu-ralism (137). In “Quetzalcoatl and the Smoking Mirror” Harris yokes together trespassand bridge, writing of a transformed epic as a form that allows “the voyaging artist orscientist to trespass across forbidden frontiers”. He continues with a caution: “Not thatdiverse faiths and religions should be conquered and unified. Such conquest, as we know,deepens the pressures of rage and a longing for revenge with the defeated who bide theirtime in Under Worlds” (22). The trespass of the “voyaging artist or scientist” is closer topassing beyond or across, rather than violating, and for Harris has the added dimensionof search and deliberation:

[The re-birth of epic] offers a renewed scrutiny – as I have already implied – of the unful-filled promises of tradition and of descent and ascent all over again into inequalities, unequalcultures. It offers in stages a conversion of such inequalities into numinous inexactitudes.

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Such numinous inexactitudes breach the role of dogmatic exactitude or fanatical ideologyand creed not by conquest but by civilization’s arrival upon bridges from one closed mindto the other, from one closed world to the other (“Quetzalcoatl” 23, Harris’s emphasis)

The concrete references to tenant, landlord and trespass in “The Reality of Trespass” and“Fences upon the Earth” are residual in this new formulation, and we are invited to graspthe gains of passing across or beyond dogmatism and ideology. Like Walcott in “TheMuse of History” Harris writes against “a literature of recrimination and despair, a litera-ture of revenge” (“Muse” 37), and, again like Walcott, Harris asks us to confront the“numinous” (“Muse” 40), to imagine our way out of closed orders. For Walcott theclosed order of the slave seller and slave buyer’s historical roles is overcome by anencounter with the “black ghost, white ghost”, who are both addressed by Walcott, butfundamentally inaccessible to him. For Harris a consciousness of the supernatural is notlimited to the condition of slavery and points not only to Walcott’s Adamic Caribbeanbut also to an intricately constellated prehistoric environment.

In Resurrection at Sorrow Hill the phrase “numinous inexactitude” is used to char-acterize an encounter with Timehri, here the Macusi/Amerindian rock engravings of“flying deer, a horned serpent, a fish within the interior of the vessel” (47). Carvingsoffer another kind of systematization of the Americas: they provide a map of migrationor “the grammar of the expedition” – a text upon “the backbone of the Americas /along which the Timehri peoples came” (48). As Denis Williams shows, for archaeolo-gists the Timehri petroglyphs throughout the Guianas offer guidance for how “theroutes of [Arawak Amerindian] migrations may have been traced” in the Americas(238–40). This archaic trace leads not just across the surface of the earth but also tothe lives of ancestors:

Cultures echoing many voices, many accents of the present and the past congregated, brokeapart, congregated again under Sorrow Hill. Not only human accents and voices but thespeech of ghosts within the whisper of rain and river, fire, light, shadow in the leaves of aTree borne by the hand of Timehri, the hand of God, upon an invisible branch of the tapes-try of the age of wood, the age of rock and water and skyscape and riverscape. (Harris,Resurrection 3–4)

Harris overlays archaeological knowledge with the cultural and natural histories ofSorrow Hill, and a cosmological order that encourages an ever-expanding constellation ofspace. Beginning with “The Reality of Trespass” and “Fences Upon the Earth”, Harrisrefines the argument that the only way to see this constellation is through the imaginativearts of both science and fiction, through passing beyond and across the boundaries of ourclosed minds and worlds.

Eternity to Season and a new world

In 1952, Harris attempted to explain the coherence of his poetic vision to A.J. Seymour,asserting that he was ready in his new publication, Eternity to Season (1952), “to meetthe problem of a new world certain of the raw material of energy (psychological and cre-ative) with which to build a structure truer to man”.3 This publication was a privatelyprinted triptych of poems: “Troy”, “Behring Straits” and “Amazon”. Between 1947 and1954 Harris wrote a range of poetic and dramatic texts exploring the creative fulfilmentavailable to the writer in the Americas. His subjects were a distinctive mixture of thelocal and the global, ranging from a village of workers (Setting Sun, 1947) to transfigured

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Guyanese and classical heroic figures (Fetish, 1951), but in Eternity to Season a newkind of poetic and psychic geography emerges, that is simultaneously microscopic andmacrocosmic. Writing to Fred D’Aguiar 50 years later, Harris revisits the challenges ofthis early writing:

This was the beginning of a task I could not evade – if I may put it that way – that lay inthe incorporation of shells, of the branches of trees, of wood in oneself like a skeleton –interiorly and imaginatively in oneself – as much as exteriorly in diverse and complex nat-ure. This gave me a sensation that conflicts in the past were unfinished and could be seenafresh beyond the frames or limitations we had imposed on them and on ourselves. I foundmyself intuitively moving into a poem I called “Troy,” which was written in 1950. I shallquote but two lines from that poem:

the strange opposition of a flower on a branch to its darkwooden companion

In that poem I knew an intuitive tremor of “flower and wooden branch” erupting in myselfand transforming the flesh of fixity. (D’Aguiar n. pag.)

