Postcolonial Imaginations: Approaching a “Fictionable” World through the Novels of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris

Abstract

Postcolonial geographers’ calls for greater multivocality in geographical knowledge can be approached through a deeper and more explicit engagement with postcolonial literature. The article draws from postcolonial studies and literary theorists to argue that an exploration of literature tends to reenvisage the world as “fictionable”; that is, open to multiple interpretations and perspectives. A brief review of geographical approaches to texts and to literature highlights the notion of the “text event,” in which writers, texts, and readers jointly create meaning. This notion of “text event” is then explored through the “geographies of disorientation” of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris, including close readings of extracts from “La Colonie du Nouveau Monde” and “Jonestown.” Using postcolonial literature to help establish the world as fictionable opens up experiences of not only reading but of being read by the “other” and warns that this opening to difference, although necessary, can be painfully disturbing.

Los reclamos de los geógrafos especializados en temas poscoloniales por una mayor multivocalidad del conocimiento geográfico pueden abordarse mediante un compromiso más profundo y explícito con la literatura poscolonial. El artículo se apoya en estudios poscoloniales y de teóricos literarios para argüir que una exploración de la literatura tiende a que el mundo sea revisualizado como “ficcionable”; es decir, abierto a múltiples interpretaciones y perspectivas. Una breve revisión de los enfoques geográficos en textos y en literatura permite destacar la noción del “evento textual”, en el que escritores, textos y lectores conjuntamente construyen significado. Esta noción de “evento textual” se explora luego a través de las “geografías de desorientación” de Maryse Condé y Wilson Harris, incluyendo la lectura de extractos de “La Colonie du Nouveau Monde” y “Jonestown”. Utilizando literatura poscolonial para ayudar a caracterizar al mundo como ficcionable se ponen de manifiesto experiencias no solo de Leer sino de ser leído por el “otro” y previene que esta apertura hacia la diferencia, si bien necesaria, puede ser penosamente perturbadora,

Key Words:

• fiction
• literature
• Maryse Condé
• postcolonial
• Wilson Harris

关键词:

• 小说
• 文学
• 玛丽斯·孔得
• 后殖民
• 威尔逊·哈里斯

Palabras clave:

• ficción
• literatura
• Maryse Condé
• poscolonial
• Wilson Harris

Postcolonial geography has a remit of developing “a politically engaged scholarship concerned with the cultural, political, and material aftermath of various colonialisms” (Power, Mohan, and Mercer 2006, 232). Controversies over the spatial and temporal borders of postcoloniality (S. Hall 1996; Sidaway 2000) serve to highlight the issues of multiplicity of voice and perspective that are postcolonial theory's particular focus in relation to critiquing and combating continuing inequalities and forms of colonialism (Jacobs 1996). As a practical means of establishing this multivocality, Robinson (2003) has argued for a renewed regional and area studies focus in geography, in which particular attention is paid to the work of geographers in areas of the world outside Europe and America, as a move toward “provincializing” the West (Chakrabarty 2000); that is, challenging its central position of authority in relation to academic knowledge. Although postcolonial geography has been most well known for its readings of historical texts, in particular colonial archives and the geographical writing that facilitated colonial rule (Crush 1994, 1995; Blunt and McEwan 2002), it has yet to approach postcolonial fiction explicitly. The few geographical readings of what could be named as postcolonial literature (e.g., Barnett 1996; Sharp 2000; Jazeel 2005; Woods 2005), although making very effective analyses of alterity, difference, and colonial legacy that are clearly informed by postcolonial theory, rarely explicitly identify either the literature or the reading as postcolonial (see Noxolo, Raghuram, and Madge [2008] for an exception). Before this article goes on to argue, via Spivak, that a more explicit focus on postcolonial fiction is a necessary starting point for this renewal, this question needs to be asked: Why has postcolonial fiction not been a focus for postcolonial geography until now? The relative absence of explicit geographical focus on postcolonial fiction as such is all the more surprising given the overwhelming reliance of the subdiscipline on three canonical postcolonial theorists—Spivak, Said, and Bhabha—the vast majority of whose theoretical work is largely (although of course not exclusively) rooted in analysis of postcolonial literature (see Gilmartin and Berg 2007).

The reasons for this surprising absence might result from postcolonial geography's concern (as part of the wider discipline of geography) with what could be defined as spatial factuality or with spatial relationships that have verifiably taken place. In relation to postcolonial literature, the first difficulty is definitional: Which fictional works are actually “postcolonial?” There has been fierce and long-standing academic debate about the label of postcolonial in relation to both the literary and theoretical output of a range of writers broadly identified with formerly colonized countries and the academics who cluster around them in the loosely bound interdisciplinary field of “postcolonial studies” (Huggan 2008). Some have argued that the grouping of such a wide range of writers from so many very different places with so many different imperial and postimperial histories under one nomenclature is to ignore (perhaps even in a sense to recolonize) the historical specificity of each place and to dilute the particularity of each writer's concerns (Sidaway 2000; Young 2000; Dirlik 2002). As will be explored in more detail later in this article, others have seen the term postcolonial novel as a form of niche marketing (in an increasingly swamped global literary publication market), privileging the work of a loose collection of elite migrant or “cosmopolitan” writers now residing in Europe and the United States (Dirlik 1994; Ley 2004). Sorensen (2010) went so far as to argue that widespread discomfort over the complicity of postcolonial literature with the workings of global capital in privileging these elite writers has led postcolonial studies as an international interdisciplinary movement to focus less and less on literature and more and more on literary theory. Postcolonial geographers are in good company.

Second, postcolonial geographers have been heavily participative in the wider “material turn” of recent years, in which, as a reaction to what is seen as an overemphasis on text, there has been a reassertion of geography's role in examining a tangible world of objects and bodies in interaction. Thus, the focus has been on the landscape legacies of colonialism (Dominy 2002; Carney and Voeks 2003) and on the historically informed circulation of goods and services in a multiethnic global economy (Henry, McEwan, and Pollard 2002; Cook and Harrison 2003; Anderson and Tolia-Kelly 2004). Of course, colonialism was a profoundly material experience in terms of genocide, enslavement, and displacement, the legacies of which remain in the bodies and experiences of a range of people worldwide (Noxolo 2009).

Third, much of the impact of postcolonial theory in geography has been in the subdiscipline most concerned with globalized material inequalities; that is, development geography. Here the textual strategies of postcolonial theory, although recognized as potentially transformative in their contemplation of difference and alterity (Noxolo 2006; McEwan 2009), have been heavily criticized for being “obfuscating” (McEwan 2003, 346) and offering “more in the way of new-fangled language than food” (Sylvester 1999, 718). In other words, textual strategies, either archival or fictional, can be seen as too “soft” to deal with the “hard” matters of poverty and inequality.

