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The Citation
The following is the full text of the announcement and message from the Secretary of the Guyana Prize, and the Citation.
On behalf of the Vice Chancellor, Uni-versity of Guyana and the Management Coun-cil of the Guyana Prize for Literature, I congratulate you on your deserved receipt of The Guyana Prize Special Award for Literature 2002.
The Guyana Prize was established in 1987 for the promotion and encouragement of good literature in the Caribbean in general and Guyana in particular. The name of Wilson Harris has had a special association with it since then because he was the inaugural winner of the Guyana Prize for Fiction in 1987 with his novel, Carnival, and delivered the first Acceptance Speech in the history of the Prize on the subject of the Art of the Grotesque.
There was an important new development in the Prize in 1998 when it was decided to honour an outstanding and exceptional work of non-fiction, which made an undisputed landmark contribution to Guyanese and West Indian literature. Such a work was the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage published in 1996 by Oxford.
This represented a lifetime achievement by its author, Dr. Richard Allsopp, a Guyanese linguist. Then, in 2000, it was decided to recognize the literary journal, Kyk-Over-Al, for its 55 years of immeasurable contribution to the development of Caribbean Literature.
In the year 2002, Faber and Faber had just published your novel, The Dark Jester, but, though eligible, it was not entered for the Guyana Prize. It appears, the author had a long-standing instruction to the publishers not to enter his novels because you, as a major established writer, felt you could contribute to the development of Guyanese literature by allowing developing authors to compete for the Prize.
We, at The Guyana Prize, do not share that view; we insist that the best works by the best writers should be entered. But it was acknowledged that in 1998, Faber and Faber had included your first novel, Palace of the Peacock, in its Faber Caribbean Series in which it published “the finest work . . . of the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora . . . in the four major languages of the region”. You were among 4 authors selected for this series. Throughout the 1990s you had completed The Carnival Trilogy, Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, Jonestown and The Dark Jester in addition to two collections of critical essays. Your latest collection, The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, edited by Andrew Bundy, was quickly recognized as one of the outstanding contributions to post-colonial theory.
Since that first revolutionary novel in 1960, Harris was eventually recognized as a fiction writer of exceptional originality. Indeed, critic Kathleen Raine holds you responsible for having influenced change and shaken up the form of the English novel, “which had remained static for nearly 100 years”. In the year 2002 The Guyana Prize recognized that no fiction writer of Guyanese origin had achieved more.
It was therefore decided to extend:
The scroll was signed by Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo, UG Vice Chancellor James Rose and Alim Hosein on behalf of the Guyana Prize Secretary.
The Conference
The Warwick Conference proceeded around the theme of “The Amerindians : Quantum Leaps” because of Harris’ extensive treatment of the Amerindians of the Guianas, Mexico and Central America, their civilizations, myths and cosmology in his fiction and theory. Two Turner Prize-winning films, Western Deep and Carib’s Leap, by Steve McQueen were shown and discussed. Western Deep is about workers in a South African gold mine while Carib’s Leap is about daily life in the village of Sauteurs in Grenada. This relates metaphorically to the conference title because Sauteurs is the site of the mass suicide by the last Caribs of the island who, rather than submit to capture, leapt off the sea-cliff into ‘mythic time’. The screenplay juxtaposes contemporary village life with misty pictures from the mythical past of men falling slowly off a cliff. The discussion followed a paper on the films by Jean Fisher. (Coincidentally, a character in Harris’ novel, Carnival, is named Jane Fisher).
Michael Mitchell, whose doctoral thesis at Warwick was on Harris’ work, read a paper titled “With covered Eyes : Wilson Harris and the Arts of Seeing”, about the films and the novel Tumatumari. Following a vision, the novel’s heroine, Prudence, immerses herself in the same river and waterfall that claimed her husband’s life in the wilderness of Tumatumari, and this parallels the self-sacrificing leap of the Caribs in the film. Carolyn Rodrigues’ presentation dealt with the real dilemmas confronting the inhabitants of the same interior locations treated in the fiction. She analyzed the social and political issues which concern them including the Amerindian Act now being studied for amendment.
The Amerindian woman, whose contemporary situation concerned Rodrigues, was also the subject of McWatt’s paper titled “Eldorado Dreaming : Landscape and the Amerindian woman in Guyanese fiction”. Drawing on the myth of Eldorado, McWatt explores the way “the desire for riches and for the landscape and its mysteries or secrets tend to get focussed, in the fictional test, into the desire for a woman”. He cites relevant treatments in Carpentier, W.H.Hudson and A.J.Seymour before exploring female characters in Harris’ Palace of the Peacock, Heartland and a Wapishana girl in The Age of the Rainmakers.
