Kaieteur: place of the pharmakos and deconstruction

Abstract

The Fall of Kaieteur, iconic for Guyana, takes its name from an indigenous legend, assimilated by the influential poet, A.J. Seymour, to the Christian version of the pharmakos, the sacrificial victim. Harris exposes the structural ambivalence of the motif and its basis in Seymour’s suppression of an interiority ultimately derived from physical space. He submits the indigenous cult of kanaima to a similar spatialization of the collective unconscious in a landscape corresponding to the findings of recent anthropology. In The Age of the Rainmakers Kaieteur is the location for the reactive formations of political conflict and the writing resorts to “infinite rehearsal” in language to escape entrapment in the same ambivalences. This brings Harris close to the practice of différance and the deconstructive position on language and politics in Tel Quel, where Derrida first published “La pharmacie de Platon”, but whereas Derrida bases deconstruction purely on language, Harris bases his approach to language on physical space.

Keywords:

• pharmakos
• space
• ambivalence
• interiority
• kanaima
• deconstruction

Notes

1. Collected as “The Legend of Kaieteur” in Selected Poems (37–41). I vary spellings of Guiana, Kai, Makunaima, Makusi, Kanaima according to source.

2. Contrast Alain Badiou’s “evental” reading of Paul that eschews “the Platonic apparatus” (31, 45, 68).

3. See my “Place and Time in Wilson Harris” in The Invention of Legacy, ed. Marc Delrez and Bénédicte Ledent (forthcoming).

4. Harris tells the origin of the story: “I recall coming upon a group of Macusi Indians in the Potaro River [ … ] in the mid-1940s. They told me Canaima was active amongst them and in pursuit of some obscure wrong he had judged their people to have done” (Harris, Selected Essays 256–57).

5. The first sustained instance is in The Whole Armour (1962) where the main character, Cristo, becomes a jaguar; among other instances there is a kanaima killing in Carnival (1985) and the character Lucius Canaima in The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990).

6. Compare Aufidius’s description of his love–hate relationship with Marcius in William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (Act 4. Sc. 5. 99–113).

7. Tel Quel 34 (1968): 3–4. Compare Paget Henry’s Caliban’s Reason (125, 136, 138) on epistemic violence in Sylvia Wynter.

8. Tel Quel 32–33 (1968): 3–48, 18–59, collected in Dissemination. My quotations are from this English translation.

9. Another coincidence is that in a talk to a conference in Aarhus in 1971 Harris assimilates Che Guevara to Cortes while reflecting on colonial conquest and Plato’s Timaeus; he adds, “I am not a Platonist” (Harris, Explorations 55).