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• 1 2021-11-30T23:44:21+00:00 Wilson Harris 1 Biography and Sources plain 2021-11-30T23:44:21+00:00

  Sir Wilson Harris was a towering figure among the writers of the Caribbean and Central America. Concerned with the human condition, in particular with the marginalized, Harris sought a revolution in form as well as approach. The writing style he developed succeeded in conveying what William Blake called “fourfold vision”: grounded in the real world, transformed by metaphor, cultivating empathy, and having a universal perspective.

  It was while working as a surveyor in Guyana in the 1950s, discovering the enigmatic silences of remnant Amerindian cultures and the haunting landscapes of the rain forests, that Harris pioneered his individual and expressive voice, first revealed in poems published in Georgetown in the magazine Kyk-Over-Al and later in a privately printed collection, Eternity to Season (1954).

  Harris was born in the small community of New Amsterdam, Guyana. His mixed ancestry reflected the diverse interaction of cultures and races in Britain’s only colony on the South American mainland. His father, an insurance broker, died when he was two, and his stepfather disappeared, believed drowned, in the rainforests in 1929. This and other childhood memories were to influence the themes of his future fiction. Georgetown, the capital, to which the family had moved in 1923, was a provincial and racially divided place, yet Harris found educational opportunities at Queen’s college. After leaving Queen’s in 1937, he trained as a surveyor, and subsequently led expeditions charting the great rivers of the Guyanese interior and their effects on the flood-prone coastlands.

  After publishing his first poetry, Harris found it “impossible to stay in Guyana and write – there were no publishers in the West Indies”. Once he was in Britain, Palace of the Peacock was followed by three further works set in Guyana and its interior, The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963), subsequently published together as The Guyana Quartet, establishing their author’s reputation as a leading figure in postcolonial literature.

  One thing that set Harris apart was the breadth of his vision. He was interested in physics, anthropology, mythology, alchemy and the pioneers of the unconscious, particularly Carl Jung. He also warned against the trap of victim-hood in postcolonial fiction, which could lead the oppressed to become as prejudiced as their former oppressors.
  
  Source 
  Interview with BOMB Magazine, 2003
  The Wilson Harris Bibliography 
  
   

  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.
  
  - Wilson Harris, "Amazon"