Even if Harris’s image of flower and branch derives from Ezra Pound’s celebrated “In aStation of the Metro”, his articulation of the interior and exterior skeleton powerfullyglosses his task in Eternity to Season “to build a structure truer to man”. The task canalso be seen as an extension of his interests in the limits and freedoms of an Americanpoetics in “The Reality of Trespass”. Writing about Harris’s 1978 revisions of the 1954revised text of Eternity to Season, Rhonda Cobham identifies “the facile hierarchy of vic-tim versus victor that Harris was trying to transcend in his vision of the New World”(31). Anita Patterson draws on Harris’s debt to T.S. Eliot to argue that both see the poet’stask to restore the “continuity [that] appears to have vanished in the New World” (138).Yet reading Harris exclusively through the expansions of the later 1954 and 1978 editionsof Eternity to Season, neither Cobham nor Patterson consider the significance of the tri-angulated continental coordinates that Harris picks out in his initial 1952 triptych, andthat open each edition. Without a focus on these coordinates, the precise landscapes –Cumberland (Eternity [1954] 23–31), Canje (Eternity [1954] 32–9), suburban Kitty andport Georgetown (Eternity [1954] 43) – and the symbolic landscapes – of the Yeatsianwell (Eternity [1954] 13–16), and classical and pre-Columbian myth – are cast adriftfrom the initial organizing principle of Eternity to Season.

“Troy”, “Behring Straits” and “Amazon” create a powerful mythical geography forthe Americas, yoking together a Whitmanesque call for a migrating muse to two impor-tant cradles of civilization: the Berengian land bridge that enabled prehistoric migrationand the rainforest artery of the Amazon that supports global life. By opening with mythand linking north to south America, Harris’s pamphlet asserts a dizzying hemisphericambition, but when we also connect this to the intimate geographies of the body that hislater reflections encourage, the scale of Harris’s ambition becomes both bolder and moremodest. Troy, the Behring Straits and Amazon become landscapes that are, to use Har-ris’s words, incorporated into oneself “like a skeleton”, just as much as the flower andbranch to which he explicitly refers. Indeed the creation of transitive landscapes which atrespassing narrative voice passes through, and incorporates into his consciousness,becomes a narrative method for Harris. In Jonestown Francisco Bone travels to the tepui,Roraima, on the Guyana-Venezuela-Brazil border, at the height of the Guiana Shield – amassif of exposed Precambrian rock, home to one third of the world’s rainforests (Gibbs

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and Barron 3; Hammond 6). Harris creates a location for his narrative voice that is atonce subjectively, geographically, geologically and mythically situated:

I turned at last to confront the Apparition of Roraima in geological time. I felt the scars ofrock and waterfall and fossil grain in my bones and upon my skin in their eclipsedencounters with apparently inhospitable space, inhospitable grave.Diamonds and gold seemed to bubble at my fingertips as I reached into the inhospitable

grave of Roraima in its long and dangerous sojourn through geological ages to acquire aperch, an Eagle’s fierce perch, within and upon the watershed between the floodwaters ofthe Amazon and the torrential rapids of the Orinoco. (Jonestown 227)

This is the location for the final scenes in Bone’s “Memory-theatre” (3), a time-travel-ling rehearsal that creates a fictional space in which to discuss the Jonestown mass sui-cide/murder of the Peoples Temple settlers on the Guyana-Venezuela border. WhenBone – a fictional survivor – situates himself at Roraima he projects himself into therecent and pre-Columbian history of religious and cultural conflict to find a perspective(a perch) linking, however traumatically, the United States, Guyana and the Amerindianpeoples of the Guiana Shield. Geology provides for Harris another kind of muse orimaginative resource that leads both exteriorly and interiorly to a radical perspective onthe Americas.

