Living in paradise: The ecological conscience of contemporary Anglo-Guyanese fiction as seen through the examples of Dark Swirl, The Ventriloquist’s Tale and The Timehrian

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the ecocritical dimension of contemporary Anglo Guyanese fiction and the challenge it poses to anthropocentric philosophy and economic exploitation of the land and minorities, as well as to the environmental insensitivity of today’s world. Through a reading of novels by Cyril Dabydeen (Dark Swirl, 1996), Pauline Melville (The Ventriloquist’s Tale, 1997) and Andrew Jefferson-Miles (The Timehrian, 2002), the article explores the differences in the anthropological and holistic conceptualization of nature and looks into the (im)possibility of reconciling the interests of the urban Guyanese population with the world view of the Amerindian inhabitants. The article underscores the characteristic features of a Guyanese discourse on Nature that mark it out as being unique within Caribbean literatures. It presents each novel as an individual call for ecological justice for the Guyanese interior and shows contemporary Guyanese fiction as a potent ground for future ecocritical literary investigations.

KEYWORDS:

• Guyanese fiction
• ecocriticism
• anthropocentrism
• Dark Swirl
• Ventriloquist’s Tale
• The Timehrian

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more about the symbolic difference between homo sapiens and apes, see Rousseau ([1754] 1984) and Midgley ([1979] 2002).

2. The most famous example of Harris’s novels premised on the said paradigm is The Guyana Quartet (Harris 1985), a collection of his four early texts comprising an allegorical tale of Guyana’s pre-Colombian history and its postcolonial awakening into the new life.

3. For more about colonial stereotypes connected with this aspect of the Amerindian culture, see Waugh (1934, 89) and Greenblatt ([1992] 2007, 33).

4. For more about the myth, see Levi-Strauss (1967, 312).

5. Kanaima may be “an evil spirit” whose power one cannot control, but it may also be a person who sees himself or herself as “a self-appointed avenger of evil” (Menezes 1977, 36).

6. An interesting discussion of the same theme may be found in Harari (2015).

7. Jefferson-Miles (2002) alludes to the fact that the Amerindians “write” their communal memory and history in the landscape. For more, see Whitehead (2003) and Greenblatt (1991).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska

Marta Frątczak-Dąbrowska is an assistant professor at the Department of English Literature and Literary Linguistics, Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University. She gained her PhD in postcolonial studies with a thesis on the contemporary Anglo Guyanese novel (Poznań, 2015), and is currently continuing her research in the field of Anglo Caribbean fiction, postcolonial literary criticism and ecocriticism.