But does fiction actually have nothing to teach us about the real world? What can fictional texts really know about actual place and space? Even if we confine ourselves to European traditions, the question of what literature can “know” has been the subject of centuries of literary and philosophical enquiry (see, e.g., Aristotle 1961), and literary geographers have also been specifically concerned with the related question of “how the literary text may constitute a ‘geographer’ in its own right” (Brosseau 1994, 349). Although we do not propose to review these texts in depth here (but see later for a short review of literary geography), there have been two recent attempts to answer the question of how fiction relates to factuality that are particularly relevant here. The literary historian Catherine Gallagher (2006) argued that the mid-eighteenth-century rise of fictionality in the novel form both reinforced and challenged factuality. The explicit understanding that the novel is fictional offered the possibility of generalizability in relation to characters, so that they were not identified with any real living person. Gallagher (2006, 351) argued that this left the reader free to fully enjoy the pleasure of inhabiting the lives of fictional characters whose lack of real existence made them “enticingly unoccupied.” When the reader closed the book, the evident fictionality of the novel provided for the reader a reassuring “ontological contrast” (Gallagher 2006, 357) with the solid factuality of their own real self. At the same time, novelistic fictionality promoted an attitude of disbelief in the reader, “prompting judgments, not about the story's reality, but about its believability, its plausibility” (Gallagher 2006, 346)—the fictionality of the novel constantly prompted readers to compare what was in the novel with what they knew not only to be actual but also to be possible. The literary critic Michael Wood (2005) took this notion further for the modern reader, arguing that the accepted unverifiability of fiction, its perpetual openness to reinterpretation, makes the novel a space in which the reader can explore a range of possible interpretations of the factual. In doing so the reader is not only able to contrast the fictional with the factual but is also able to open the boundaries of verifiability to contestation. Novelists create the possibility of a “fictionable world,” a world that is “available for conversion into fiction” (Wood 2005, 158); that is, open to multiple interpretations from multiple located perspectives. It is toward such a multivocal world that postcolonial geography ultimately pushes.

In the same year in which Robinson's (2003) article about postcolonializing geography called for a renewed area studies, Spivak's (2003) Death of a Discipline also called for a similar renewal. Robinson (2003) argued that a renewed area studies must not simply be a charter for metropolitan scholars to take over the third world with their own studies but must entail a revaluation of scholars from the margins. In this way, knowledge becomes explicitly interlocational—not just knowledge about the whole of the world from one (largely unmarked) European-American center but knowledge that explicitly locates itself as coming out of a particular center when it talks about space and place. This explicit location of knowledge allows for multiple relocations of the center or, indeed, for multiple centers of knowledge, which is the basis for the eventual “provincialization” (Chakrabarty 2000) of Euro-America in geography.

Spivak (2003, 42) took this call for a recentering further, arguing that a renewed area studies relies on closer readings of what is written by authors outside the West, preferably not limited to European languages, but above all with a sharpened sense of the need for metropolitan authors to “solicit … the risk of being read”; that is, to open up to the gaze of the “other.” Robinson (2003), too, was alive to the need to shift the power relations of knowledge in this way, when she spoke of the need to locate the power to theorize not only in Europe and America but also in Africa, in Asia, and so on, so that non-Western places become not only case studies of spatial practice but also centers of generative knowledge (Noxolo, Raghuram, and Madge 2008). Much has been written, particularly around forms of participation in development frameworks (see, e.g., Crush 1995; Cooke and Kothari 2001) about the ways in which simply enabling the “other” to speak without challenging the European-American academic frameworks through which the West can “hear” them tends to “silence” radical difference. Classically, Spivak (1988, 280) has argued that there is an “epistemic violence” in this consistent framing, which runs the risk of merely recruiting the non-Western intellectual into the reproduction of the other as a shadow of the European-American self.

This risk of reproduction of the other as shadow is the reason she argued (Spivak 2003) that there is a need to harness the undecidability of fiction, its unverifiability, as a way of challenging existing European-American frameworks. Through the development of skills of close reading of postcolonial fiction, reading that widens the range of the potentially believable, Western-centered disciplines like geography (see, e.g., Le Heron and Lewis 2007) might be able to shake the boundaries of their accepted frameworks, to the extent of “really letting yourself be imagined (experience that impossibility) without guarantees, by and in another culture, perhaps” (Spivak 2003, 52). Essentially, Spivak is arguing for a view of interlocational knowledge (including knowledge of the West by the non-West) as “fictionable,” multiple in its vocality and perspective. Postcolonial fiction has a central role to play in this view.

Sangari's (1990) classic analysis of the features of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work, often called magical realism, addresses a similar fictionability from the point of view of history. She argued that what appear as flights of fancy in Marquez's work are critiques of historical accounts that are written from only one (colonial) perspective and leave out other perspectives. As erased accounts cannot necessarily ever be reconstructed, history must be seen as inevitably open to contestation, in terms of:

another level of factuality, to cast and resolve the issues of meaning on another, more dialectical plane, a plane on which the notion of knowledge as provisional and of truth as historically circumscribed is not only necessary for understanding, but can in turn be made to work from positions of engagement within the local and contemporary. (Sangari 1990, 220)

Sangari argued, in line with Spivak, that Marquez uses the power of fiction to question the univocality of historical knowledge. We argue that the power of postcolonial fiction to make the world “fictionable” can similarly be deployed to question the univocality of geographical knowledge.

Literary Geography: Toward the “Text Event”

To establish an explicitly geographical framework for the study of postcolonial fiction, it is worth offering a very brief and partial review of geographers’ existing engagements with literary and other texts; for more extensive and comprehensive overviews of literary geography as such, see Brosseau (1994), Pocock (1988), Noble and Dhussa (1990), and Hart and Gregory (2009). Engagements might helpfully be divided into two moves: texts in space and place, and place and space in literary texts (based on Adams 2009, 4–5; see also Pocock 1988, 94). The first of these understands texts, including literary works, not only as repositories of cultural meaning but also as material objects that inhabit place and circulate in space. Self-reflexively, many studies deal with the historical spatialities of geographical writing, focusing not only on the content and production of geographical texts (Withers 2006) but also on the changing textual layout and format of the “print spaces” of geography books (Mayhew 2007), as well as the “locational particularity” of the ways in which key geographical works were read and distributed (Keighren 2006, 525). This focus on the spatiality of production, textuality, and reception goes well beyond the “facile” observation that textual encounters must inevitably take place somewhere (Livingstone 2005b, 100), toward the important geographical point of the significance of spatial location and distribution for processes of interpretation and meaning-making. Although it is important to guard against an overly deterministic role for spatial context in relation to textual meaning (Barnett 1999), it is also crucial to recognize, as Livingstone (2005a, 395) did in the context of differently located responses to Charles Darwin's work, that “acts of reading always involve located hermeneutics.”

