The “impossible quest for wholeness”: sugar, cassava, and the ecological aesthetic in The Guyana Quartet

Abstract

This article explores how Wilson Harris’s aesthetic of the environment mediates both the specificity of Guyana’s topography and the dynamics of the capitalist world-ecology. Emphasizing Harris’s engagement with Amerindian cosmology, I suggest that his work seeks to drive beyond the specific form of the nature–society dialectic instantiated under capitalism. Arguing that literary forms are the abstract of specific socio-ecological relationships, the article considers how the novels of The Guyana Quartet register a tension between conflicting ecological complexes, one associated with the cultivation of the cash crop sugar, the other with the staple crop cassava. These conflicting ecologies become the structuring principles for opposing aesthetic modes: the aesthetics of sugar, mediating the impact of plantation capitalism on Guyana; and the aesthetics of cassava, as an aesthetic of the socio-ecological totality.

Keywords:

• Wilson Harris
• world-ecology
• Guyana
• sugar
• cassava

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which funded the research out of which this article emerged

Notes

1. In focusing on the impact of Amerindian traditions on Harris’s work, I do not mean to suggest that these alone determine its ecological dimension. For reasons of space I have concentrated on this one strand, but such is the extent of Harris’s interweaving of different historical legacies that it would be equally possible to think about his ecological aesthetic in terms of, say, the role African cosmologies and practices have played.

2. Donne, it should be stressed, is not presented specifically as a sugar planter in the novel. However, his destructive thirst for land and labour make him indicative of the sugar-dominated plantation complex in Guyana.

3. Cf. Nalo Hopkinson, who connects the regenerative properties of yams with the historical experience of Caribbean peoples (see DeLoughrey 62).

4. Brotherston has noted a similar connection between the trials of Medatia and the narrator’s journey in Palace of the Peacock (348).