The Surrealist and the Realist:
Wilson Harris and Roy Heath in latest London Diaspora Dialogue
By John Mair in London
Stabroek News
May 29, 2002
It was chalk and cheese; both born in the same country, both about the same age, both former winners of the Guyana Prize for Fiction, but one 'intensely Guyanese' the other a believer in 'cross-culturalism. I am an author from no particular country. 'They made an unlikely but challenging pair -the Caribbean writers Roy Heath and Wilson Harris. One best known for 'The Guyana Quartet' the other for 'the Georgetown Trilogy'. Both held a packed third 'Diaspora Dialogue' spellbound for ninety minutes at Guyana High Commission in London earlier this week. The intellectual level was high, sometimes arcane, often up in the clouds. Nobody complained. Especially the other writers of the Guyanese diaspora-John Agard, Michael Abbensetts, Marc Matthews and Grace Nichols, there to see the octogenarian masters of fiction in action.
Both started with extracts from their work. Harris from The Palace of the Pea-cock' (his first published novel) and the prologue from his new novel in progress; Heath from 'The Murderer.' Some of the audience were familiar with one or the other works, very few familiar with both. Heath expressed a reluctance to read his own work as 'it would seem I am showing off, which I am'. That brought a titter. Both were frequently applauded.
Harris was less backward in coming forward on his oeuvre. He kicked off by announcing his 'cross culturality. I am not strictly a Guyanese writer but a Caribbean writer with links to the Aztecs to Peru to Mexico'. His world view had been formed in his early days as a surveyor for the British Guiana Lands and Surveys department working in the Guyanese interior 'Guyana has two oceans.
The jungle to the south of the coastal belt is like another ocean to most Guyanese'. His mind had transcended those and other oceans since.
Heath on the other hand, who has lived in London for over half a century, declared himself 'intensely Guyanese' so much so that for the first fifteen years after coming to the UK in 1950 'all my dreams were all set in Guyana'. He was, and is ''trapped in my Guyanese skin'. It was the double act that would operate all night. Heath the comedic, the quick fire, Harris the serious and reflective.
Yet both had negative experiences and images of colonialism in their homeland and in the motherland. Harris had wanted to reinvent the literary form because the novel itself was a European cultural artefact and invention. "In English novels, the families are all white. The resentment of the colonial legacy had built up to events like the World Trade Center attack and 'September 11th will happen again. It is inevitable after centuries of conquest".
Heath disagreed profoundly on the literary hegemony of Empire, pointing out that the origins of the novel were not in Europe but in Japan eight centuries ago. His initial experiences of England had been `negative', they spoke English like me, they were Protestant like me, yet they did not accept me'. This unsettled state lasted for at least the first decade and half of his diasporic life. He quoted Grace Nichols' words "it was never enough to keep us rooted'. Wilson Harris had to emigrate to the UK, nearly five decades ago too, for his muse to take hold. In Guyana he had already written and discarded three novels; only in Britain was he to produce one that was publishable and of acceptable quality to him.
Both accepted that as novelists they lived between cultures, rooted neither 'here' nor 'there'. Both had landscapes and backgrounds in their work that were firmly Guyanese or Caribbean. Harris contrasted his 'moving landscapes' to the "stationary ones you find in Thomas Hardy". Heath was proud that his book'. The Murderer' had struck (too) close to home with many Guyanese men and had been unpopular with them as a result. Harris saw his latter day writing as being not unrelated to quantum physics, "all relative, no absolutes" and there was good reason for the reader to abandon the security of the plot in a novel and read the text in new and different ways. This mystical interpretation of literature was all the more remarkable coming from a sprightly ocotogenarian, his age showing in his reading with some difficulty, yet an 80 year old who announced "have just three or four years of life left.'' None of the audience fell for that.
But what life both he and Roy Heath had lived-in Guyana and in the UK-had been rich in texture and experience, reflected in their prolific writing. They were lucky. They had come from a Caribbean generation which read books when they could afford them. Heath sadly recognised the reality of contemporary Guyana where "very few people read books". Both seemed unaware of the recent renaissance of publishing in their country which has seen progress from the nadir of just six books a year published a decade ago to scores today. Heath, ever the contemporary man (both of his sons were there to support him), suggested that Guyana do to print what it does to television. Simply pirate books and ignore international copyright conventions. This would remove the '"colonial strangehold on literacy.'' On this, as on other issues, Wilson Harris was much more arcane but saw the pivotal function of literature and history because "if you eclipse the past, you eclipse the future.''
Short and lively contributions were made by the scribes in the audience. Poet Grace Nichols and Playwright Michael Abbensetts indulging in a minor spat over the place, if any, of Jean Rhys and her 'Wide Sargasso Sea' in the canon of Caribbean literature whilst storyteller Marc Matthews put the secret of the profusion of Guyanese writers down to geography 'the 93,000 square miles and we're very peculiar people because we're part of a continent.''
This dialogue, very ably chaired by Denise de Caires Narain late of Georgetown and now of the University of Sussex in England ended as it had begun. The wise mystic Wilson Harris finding his foil in the street sense of Roy Heath. Truly the realist and the surrealist. In fiction as well as in reality.