Linked to the location of meaning at the scale of the individual or community of readers is the larger scale of activities that du Gay et al. (1997, 5) called the political and institutional “regulation” of the distribution and reception of cultural products of all kinds, including texts. Phillips (2001), for example, wrote of the politicized contestation spearheaded by teachers and librarians over children's adventure novels in a bid to decolonize children's imaginative geographies, and Sharp (2000) placed her reading of Salman Rushdie's work in the context of geopolitical struggles over the fixing and fluidity of both Islamic and Western identities.

In relation to place and space in literary texts, for humanist geographers (Tuan 1978; Pocock 1987) literary texts were of geographical interest primarily for their ability to eloquently articulate a sense of place that could be, as it were, verified intersubjectively, through essentially human experience. Lewis, Rodgers, and Woolcock (2008) have recently made a similar point in relation to the capacity of literary writing to articulate the experience of development practice. Readings of literary works in terms of their portrayal of landscape (Tyner 2005) or location (Daniels and Rycroft 1993) have been numerous. Such individual readings of content and description need, however, to be tempered by a recognition that, as Saunders (2010, 441) suggested, in literature features of form such as narrative structure are not merely decorative but are active in the construction of meaning: “the authenticity of [literary] truth claims is dependent not merely upon the practices of production and reception but upon the way in which [meaning and form] are synthesized to reflect and reinforce one another.” Because it is integral to the often uncanny ways in which meaning takes place within the literary text, attention to the ways in which form interacts with content and context alerts us to “what might be disruptive, subversive or a source of new questions in the novel” (Brosseau 1994, 347), allowing the text a measure of resistance against narrowly instrumental or dogmatic reading or writing (Pocock 1988, 95). As Derrida (1992, 47) suggested, it is precisely within the powerful combination of content, form, and context that the prodigious “potentiality” of literary texts lies.

Questions surrounding literature's role in the politics of cultural representation have been much debated within literary geography. Contestations such as the protracted exchange between Cresswell (1993, 1996), McDowell (1996), and Rycroft (1996) about the ways in which Jack Kerouac's On the Road might be read differently by differently located and gendered readers who have different experiences of home and mobility have forced a recognition that the politics of identity and difference manifests itself through textual encounters. A number of recent geographical works therefore foreground reading literary texts either for or through the different spatialized experiences of different identities (Kobayashi 1992; Barnett 1996; Jazeel 2005).

Differently located readings interact with differently located writings. Saunders (2010, 445) explored the “elusiveness” of the spatiality of the compositional moment, particularly with literary writers. If writing is seen not only as the moment when fingers hit a keyboard or hold a pen, if writing is to do with “the iterative and reiterative journey from idea through revision to material form” (Saunders 2010, 446), then the spatiality of writing needs to be understood as linked to a range of everyday spaces and with the location and movement of the body through and in those spaces. Noxolo (2009) made a similar point in relation to academic writing, arguing that understanding writing as an embodied process entails recognizing that, as bodies are always in process of materialization, the meanings that they make are also always in process of being made. For literary geographers, therefore, meaning does not reside ultimately with the writer alone, but it is in diversely and contingently located interactions—“text events” (Hones 2008, 1301)—among writer, text, and reader that literary texts are able to articulate meaning in place.

This notion of the text event is a useful starting point for postcolonial geographers as they approach postcolonial fiction. It builds on literary geographers’ recognition that the articulation among writer, text, and reader, which is so crucial to the emergence of meaning, is spatialized and located, and this is a crucial starting point for postcolonial geographers to search for multivocality via postcolonial fiction, in which the spatial relations among writer, text, and reader are often heavily politicized. At the same time, the terminology of event recognizes that meaning does not simply reside in the spatial context of writer, text, or reader but is “unprecedented and contingent” (Hones 2008, 1311), brought to life in the specificity of each unique encounter. This combination of multivocality and specificity demands attentive engagement with the continual emergence of provisional, contested, and dynamic meanings across a landscape of postcolonial difference. Understood via Spivak's (2003) call for a renewed area studies that is truly open to difference, this attentive engagement is an important prerequisite for Robinson's (2003) call for multilocational geographic knowledge to be answered.

In the following section, we illustrate how postcolonial fiction can be deployed toward the creation of a fictionable world (an understanding of space and place that is open to multivocality), through the analysis of texts as they take meaning in spatialized text events. The fiction of two Caribbean novelists, Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris, will be taken as a fertile example.

Caribbean Literature and the Work of Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris: Relocating the “Text Event”

The work of both Maryse Condé and Wilson Harris has been the subject of much academic and popular attention, each in its own right (see, e.g., Cottenet-Hage and Moudileno 2002; Adler 2003); however, due largely to the different arenas of consumption of Anglophone and Francophone literatures, it is rare for them to be considered together.

Guyanese writer Wilson Harris has been publishing visionary and poetic novels for almost half a century (e.g., Harris 1960, 1996, 2006). Harris's novels are particularly interesting for geographers because of their historically dynamic meditation on the Caribbean as a meeting point, where ancient Amerindian concepts and language forms continue to articulate with European, African, and Asian postcolonial cultural forms, specifically through the physical landscapes of the Guyanese interior. Harris's own extensive literary criticism (Harris 1967; Bundy 1999) draws explicitly on his early career in Guyana as a surveyor (Cribb 1993), combined with his having lived and worked much of his adult life in the United Kingdom, to consider “a rhythm and counterpoint, a spatiality” (Harris 2003, x–xi) that is set up through the Caribbean's multiple interconnections with other places.

The career of the highly successful Guadeloupean novelist, Maryse Condé, has also spanned forty years, during which time she has been celebrated for her polyphonic retellings of postcolonial histories and of classic European texts (e.g., Condé 1976, 1986, 1993). Her work is particularly interesting because of its ongoing meditation on the often traumatic and unresolved cross-cuttings of identity and place in the African-Caribbean diaspora. The trajectory of her work repeatedly retraces routes between Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, developing into a complex “irritant dialogue avec lui-même” (Condé 1981, 149)—irritating dialogue with (her)self.

Routing postcolonial fiction specifically through two Caribbean writers, albeit two very different ones from two very different places, ¹ highlights a number of interesting geographical questions. Caribbean literature has a long history, covering a wide range of genres, languages, and subject matters—it is at least as diverse as the islands themselves and contingently includes writing from an even more diverse diaspora (O’Callaghan 1993; Donnell and Lawson Welsh 1996; Nesbitt 2003; Balderston 2004). In fact, both Harris and Condé have been vocal in their rejection of fixed rules or boundaries around what can or cannot be typified as Caribbean literature (Harris 1967; Pfaff 1996).

Relationships between the Caribbean and European America have been both intricate and intimate, not least because the Caribbean is situated within the Americas, where its location in the “backyard” of a superpower has had an incalculable historical influence on a range of Caribbean economies and cultures (Maingot 1994; G. Williams 2007). Before this time, Europe's colonial involvement in the Caribbean had an almost 500-year history, more than long enough for the Caribbean to be considered integral to the economic and cultural formation of what is now meant by “the West” (E. Williams 1970; S. Hall 1992). Key postcolonial terms, such as creolization (Brathwaite 1995) draw directly on the intimate but unequal relationships arising from the wide range of different mobilities, from privileged free to brutalized unfree, that led Europeans, Africans, Indians, Chinese people, and Amerindians to meet at the Caribbean “crossroads” (Nettleford 1994). This long history, with its often subtle and contradictory linkages, has led the Caribbean at times to be considered central to the formation of postcolonial studies as an interdisciplinary field (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989).