In his poetry, the incorporation of the human into the environment and vice versaleads to a dilemma about the lyric form. Harris’s first published poem in Kyk-Over-Al,“Tell Me Trees! What Are You Whispering?”, experimented with an expanded lyricvoice: “I and the leaves shall always lie together, / And know no parting” (10). Here lyricpoetry’s complicated relationship to a speaker’s sociality is enlarged to incorporate a soci-ety that is human and extra-human. It may no longer be adequately expressed as society.Perhaps because of the link between lyric and the apparently isolated voice of the private,feeling individual, Harris rarely uses the individual speaker or lyric voice within hiswork, preferring instead narrative or dramatic poetry. Iris M. Zavala notes in relation tomodernist Latin American lyric poetry that “the constitution of the self” was part of a“dialogized ‘I’” who refers to “correlations between the historical event, the objectiveworld, and the collective social coparticipant of the utterance. Utterances do not merelyirradiate a closed dialogue in the closed system of subjectivity” (73). This kind of openlyric voice positioned between self, world and event works for Harris’s poetry, but Zav-ala’s discursive definition cannot capture the narrative or prophetic impulse in Eternity toSeason. The voice is more visionary or listener than interlocutor, and it is unclear how todistinguish a human self. In “Behring Straits” it is ambiguously “life”, “earth” and “voy-ager” who are the protagonists in “the voyage between worlds”:

So life discovers the remotest beaches in time

that are always present in action: the interior wall of being

open like a mirrorless pool, the ocean’s nostalgia

and the stormy communication of truth turn still deeply

like settlement and root.

[ … ]

The voyage between two worlds

is fraught with this grandeur and this anonymity. Who blazes a trail

is overtaken by a labyrinth

[ … ]

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So the incomplete discovery of the world

in the blueness of its delicacy

is broken on the beach of its lofty ground

[ … ]

But earth waits for the continual voyager

who dances on mortal ground (2–3)

In part the poem registers what archaeology and geology prove for us, that the Berengianland bridge between Asia and America was created by “exposed marine shelves of theBering and Chuki seas” and produced a conduit for flora, fauna and humans to migrate“both west to east and east to west” (Goebel and Buvit 1). Harris begins: “So life discov-ers the remotest beaches in time”. But given Harris’s metaphorical densities it would bereductive to restate his poetry as a mimetic record of the earth’s and humanity’s originarystories. Harris translates these traces of archaic existence out of geology and archaeologyand places them in a new position within his own metaphorical complex. There are figu-rative anchors that seem to speak of the human world and help us work our way throughthe poem – “action”, “being”, “settlement”, “world”, “nostalgia”, “communication”, “dis-covery” (2–3) – but they are tied to another vocabulary that seems determinedly extra-human – “mirrorless pool”, “labyrinth”. Discovery is “incomplete” in this “BehringStraits” and even the notion of “trailblazer” (so apt for the prehistoric transcontinentaltravellers and 18th-century Siberian voyagers) is widened to encourage us to consider thetrail within a more intricate structure of “labyrinth”. The scale of this labyrinth is sum-moned even in the poem’s first lines: “The tremendous voyage between two worlds / iscontained in every hollow shell, in every name that echoes” (2). The two worlds of the“new” and the “old” are repositioned. Christopher Columbus and Vitus Bering areimplied here, but Harris’s “voyage” is part of his expansive vision of the multiplediscoveries available to an open creative consciousness.

Harris’s early choice of pen name, Kona Waruk, fits this sense of an open scale ofconsciousness. Compared to Anatole France or César Perú (the pseudonym Vallejo con-sidered for the collection that would become Trilce in 1922 [Vallejo 624]), Harris’schoice (from the river, Konawaruk, a tributary of the Essequibo) seems both a modestalliance of writer to place and a radical aligning of poetic voice to an environmental sub-jectivity that does not depend on the socially symbolic landscapes of the Americas. Thisvery local name clashes with and complements the symbolisms of “Troy”, “BehringStraits” and “Amazon”, suggesting a poetics already informed by a radical local, social,environmental and mythic geography. In “Amazon” the poetic voice speaks of “theworld-creating jungle”:

The world-creating jungle

travels eternity to season. Not an individual artifice –

this living movement

this tide

this paradoxical stream and stillness rousing reflection.

The living jungle is too full of voices

not to be aware of collectivity

and too swift with unseen wings

to capture certainty. (n. pag. [4])4

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Seeking always to register scale, Harris positions “season” not as eternity’s opposite butas the more local and material way to convey the ecological cycles that inform our tem-poral divisions. The internal rhyme in the phrase reinforces this connection as an aurallink. In contrast to this chime, human material existence in this poem is rendered as tor-ture: “distorted into material duration and strife. / This is the glorified individual creationof antagonism, the form / of an artificial resemblance to the collective environment of theworld” (n. pag. [8]). As the lines lengthen Harris registers our distance from “the world-creating jungle”. Writing as Kona Waruk, he sublimates himself as individual andbecomes an ambiguously located poetic voice travelling between the coordinates of“Troy”, “Behring Straights” and “Amazon”. The poems are still voiced by a narrator butcome from an expanded sense of subjective environmental experience. In that sense theyare choric in their appeal against the certainties of individualistic, human-centred mind-sets and in their attempt to reveal the poverty of ignoring the collectivity of the earth.

