Arise, Sir Wilson

by Nicholas Laughlin on June 16, 2010

Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris. Photograph courtesy Faber

Sir Vidia is no longer the Caribbean’s sole literary knight. As many Antilles readers have probably heard, Wilson Harris has been granted a knighthood in the latest British honours list. “It is a great moment in Guyanese literary history,” says David Dabydeen. Though your Antilles blogger is not keen on honours that come with titles, it’s nonetheless deeply gratifying to see Harris’s contribution to literature recognised by his adopted country.

Harris is a conundrum: a major Caribbean writer of powerful imaginative and intellectual influence who is at the same time little read and even less understood. His books are difficult in almost every sense, and extraordinarily ambitious: a cumulative and profound effort to erase borders between prose and poetry, fiction and metaphysics. Harris confronts the boundaries of politics, history, and language which have divided the natural world and the human imagination, and attempts to transcend them in an act of creative restoration or recuperation. His novels are like literary time machines, bringing past, present, and future into a single frame of the imagination, but also seeking out unities of space and place. He deals with abstract concepts like eternity and infinity in moving, poetic, if usually esoteric prose. I find reading Harris simultaneously frustrating, thrilling, and profoundly moving.

Anyway, it seems an apt moment for the CRB to introduce our new Wilson Harris author index page, which lists relevant content from the magazine, plus links to other useful material elsewhere online. We’ve also just set up a page for Lorna Goodison (and we introduced our Martin Carter page last week). We’ll be adding more pages for significant Caribbean writers in the coming weeks and months — keep an eye on our subject index.

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Fragano Ledgister June 17, 2010 at 2:55 pm

You’re right to class Wilson Harris as a difficult author, and he’s certainly profound. I’ve always found him very hard to read.

What bothers me is that the region does not honour its own. Have Lorna Goodison, or Zee Edgell, or Michelle Cliff, or Sylvia Wynter, or Merle Hodge to take four names more or less at random been honoured by their states? I can recall asking what the Jamaican state would do for John Hearne, and being told that the Musgrave Medal was the appropriate honour in such cases.

We need to do more to honour our writers and artists publicly. We have honours systems, what are they for if not to indicate that the people, through their representatives, believe that certain persons are worthy of honour?

Besides, it’s long past time that the Barbadian state honoured George Lamming (to take one example, not at all at random).

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