At the same time, the peculiar spatialities of the Caribbean as a postcolonial location can be made plain in the iconic figure of the slave. Enslaved African people were brought to the islands by the thousands, over decades, often dying in transit or after a few years of brutal hardship, enduring physical and sexual abuse as a banal aspect of everyday life (Beckles 1989; D. Hall 1989). Yet the racialized systems of inequality on which slavery relied mean that the skin color and ethnicity of most people living in the Caribbean and in its diaspora is a legacy of a slave system that is not easy to ignore (Thompson 1997). The enslaved person's own subjective experience of forced displacement, mobility, and relocation is therefore enduringly “problematic” (Harris 1967; see also Noxolo 2009) for contemporary writers precisely because it is so heavily silenced in historical records: “The experience of the slaves is, in a very real sense, lost to the conventional resources of historical reconstruction” (Higman 1999, 9). The lived experience of these hard lives, although we know it to be real, is as unverifiable as fiction.

To attempt to write time and space “from the point of view of the slave” (Gilroy 1993, 55) is therefore to explore the range of plausible possibilities of an experience of mobility and (dis)location that was characterized by jolts and erasures, the cataclysmic experience of being suddenly taken from familiar surroundings and flung very far away. This is not only the case historically under slavery but is also an integral part of modern life for many Caribbean people, for whom transnational, diasporic networks and temporary and permanent migrations to and from Europe and North America are integral to economic and social livelihoods (Byron 1999; Skelton 2000; Thomas-Hope 2002a, 2002b). People are repeatedly transported “from the third world to the first in a matter of seconds” ² to make ends meet. In short, Caribbean spatiality can be typified as a geography of disorientation.

In fiction, this geography of disorientation addresses not only where people or things are in relation to other people or things but also where they are no longer, where they are coming from or going to, as well as, crucially, where they could have been or might have longed to be. It has therefore often been explored by diverse Caribbean writers through figures of restless mobility or marginal presence, such as the ghost (Bennett 1966; Huggan 2008), the “mad woman” (Rhys 1992; O’Callaghan 1993), the “symbolic city” (Winks 2009), or the ship (Lamming 1992; Ghosh 2008). ³ Equally, Caribbean writers reimagine the wide range of European and Amerindian myths about the Caribbean, such as El Dorado or Eden (Maes-Jelinek 1971), relocating these imagined Caribbean landscapes in the contemporary lived Caribbean, and relating them to contemporary issues such as environmental degradation or overdevelopment resulting from mass tourism (Campbell and Somerville 2007). So the spatialities expressed in Caribbean fiction can be said to have a restlessness in relation to the historical factuality of place and space, a restlessness that Harris (1990a, 182) described as “quantum” in form, uncertain, and, beyond that, undecidable in their location and ontology (Gribbin 1984; Hawking 1988). To see Caribbean writing as an example of postcolonial fiction is therefore to emphasize the fictionability of place and space as part of an ongoing meditation on the actually persisting inequalities between differently located and differently mobile bodies that is central to postcolonial geography.

Postcolonial fiction routed in this way locates the text event (the encounter among readers, texts, and writers as it creates meaning) in complex ways, and the identificatory politics of this location has become a central concern of postcolonial studies. For example, Graham Huggan (2001, 2008) has argued that postcoloniality (which he defined as a regime of value within which novels by authors from non-Western backgrounds are marketed to Western-dominated global literary audiences) draws on forms of exoticism developed under and since European colonialism. Therefore, the elements of postcolonial literature that are familiar to Western audiences (most noticeably the medium of European languages) work alongside less familiar aspects (e.g., cultural specificities and descriptions of tropical landscapes) to make the latter both less threatening and more enticing. This indeterminable balancing act between strangeness and familiarity characterizes the marketing and publicity that surrounds postcolonial literature: “exoticism is a kind of semiotic circuit that oscillates between the opposite poles of strangeness and familiarity” (Huggan 2001, 13).

Others, such as Bongie (2003), have applied the notion of exoticism specifically to text events surrounding Caribbean literature, noting that the category “Caribbean literature” is often assigned via an assumption of its author's authenticity, a currency that is supposedly passed on from the authors to the texts by virtue of birth or ethnicity. This assumption of Caribbean authenticity (attended by paratextual elements such as cover illustrations and blurbs that draw on a time-honored tropical discourse typified by words like “hot” and “lush”) is what makes the novels “exotic” in Bongie's terms; however, he went on to argue that the label of “postcolonial” is given only to some Caribbean literature as it is marketed to Western academic audiences. This additional currency is in general mediated by outmoded and elitist modernist notions of literary “greatness,” of which innovation in style and “perfect political credentials” (Donnell, quoted in Bongie 2003)—in terms of a broadly anticolonial poststructuralism—are important markers. Issues surrounding the selectivity of publication regimes and the consumerist demands of the book-buying public are unwelcome in discussions about intrinsic literary value:

A text's existence in the literary marketplace and its possibly complicitous relation to the desires of the buying public (regardless of where that public is located) are precisely what postcolonial literary critics have an extremely hard time envisaging and what they exile to the unspoken margins of their own self-styled “minoritarian” readings. (Bongie 2003)

Bongie (2003) offered Maryse Condé's work as a particularly ambivalent example of Caribbean writing that is claimed as “postcolonial” but the popularity of which directly challenges the elitism of postcolonial studies. He argued that Condé can be identified as a “self-consciously ‘middle-brow’ writer,” in that the challenging and experimental features of her work fit it for the mantle of “greatness” placed on it by its “postcolonial” positioning but at the same time the pleasurable “page turning” qualities of the writing and the exoticized covers and blurbs of the books also appeal to more popular audiences. Condé's books (particularly her historical novels) have sold extremely well in Europe and North America, both in French and in translation: “Condé is in many respects the very model of a middlebrow writer, with all the stylistic restrictions, political ambivalence, and capacity for success in the literary and academic market that this adjective entails” (Bongie 2003).

