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

Abstract

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

Keywords:

• Wilson Harris
• Caribbean poetics
• the Americas
• New World
• Guyana

Acknowledgements

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

Notes

1. Wilson Harris, New World of the Caribbean, Programme 1, 4 programmes (1956). The transcriptions are mine. Harris and George Lamming wrote the programmes, with Harris credited for the first. For a discussion of the series in relation to other Caribbean broadcasting see Robinson 2006.

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

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

4. In the 1954 and 1978 editions of Eternity to Season it looks as though the cramped text in the 1952 edition is corrected so that “The living jungle” begins a new stanza.