'I was obsessed - let me confess - by cities and settlements in the Central and South Americas that are an enigma to many scholars. I dreamt of their abandonment, their bird-masks, their animal-masks ... Did their inhabitants rebel against the priests, did obscure holocausts occur, civil strife, ...
The last of the somewhat unified cycles of fiction by Wilson Harris is represented by his Carnival Trilogy, comprised of the novels Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987), and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990). Playing on carnival’s subversive potential in reenacting received tr...
Occasional rags lay at the water’s edge beneath the sea wall like disembowelled toys over and beyond which the wings of sea-gulls flashed in the sun, settling in the water and on a ruffled day like this, with a gentle wind and hardly a cloud in the sky, seeming to roll or sail tenderly upon the p...
They seemed to twist and wind their way through the palms of her hand as if they were intent on plucking her from their living grave and vortex. The sensation drew her into his arms again: the man she had loved who had abandoned and betrayed her a long time ago. Was it ten years or as many centur...
Were they human, were they other than human? I felt an irrational shock that my college education was over. It was a blow. I felt the hollowness of the humanity to which I returned. My mother was an excellent swimmer. Why had she drowned? The afternoon had been blissful. She had taken our boat Ti...
The names Brazil and Guyana were colonial conventions I had known from childhood. I clung to them now as to a curious necessary stone and footing, even in my dream, the ground I knew I must not relinquish. They were an actual stage, a presence, however mythical they seemed to the universal and th...
Faded back into the currency of dreams a minute to the hour when Jen, his wife, conceived…. “Lands, cities, are ships with sails of darkness (sails of light) as the clouds or the stars unfurl into conventions and maps. Tenanted floods. Tenanted fires. Confusing landmasses ...