Whether Condé's writing qualifies for “greatness” is not our chief concern here. Of particular interest for us is the excess and ambivalence that characterize the spatiality of the novels’ consumption. Condé's novels have been described as “cross-over texts” (Apter 2001) that go beyond the demands and expectations of both the European-American popular buying public toward which the exoticized packaging of Caribbean novels is marketed and the Caribbean/European-American niche readership that is associated with the consumption of “postcolonial literature.” This excess in relation to each readership means that Condé's work has the capacity to challenge all of its audiences—popular, academic, European-American, and Caribbean. Like Salman Rushdie's novels, Condé's work includes but also excludes each of them: It “makes the reader simultaneously feel that s/he belongs and that s/he is excluded from [t]his world” (Sharp 2000, 125). Indeed, the novels’ multiple opportunities for marketing go well beyond this, so that postcolonial and Caribbean are only two among a range of applicable labels, including Francophone, black, feminist, and so on. The writer herself has always been vigilant in her resistance to publishers’ fully enclosing her within any of these labels, keen that her work should maintain its excess and not be “typecast or ghettoized in relation to audience” (Condé, quoted in Apter 2001, 93).

What this range of labeling makes clear is that the buying and selling of postcolonial novels as commodities in a globalized marketplace is fundamentally linked with complex processes of identification in a postcolonial world. The process of identification within the “text event” of writer, text, and audience is always dialogic: Writers and novels “imagine, construct and manipulate” (Ogola 2002, 47) a range of audiences, but at the same time a range of audiences interpret and “appropriate” the novels into their everyday lives (du Gay et al. 1997). In relation to Condé's novels, we want to argue that this dialogue of identification is distinctly postcolonial in its spatiality, precisely because (contra Bongie) the authenticity of the novels’ Caribbeanness, which audiences supposedly buy into, is not guaranteed by the writer's location within the Caribbean. Condé has spent much of her life away from Guadeloupe, in Paris, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Ghana, London, and the United States. But far from making her work less Caribbean, Condé insists that it is precisely this nomadic existence, the fact that she has not remained “rooted” in Guadeloupe, that fosters her creativity in relation to writing from a Caribbean perspective: “C’est l’errance qui amène la créativité. L’enracinement est très mauvais au fond. Il faut absolument être errant, multiple, au-dehors et au dedans. Nomade” ⁴ (Condé, quoted in Soestwohner 1995, 690). By the same token, Condé's work has a Caribbean audience, including a number of high-profile academic conferences in the Caribbean (Leservot 2009, 42), but her largest audiences have been in the United States and in Europe, often through the English translations made by her husband, Richard Philcox (Apter 2001, 92–93). In fact, Condé has stated repeatedly that her work is more debated and followed more closely outside the Caribbean; although some people in Guadeloupe buy her books and people recognize her when she is interviewed for television, “people do not read me. … There's no reaction to what I write, there's no constructive criticism, there's nothing at all” (Condé, in Pfaff 1996, 26; see also Apter 2001, 95).

The text event of Condé's novels functions as postcolonial not only in the dispersed locations of their author and their public, with the complex identificatory dialogues that ensue, but also to the extent that this dispersal is creatively represented within the texts themselves as routed through the Caribbean. In other words, the novels represent diverse identities and places stretching well beyond the geographical borders of the Caribbean region, but at the same time these identities and these places remain rooted in and routed through a distinctively Caribbean geography of disorientation (see earlier).

A brief reading of Extract 1 (see Appendix) from Condé's (1993) novel La Colonie du Nouveau Monde displays the fluid spatial connections among the Caribbean, Colombia, and the wider world within a global economic system, firmly emphasizing that movements of bodies are deeply unequal and that for many mobility is still connected with violence, desperation, and death. The novel concerns a fictional colony set up by a Guadaloupean man, Aton, who has a vision that he has been chosen by the Sun to spread a message of return to God and separation from the world through pilgrimage to Egypt. The novel begins during the slow decline of this movement, when the group has been rehoused in Colombia, after their first colony in Guadeloupe fell apart amid recriminations and legal procedures. Only a remnant is left: Aton, his wife Tiyi, their two daughters Nefertiti and Méritaton, and two remaining followers from Guadeloupe. The colony continues to disintegrate in a ragged way, hemorrhaging followers until the suicide of its founder, but also attracting ephemeral adherents (from Germany as well as Haiti), each with his or her own disparate motivations, linked with the politics of the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, as much as with poverty and desperation. In its reflection on spiritual and political faith and disenchantment, the novel can be seen as a meditation on the state of a globalized “new world” at the specific point in time (c. 1992) of the 500th anniversary of Columbus's “‘discovery’ of the Americas” (Pfaff 1996, 126).

In Extract 1, Nefertiti, a twelve-year-old girl, has committed suicide after being sexually abused by one of the colony's German disciples. As readers we know this, although the fishermen do not, allowing for simultaneous and contrasting perspectives. What the reader sees is the body of Nefertiti, a lively individual tragically transformed into an object in the water, buffeted by the tides but still recognizable as the child that the reader has encountered earlier in the novel's narrative, her starved stomach and barely formed breasts, respectively, indicative of the life she did and could have lived. Her humanity is transformed but not reduced. What the fishermen see is a corpse, in shocking detail, floating into their world. They fear it, but they immediately relocate it in the context of their own lives, of Colombia, of the global reach of the sea, and of the wider cosmology of the Blessed Virgin. At the same time, the continuing description of the thoughts of the two fishermen scales the effects of globalization down to the local and the individual. The unpredictable movements of global tourism, for example, are interpreted in terms of the “bad luck” of these two young men, as they think through the various ruses they have to develop to attract visitors and earn a living when the marine livelihoods open to earlier generations begin to close down. Ultimately it is the intrusion of the police, drawing the fishermen into a wider discursive framing of criminality in Colombia, as much as the corpse itself that results in “Une journée de perdue!”—a lost day or, perhaps, a day of loss.

Condé's writing therefore links back to Robinson's (2003) call for multivocality in geographical research in two ways. First, this fictional text offers multiply located characters who offer a range of perspectives on a system of globalization in which some places receive dead bodies rather than wealthy tourists. Events that take place in geographically dispersed locations and on different geographical scales (the international significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the national significance of rising criminality in Colombia, the individual tragedy of child abuse and suicide) are juxtaposed through spatial flows governed as much by “happenstance” (Massey 2005, 111) as by power relations. Second, the fishermen's day of loss is written and read within a spatially dispersed text event, in which writer, text, and reader meet through the complex spatialities of global systems of distribution, marketing, and identification, themselves making meaning via postcolonial histories of imperialism and independence, relationality, and exploitation. Not only do the text's fictional characters offer multiple perspectives in relation to spatial connections, but the text event is itself multiple, offering insights into the ways in which those spatial connections work through into processes of identification.

