Born in a small town in a far-away country, Wilson Harris would go on to haunt the imagination of people around the world.
He gifted us infinitesimal dots on enormous canvases of the mind by listening to trees – ‘Tell me trees, what are you whispering’ – and writing back to Guyana and communicating with the world, by smashing down ‘Fences upon the earth’ and opening the ‘womb of space’ into which our imagination entered. He takes the reader to the precipice and dangles answers for the discerning; hard work for the reader but not unrewarding.
His accolades, awards and accomplishments can only address part of his work and worth. The other parts of his work and worth are in the domain of the reader to appreciate. Harris is the recipient of several honorary doctorates, grants and fellowships. He has held the revered position of Writer-in-Residence at many universities around the world including places like Australia, New York, Texas, Toronto and Cuba. In 1970, he was part of the Convention of Caribbean Writers and Artists held in Guyana planning for what turned out to be the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta). During that visit to Guyana, he delivered a number of talks in the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lecture Series. (Both Harris and Mittelholzer were born in New Amsterdam, Berbice, Guyana.) In 1987, he won the inaugural Guyana Prize for Literature in the fiction category and, in 2002, he was awarded the Guyana Prize Special Award. In 2010, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Before Harris migrated to England in 1959, he had spent almost equal number of years in Georgetown and in Guyana’s interior for he was 17 when he left school (Queen’s College – one of Guyana’s top schools at the time) to train as a land surveyor and, according to Jan Carew, Harris’ writing came out of ‘someone accustomed to talking to himself in the Guyana bush for seventeen years’.
Harris’s early years were not uncomplicated but certain influences along the way helped to shape the direction of his writing. When he was only two years of age, his father died and when he was six, his step-father seemed to have deserted the family. The family headed by the mother made several house moves. When Wilson was only eight, he starting reading, THE ODYSSEY, with the help of his mother, Millicent. The Ulysses of that book became one of the motifs Harris employed in his writing.
Along with chalking up his first read book, young Wilson was part of an informal literary circle comprising of Sheila King and Malcolm King, discussing mainly Shakespeare, Milton, and Camus.
During his high school days at Queen’s College, he was a member of another literary group, Club 25. This group, limited to twenty five members only, operated from Progressive High School headed at the time by Leslie C. Davis. It included the likes of Allan Young, W. G. Stoll, E. O. Q. Potter, Maurice Charles and Jan Carew. One of the club’s events was a debate on the moot, ‘Poets and Scoffers’, judged by A. J. Seymour.
Later, when he moved into the world of work, Harris became part of a number of social and literary groups. One such gathering was labelled the ‘Anira Group’ operating out of the home of Martin Carter’s mother. It included Martin and his brother, Keith, Sydney Singh, and others. That group eventually moved to Carter’s home with additional members like Jan Carew, Slade Hopkinson and Milton Vishnu Williams.
Harris was also a part of a group that met at the home of Cheddi Jagan, mainly attracted to his vast library and his political vision for Guyana.
Another formal body of which Harris was a member was the Carnegie Library Discussion Circle. In 1956, when George Lamming visited Guyana to organise public readings, it was Harris who read Carter’s poems because Carter was under house arrest.
So Harris was well grounded in literary matters before his sojourn in the wilderness of Guyana and was conversant in such matters during his years as a surveyor, exploring the ‘womb of space’. So much emphasis is being placed on the influence of the jungle on his work that his steady growth in literature in the ‘civilised’ Georgetown environs is overlooked. But his Georgetown sojourn is important part of Harris’ journeys of the imagination.
*The theme of the 38th Annual West Indian Literature Conference ( Oct 17 – 20) to be staged by University of Guyana is ‘Hinterlands: Journeys of the Imagination’.
Responses to this author please telephone 226-0065 of email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com