Harris’ own address, “The Brutalization of Truth”, touched on the Iraq war, trans-culturalism and quantum theory among other things. The war is the latest act in the unending series to which Harris returns in different works, in which the human race has been warring against itself at different times in history through plunder, genocide and other man-made, technological disasters. He argues that although they wear different masks, different costumes and play different parts in the theatre of history, they remain the same race in a continuing drama of self-destruction. This links with his theory of trans-culturalism because he believes the world’s different cultures and myths in far-flung geographical locations are all very closely inter-related, belonging to the one family of man. This has informed his fiction, his plots and narrative styles as well as his theory, which have also benefited from his training in science.
Harris has exploited both quantum physics and the mathematical theory of Chaos in constructing the very complex techniques that he uses in many of the later novels, just as his experiences in the Guyanese rainforests and as a surveyor gave him visionary images, concepts, characters and incidents that appear in many of the earlier books. The concept of “quantum leaps” was therefore a very neat canopy for Harris’ work, the history of Amerindians in the New World and the links to their contemporary existence.
The Conference
The Warwick Conference held on May 17 in honour of Wilson Harris proceeded around the theme of “The Amerindians : Quantum Leaps” because of Harris’ extensive treatment of the Amerindians of the Guianas, Mexico and Central America, their civilizations, myths and cosmology in his fiction and theory. Two Turner Prize-winning films, Western Deep and Carib’s Leap, by Steve McQueen were shown and discussed. Western Deep is about workers in a South African gold mine while Carib’s Leap is about daily life in the village of Sauteurs in Grenada. This relates metaphorically to the conference title because Sauteurs is the site of the mass suicide by the last Caribs of the island who, rather than submit to capture, leapt off the sea-cliff into ‘mythic time’. The screenplay juxtaposes contemporary village life with misty pictures from the mythical past of men falling slowly off a cliff. The discussion followed a paper on the films by Jean Fisher. (Coincidentally, a character in Harris’ novel, Carnival, is named Jane Fisher).
Michael Mitchell, whose doctoral thesis at Warwick was on Harris’ work, read a paper titled “With covered Eyes : Wilson Harris and the Arts of Seeing”, about the films and the novel Tumatumari. Following a vision, the novel’s heroine, Prudence, immerses herself in the same river and waterfall that claimed her husband’s life in the wilderness of Tumatumari, and this parallels the self-sacrificing leap of the Caribs in the film. Carolyn Rodrigues’ presentation dealt with the real dilemmas confronting the inhabitants of the same interior locations treated in the fiction. She analyzed the social and political issues which concern them including the Amerindian Act now being studied for amendment.
The Amerindian woman, whose contemporary situation concerned Rodrigues, was also the subject of McWatt’s paper titled “Eldorado Dreaming: Land-scape and the Amerindian woman in Guyanese fiction”. Drawing on the myth of Eldorado, McWatt explores the way “the desire for riches and for the landscape and its mysteries or secrets tend to get focussed, in the fictional test, into the desire for a woman”. He cites relevant treatments in Carpentier, W.H.Hudson and A.J.Seymour before exploring female characters in Harris’ Palace of the Peacock, Heartland and a Wapishana girl in The Age of the Rainmakers.
Harris’ own address, “The Brutalization of Truth”, touched on the Iraq war, trans-culturalism and quantum theory among other things. The war is the latest act in the unending series to which Harris returns in different works, in which the human race has been warring against itself at different times in history through plunder, genocide and other man-made, technological disasters. He argues that although they wear different masks, different costumes and play different parts in the theatre of history, they remain the same race in a continuing drama of self-destruction. This links with his theory of trans-culturalism because he believes the world’s different cultures and myths in far-flung geographical locations are all very closely inter-related, belonging to the one family of man. This has informed his fiction, his plots and narrative styles as well as his theory, which have also benefited from his training in science.
Harris has exploited both quantum physics and the mathematical theory of Chaos in constructing the very complex techniques that he uses in many of the later novels, just as his experiences in the Guyanese rainforests and as a surveyor gave him visionary images, concepts, characters and incidents that appear in many of the earlier books. The concept of “quantum leaps” was therefore a very neat canopy for Harris’ work, the history of Amerindians in the New World and the links to their contemporary existence.