Wilson Harris's “Jonestown”: Pain and Fear in Being Read/Written

The work of Wilson Harris offers another productive reflection on postcolonial multivocality in relation to space and place. Beginning in 1939, decades before Guyana became independent in 1966, Wilson Harris spent fifteen years training and working as a surveyor. During this time his use of hydrographic surveying techniques to make new maps of the Guyanese landscape led him in particular to challenge the “rectilinear system of canals and dams” (Cribb 1993, 36) imposed by Dutch settlers and to argue that the use of natural drainage systems would allow large amounts of land to be reclaimed for agriculture. Although opposition by the owners of sugar estates ultimately led his recommendations to be blocked, the impact of this survey on the young Wilson Harris and on his later writing career was profound:

When we did that new kind of survey it was as if the whole field tilted and the boundaries were dislodged. We entered into a dialogue with the landscape … I knew I needed to find a different series of equations between the language of the imagination and the complex rhythms and life of the landscape. (Harris, quoted in Cribb 1993, 36–37)

Harris's epiphanic experience of the process of land surveying as a “dialogue with landscape,” and as a way to “build different equations” between the complexity of landscape and the diversity of the human cultures interacting with it, continued in unexpected ways when he moved away from Guyana to the United Kingdom at the age of thirty-eight. He recognized in the very different physical environments of London and East Anglia a range of interconnections with the Guyanese rainforests and the need for a continuation of his “new dialogue with reality in all its guises of recovered and revisionary tradition” (Harris 1999b, 43). Like Condé, the view of space and place that Harris brings through his writing is routed through—and not simply “rooted in”—the Caribbean, indelibly marked with its multiple connections and with the sometimes violent and abrupt mobilities of its diverse peoples. As text events, Harris's novels are as spatially dispersed as Condé's, in that Harris is an iconic figure in Guyanese literature and his work is much admired in academic circles (Maes-Jelinek 1991b; Adler 2003). ⁵ Unlike Condé's, however, Harris's novels do not have a popular audience. Indeed, due to his densely innovative style and wealth of literary and cultural allusions, he has often been accused of esotericism and elitism. Harris's defense in relation to these accusations, however, is not to analyze or assign particular social identities to his readership but rather to refer to relationships built through landscape rather than literature:

For fifteen years I worked and traveled with and among illiterates. Because I became attached to them I became aware of what mattered to them.—They were not interested in what they already knew about themselves, but in something more. So realism was not the answer. Their own resources went deeper than their predicament. I became an agent for them, and they understood that—If I were to betray the vision that I have for an instant then I would betray them. But I have not. I am certain that in all my writing I have kept faith with those men and women. (Harris, quoted in Cribb 1993, 44)

This is a fascinating quotation because it effectively relocates the text event from an intimate and exclusive interaction among writer, text, and reader alone to a position as one of many archival resources within a larger, more inclusive social and environmental landscape, to which both those who read and those who do not can have access.

It is not possible to elucidate fully the implications of Harris's text here, because this is arguably a distillation of a message spread across a whole literary lifetime (see Maes-Jelinek 1991b; Adler 2003); however, a brief description of Harris's vision of the role of literature and his critique of realism will explain his effective expansion of the text event. According to Harris (1967), the role of literature is to break the “realist” habit of consolidating existing roles and views of society, even where the intention is to reveal inequalities of class, gender, or race. The effect of consolidating societal roles is to trap people into reproducing a conquistadorial discourse that has dogged the Americas, for example, in some of the more brutal aspects of indigenous civilizations, since long before the Europeans arrived (Harris 1999a). The function of Harris's novels is to reveal the “visionary counterpoint of resources” (Harris 1990b, 18)—between myth and experience, history and narrative, human, natural, and animal worlds, made of the living, the dead, and the unborn—categories and practices that apparently belong to different orders but that instead are connected “below the threshold of consciousness” (Griffiths 1991, 68). These resources draw on the vast range of cultural traditions that can be accessed in and through the Caribbean—indigenous, African, European—and are not the sole property of any one group or place.

Harris argued that these resources are widely accessible, not necessarily or only through his novels but through the living archives of language and landscape as they have developed interactively over time, bringing together a wide range of different civilizations as they have met in the Americas. Wilson Harris's novels therefore are a resource for maintaining a vision of this endlessly “unfinished genesis” (Maes-Jelinek 1991a). In a process that echoes Spivak's (2003) call for Western academics to allow themselves to be imagined by the “other,” Harris's novels challenge readers both to produce and to be produced by the archival resources of language and landscape through their own writing, speaking, listening, and reading and through their own interaction with landscapes. We argue that this process of allowing the self to be creatively produced and reproduced through the collective resources of language and landscape is one answer to what Spivak (2003, 26) called “the question of the formation of collectivities without necessarily prefabricated contents”—an opening out to creative ways of living together on and with the planet.

Harris (1967) contrasts this creative vision with what he called realism: a literature that offers a linear, uncontradictory, and univocal “reality.” Like Bhabha's (1994) analysis of colonial discourses, this realism is limited because it cannot express the fullness of the resources available in the Caribbean, but at the same time the ways in which the Caribbean exceeds that reality are occasionally revealed in realist texts as excess. In this way the resolute complexity of the lived Caribbean is always under erasure but never completely flattened out by realist discourses.

So the writer sees the novels as taking meaning not only within the relatively restricted context of the text event among (largely academic but spatially dispersed) writers, texts, and readers but also within a wider, more inclusive sociospatial context that includes the extratextual interactions among people, language, and landscape, routed through the Caribbean as a crossroads where a range of civilizations have met. Harris creatively worked through the process of producing and being produced by language and landscape within his novels, emphasizing that the process itself can be filled with fear, pain, and difficulty. Rather than a dialogue, it can be a struggle, both for the writer and for that which is produced.

Jonestown (Harris 1996) clearly illustrated this struggle. The title immediately recalls the famous tragedy in 1978, when the Reverend Jim Jones persuaded a large group of women, men, and children, mainly African American, to set up a religious colony in Guyana, which ended in the mass suicide and murder of its adherents (J. R. Hall 2004). Far from documentary in style, however, the novel has a narrator named Francisco Bone, a fictional survivor of the Jonestown tragedy, who sends a letter to Wilson Harris at the beginning of the novel explaining that he, Bone, is writing a dream-book in which he aims to try to understand Jonestown as “the latest manifestation of the breakdown of populations within the hidden flexibilities and inflexibilities of pre-Colombian civilizations” (Harris 1996, 4). The novel can therefore be read as a meditation on pain and violence in the Americas. The bulk of the novel proceeds as an episodic quest through a range of spiritual and material spaces and moving freely backward and forward in time, in which the narrator has a range of conversations and encounters with fictional archetypes and with historical characters, which inform his dream-book and the potential for healing to be found in it.