An impossible poetics of the Americas

Throughout Harris’s work, the Americas structure his figurative language. His intuitionsabout American literature make sense as an elaboration of Eternity to Season. They arepoems that seek to reinvent static myths, they are positioned at a “watershed of expectancy”,and they demand a freedom of association that Harris believes should create bridges“between man and man – and between man and his environment, the world” (“Reality ofTrespass” 22). They are also poems that are urgent in their attempt to pass beyond or tres-pass the accepted boundaries of “closed minds” and “closed worlds” (Harris, “Quetzalcoatl”23). Given this, one conclusion to a discussion of Harris and a poetics of the Americasmight point to the bounded limits that the very category places upon his fictions. If, as Wal-ter Mignolo argues, “the idea of America cannot be separated from coloniality” (7), then theAmericas seem constrained as a site that cannot be freed from a particular history. Thisstraitjacket is approached by José Martí in “Nuestra América”: he recognizes that a claim tothe term must reject the colonizing practices of North and South America, and turn insteadto a multicultural community, the foundational role of the Amerindian (Ramos 251–67),and to a changing geographical sensibility – “from the Rio bravo to the Straits of Magellan”(Martí 301). The challenge Martí extends to his readers is to see this space as joined in ashared enterprise, and his symbol of the forest translates national societies into strong ecol-ogy: “We can no longer be a nation of fluttering leaves, spending our lives in the air, [ … ]caressed by the caprices of sunlight or thrashed and felled by tempests. The trees must formranks to block the seven-league giant!” (295). This mixed metaphor of the marching “ranks”of the forest suggests not only the will to form a continent, but its immanent natural unity.

Martí’s forest does not make him a straightforward forebear of Harris – the image istoo militaristic, too governmental for Harris. What they share, however, forms the basisof my conclusion on Harris and the possibility of a poetics of the Americas. They bothurgently wish to understand the nature of the collective “nuestra/our”, even though thenature of the possession seems impossible to express beyond the platitudes of politicaltreaty. Charles Bernstein might say that this is because we are trying to locate a “virtualAmerica that we approach but never possess” (5). Writing of a poetics of the Americas,he says:

The problem is how to pursue affinities while resisting unities and how to resist unities with-out losing the capacity to be poetically responsible [ … ]. And that means enacting poetry’scontemporaneity – the willingness of poets and ability of poems to act on and in the present

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social and cultural circumstances [ … ]. The point is to pursue the collective and dialogic nat-ure of poetry without necessarily defining the nature of this collectivity – call it a virtual col-lectivity or, to appropriate Stanley Cavell’s phrase for Emersonian moral perfectionism, “thisnew yet unapproachable America”: this unrepresentable yet ever presenting collectivity. (4)

Yet Bernstein’s language of society, virtuality, contemporaneity and dialogue are not suf-ficient to show what is “ever presenting” in the collectivity of the Americas. This is whatMartí’s extraordinary political metaphor and Harris’s evolving symbolic historical fictionsaim at. Although neither sets himself the task of mapping a collective poetics, Martí andHarris supplement Bernstein through their sense that the connectedness of the Americasis wild – whereby I mean both pertaining to an extra-human wilderness but also to theextreme human inventiveness that we must develop in order to grapple with unrepresent-able collectivities. They offer, to redirect Emmanuel Lézy’s argument for the Guianas, a“géographie sauvage”, a “wild geography” (10–12). When Harris turns to the geological,he invokes a wild Americas that incorporates and exceeds humanity, and more than this,he invokes a way of seeing and writing about “wholeness” even as he accepts it as “aquest for impossible fulfilment” (“Apprenticeship” 235).

AcknowledgementsThis research was supported by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes1. Wilson Harris, New World of the Caribbean, Programme 1, 4 programmes (1956). The

transcriptions are mine. Harris and George Lamming wrote the programmes, with Harriscredited for the first. For a discussion of the series in relation to other Caribbean broadcastingsee Robinson 2006.

2. The lines are incorrectly laid out in Kyk-Over-Al, and are here corrected against MacLeish’sCollected Poems.

3. Wilson Harris, letter to Arthur [A.J.] Seymour, 26 March 1952 (A.J. Seymour Papers, Univer-sity of Guyana Library). Permission to quote from this correspondence has been generouslygranted by Wilson Harris.

4. In the 1954 and 1978 editions of Eternity to Season it looks as though the cramped text in the1952 edition is corrected so that “The living jungle” begins a new stanza.

Note on contributor

Gemma Robinson is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Stirling. Shehas edited University of Hunger: Collected Poems and Selected Prose of Martin Carter(Bloodaxe 2006), and co-edited Postcolonial Audiences (Routledge 2011) and Out ofBounds: British Black and Asian Poets (Bloodaxe 2012).

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