In his letter to Wilson Harris (1996, 4; seemingly to the author himself), Bone (the fictional character) writes: “I feared to write in—and be written by—a demanding book that asserts itself in Dream and questions itself from time to time. … One overcomes the fear of Dreams, I suspect, for I did not stop writing or being written into what I wrote.” So the novel begins with a clear sense that writing and being written can be a “demanding,” rather exposing experience, but that this fear can be overcome. Extract 2 (see Appendix) is a working through of the difficulty of allowing oneself to be produced in circumstances where relationships are not equal, where there is a risk of exploitation or even of recolonization. This extract features an encounter between Jonah Jones (a close pseudonym for the Reverend Jim Jones) and Francisco Bone, exposing a Caribbean-centered geography of disorientation in a vertiginous rush through a range of connections in time and space and through a range of different ontologies. In the first paragraph we are in the narrative present where the dialogue is taking place, but in the second we are in the narrative past, when a character named Deacon had shared in the leadership of the religious colony, and where Jonah Jones's sexual exploitation of the indigenous women had become established. In the third paragraph the phrase “ghosts of Atlantis,” drawn from Greek and Egyptian mythology, is used to reflect on the historically verifiable extermination and exploitation of indigenous peoples in the Americas. By the fourth paragraph this continental history is focused in on the historical locality of Jonestown, where Jonah Jones's idea of a “liberal” education is to teach English classics to indigenous people coming “out of the Bush.” But in paragraph six this historical locality is hyperlinked, through the wormhole of education and the Hispanic name “Francisco,” to a U.S. locality, San Francisco, in which the two characters, as Western-educated students, had discussed American classics that voiced anger about the exploitation of indigenous people. In paragraph six Jonah Jones reveals that his philosophy exploits a range of global oppressions, using them as resources to feed his particular version of Judeo-Christian dualism, consisting purely of the saved and the damned. In paragraphs seven and eight, the perspective finally moves around to that of Bone, himself of mixed indigenous, African, and European ancestry, who reflects on and refuses this “split mind” that would make him “invisible” as a “savage.” Crucially, however, Bone is clear that, in writing Jonah Jones, his interlocutor, into his dream-book, he has to draw the exploiter into himself, despite the risk of being exploited. The process of being rewritten through the text event, of allowing oneself to become a text that is open to other writers and other readers, is a painful struggle, a struggle both with others outside the self and with that which is exploitative and oppressive within the self.

This warning of fear and pain is crucial for postcolonial geography. Robinson's recommendations of multivocality in geography, provincializing the Euro-American center, are also subject to a warning that this is not an easy undertaking. Robinson (2003, 284) talked about the “pitfalls or loose stones” on which a project to decenter European-American geography could fall, not least because of the inherent difficulties of overcoming entrenched habits of scholarship that have been formative of the discipline. Spivak's (2003, 21) formulation of the responsibility to allow oneself to be written by the other as “the difficult giving of permission to be approached by that which most resists thought” makes clear what sheer hard work it can be to shift established ways of thinking. We argue, however, that through the deployment of postcolonial fiction as text event, it might be possible to overcome the fear of pushing past the limits of preestablished and conventional—Western academic—frameworks to allow the possibility of other ways of thinking space and place. At the very least, Caribbean fiction allows for a shifting of worldview that places the Caribbean at the crossroads of an interconnected, sometimes painfully mobile world.

Conclusion

We have argued that postcolonial literature can be deployed within geography as a way of working toward multivocality in geographical knowledge. This argument has been expressed as the creation of a fictionable world, inasmuch as literature allows for testing out a range of different plausible possibilities and for voicing a range of different perspectives. Caribbean literature, in particular the novels of Wilson Harris and Maryse Condé, allows for the routing of the interconnected histories of a range of places through the Caribbean “crossroads” of civilizations. The particular histories and contemporary experiences of the region force a focus on a geography of disorientation, in which locations can be mythical or contested and mobilities are sometimes forced and violent displacements. The text event, in which novels make meaning, can be at the same time spatially dispersed—readers, writers, and texts are all mobile—and deeply imbued with a complex postcolonial politics of identification. Ultimately, this combination of spatial dispersal and complex identification makes the study of postcolonial fiction a fertile starting point for reimagining the world from multiple locations and with multiple voices.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded the research on which this article is based.

Notes

1. Guadeloupe is a small Francophone group of islands in the Lesser Antilles, whereas Guyana is a vast, mainly Anglophone country on the South American mainland.

2. E-mail interview with Junot Diaz, conducted by Marika Preziuso on 22 August 2008.

3. Ghosh is an Indian writer, but his novel, about the predeparture histories of Indian indentured workers sailing toward the Caribbean, reminds the reader that the Caribbean's history of unfree mobility is not confined to slavery and that writing about the Caribbean cannot be confined to experiences within the region's geographical boundaries.

4. “It's wandering that brings creativity. Rootedness is fundamentally very bad. It's absolutely necessary to be wandering, multiple, both outside and inside. Nomadic” (our translation).

5. See Hon. Edolphus Towns's Tribute to the Nation of Ghana in the U.S. Congress, June 2000, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2000-06-23/html/CREC-2000-06-23-pt1-PgE110613.htm.

Appendix

Extract 1: La Colonie du Nouveau Monde

Les yeux grands ouverts, à moitié nu, le corps reposait dans cette frange saumâtre où le sel de la mer se mélange à l’eau douce du río. Sans doute, les courants violents dans les alentours l’avaient amené là ou il était, car il semblait avoir trainé pas mal de temps dans l’eau et s’être heurté à beaucoup de récifs. Pour gonflé, boursouflé, ouvert par endroits qu’il fût, on pouvait voir que c’était celui d’une très jeune fille, une enfant en vérité, encore peu formée. Ses seins se bombaient à peine. Ses épaules étaient frêles. Son ventre était en creux. S’aidant avec des branchages tombés de cocotiers, car ils avaient peur de cette peau sans couleur et surtout de ces yeux qui semblaient béer sur le néant, Adolfo et Manoel halèrent le corps sur le rivage. C’était bien leur étoile. La Sainte Vierge n’avait jamais dans son idée de leur faire une faveur, par exemple de leur envoyer des groupes de touristes argentés désirant faire de la plongée dans les criques du parc naturel. Les gens ne venaient dans le parc que pour admirer les forêts enchevêtrées au sud et pour tenter de surprendre les animaux sauvages. Pourtant les récifs de corail au large de Tayrona étaient aussi spectaculaires que ceux des iles de Rosario où les Américains et tous les gens fortunés de la terre se pressaient au coude à coude et la mer aussi somptueusement violette. Ils se regardèrent, puis Adolfo, qui était le plus jeune, demanda:

- Qu’est-ce qu’on fait?

L’autre eut un haussement d’épaules:

- Il faut les prévenir. Ne bouge pas. J’irai tout seul à Santa Marta.

Il se dirigea vers la camionnette. Resté seul, Adolfo ne se sentit pas rassuré et fit en vitesse le signe de la croix. Il n’osait tourner la tête dans la direction de la petite morte et il alla s’asseoir a bonne distance d’elle. Vraiment la Colombie ne valait plus rien! La drogue, les vols, la violence, des morts dans des criques autrefois paisibles! C’était aux alentours de cette même baie de Taganga que son père était venu sur terre et avait gagné sa vie en jetant des filets aux poissons. A présent, la pêche ne nourrissait plus son homme. Si l’on voulait continuer à rester avec la mer, on devait inventer toutes sortes de ruses. Des cours de plongée sous-marine, des promenades dans des bateaux à fond de verre.

Une grande heure se passa, puis Adolfo entendit le bruit des moteurs. Sans se presser, l’air maussade comme s’ils accomplissaient une corvée, des policiers s’approchèrent du cadavre.

Aussitôt, l’un d’eux se mit à hurler:

- Pourquoi l’avez-vous tirée sur le bord? Est-ce que vous ne savez pas qu’il ne faut rien toucher? On apprend cela au cinéma!

Ils commençaient, les ennuis! Bientôt, on allait les accuser d’avoir tué cette fillette qu’ils n’avaient jamais vue de leur vie. Dans son écœurement, Adolfo fit face a la mer tandis que son ainé répondait aux questions.

Qui ils étaient? Deux honnêtes travailleurs. N’importe qui à Santa Marta pouvait fournir des renseignements sur leur compte. Au bout d’un temps qui sembla une éternité, les policiers firent glisser le corps sur un brancard et retournèrent vers leur car. Manoel héla dans leur dos:

	- Et nous? Qu’est-ce que nous faisons?
	- Vous venez avec nous!
	Voilà! Une journée de perdue! (Condé 1993; reproduced by kind permission of Robert Laffont)

Extract 1 (Authors’ Translation): The Colony of the New World

Eyes wide open, half naked, the body rested in this brackish fringe where the salt of the sea mixes with the fresh water of the river (río). No doubt, the violent currents in the surrounding waters had taken it here where it lay, because it seemed to have been drifting for a good while in the water and to have bumped against a lot of reefs. Swollen, bloated, cut open in parts as it was, one could see that it was the body of a very young girl, a child in truth, still barely grown. Her breasts were barely rounded. Her shoulders were frail. Her stomach was concave. Using branches fallen from coconut trees, because they were afraid of the colorless skin and above all of those eyes that seemed to stare into the void, Adolfo and Manoel hauled the body onto the shore. This was typical of their lot. The Blessed Virgin never thought to do them a favor, for example to send them groups of rich tourists wanting to go diving in the creeks of the nature reserves. People did not come to the reserve except to admire the tangled forests in the south and to try to glimpse wild animals. Nonetheless the coral reefs along the Tayrona were just as spectacular as the ones on the islands of Rosario to which the Americans and all the rich people on earth were fighting each other to go and the sea was just as sumptuously blue. They looked at each other, then Adolfo, who was the youngest, asked:

“What shall we do?”

The other shrugged his shoulders:

“We have to report it. Don't move. I’m going to Santa Marta on my own.”

He walked toward the van. Left alone, Adolfo did not feel comfortable and quickly made the sign of the cross. He did not dare to turn his head in the direction of the little dead girl and he went and sat down a good distance away from her. Really Colombia was worthless now! Drugs, robberies, violence, dead bodies in creeks that had been peaceful before! It was around this same Taganga bay that his father came into this world and made his living casting his net for fish. Nowadays, fishing could no longer feed a man. If you wanted to continue to stay near the sea, you had to invent all sorts of ruses. Underwater diving lessons, trips out in glass-bottomed boats.

A long hour passed, then Adolfo heard the noise of motors. Without hurrying, looking sullen as if they were carrying out a chore, the police approached the corpse.

Immediately, one of them started to shout:

“Why did you pull her ashore? Don't you know that you shouldn't touch anything? You learn that much even from films!”

They were starting, the problems! Soon, they’d be accused of killing this little girl that they’d never seen before in their lives. In his discouragement, Adolfo turned toward the sea while his elder brother answered the questions.

Who were they? Two honest workers. Anybody in Santa Marta could tell them all about them. After what seemed an eternity, the police officers slipped the body onto a stretcher and turned toward their vehicle. Manoel shouted at their backs:

	“And us? What should we do?”
	“You’re coming with us!”
	There it was! A whole day wasted!

Extract 2: Jonestown

Jonah and I fenced with each other in the Dream-book, in a new Circus, New World, New Carnival of savages and heathens, pre-Christian resurrected paganism that Jones despised in his charismatic Church of Eternity. He had almost infected me with his prejudices.

He and Deacon and I would eye the Arawak and Macusi women who passed through Jonestown occasionally. Jones eyed them, one eye in the belly of river beneath the reflected timbers of his house, the other in his bedroom window … Save their souls, embrace their bodies! Hell's missionary truth.

Were they not—these women and their silent menfolk—ghosts of Atlantis? Had they not come precariously close to extinction across the centuries since the Conquest? Had they not seen their pre-Columbian continent, South and Central and North, fall into a veil akin to an oceanic grave as their bones, their cemeteries, their sacred places were pillaged, uprooted, cast aside? Atlantis was here in the Americas, North, Central and South. It was in the belly of a veiled ocean within the forests, the mountains, the valleys, within the dry land and the rivers.

“Heathen savages,” said Jonah, “you may think what you like Francisco. I am liberal enough in my School here in Jonestown to teach them good English when they send their children to me out of the Bush. Teach them to read Charles Dickens and Jane Austen and to write in the same true vein …”

“But when we were in College in San Francisco you told me,” I said, “that you loved the American classics of anger in which the heathen—as you put it—feature so strikingly …”

“True, true,” said Jonah. “The heathen are a stick with which to beat my cursed society. Use the heathen savage as a clarion call when you wish to upbraid your civilization. Pretend to be black or red or yellow. Say you understand what black South Africans have suffered under apartheid regimes. Eskimos, South Sea Islanders, whatever. I was addicted to classics of anger. I am an American charismatic preacher. But let me tell you this, Francisco. Human nature never changes. I never doubted that the heathen savage is damned. I preach salvation to the saved who must forsake time and aim at eternity.”

He spoke to me, his close associate, as if I were not there. I was no savage! I was invisible in my Dream-book.

How peculiar are the proportions of the split mind of my age, hell … How peculiar are the challenges ingrained into original epic, modern epic … My invisibility—his difficulty to see me for what I was, who I was, neither damned nor saved but drifting somewhere between the two realms in their archetypal intercourse—was the price I must pay to suffer the anguish of addiction to American classics of anger that ran through my mixed ancestries and his puritan logic. I was linked to him in self-understanding within my Dream-book because of the humour, the elemental humour, of savage gods and goddesses though he was unaware of it.

I could see Jonah in myself, suffer him in myself, with a dark humour. I could write him into organs of fire and water even as he sought to mould me (or my heathen kith and kin) into liberal Dickensian flesh-and-blood. A liberality that made me invisible to him and ripe therefore (who knows) for salvation! Such is the predicament of savage conscience in seeking to lay bare the transgression and transfiguration of anger that I sought to achieve in my Dream-book, the transgression of anger's compulsive frame to damn and use others forever; transgression and transfiguration into a mystical dismemberment empowering a Virgin Ship, that I had begun to build, in order to cross (or contemplate crossing) every divide in hope of a third or fourth or fifth dimension beyond pure salvation or pure damnation … (Harris 1996, 118–19; reproduced by kind permission of Faber and Faber).