Writers who have influenced me

Wilson Harris (b. 1921), from Guyana but resident in England since the late 1950s, is perhaps the single biggest influence on my thinking.  I read all his novels every few years and each reading shows me something I had not seen before or felt before.  His engagement with the Guyanese interior, poised on the edge of the Amazonian basin, packs a hefty surprise in his diction and syntax which argues for a new amalgamation of ecology, philosophy, history, myth, and spirituality, an ecobiophilomythohistoricospiritualism if you please!

  
I read his first novel, Palace of the Peacock (Faber, UK 1960) when I was 18.  When I talk about the experience I know I sound like a character in a Carlos Castanada novel, or Alan Watts, or the Siddartha of Hesse – but it is true – Harris writes with visionary zeal.  His lifelong project remains a coalition between the form of his writing dictated by his experience of the Guyanese interior, where he worked for some years as a river surveyor. This altered means of literary expression suits his discoveries about the workings of the jungle and river interior of Guyana.  Put another way he writes with the music of imagery combined with compound clauses because the way of writing approximates most closely to the cartography and indigenous myths of Guyana’s interior.

  
It just so happens that how Wilson Harris writes and what he writes about dovetail beautifully with a set of critical global concerns: the use and misuse of the planet by people, the responsibility of writing to things such as, the past, myths of the indigenous peoples, the instruction inherent in such myths for so-called modernity if only modernity cared to pay attention, the fatalism of profit-driven technological development that must be altered in all fairness to the planet and its many impoverished peoples, the honour and dignity that are integral to a life of reflection wedded to the globe and other species rather than to individual material gains, to name a few.

  
Since his holistic arguments are conducted from an admittedly partial perspective, Wilson Harris calls his approach an ‘Infinite Rehearsal’ (the title of his 19th novel), a necessary return to this cluster of themes since each visitation delves into new realms of thought and revelation. In this way he keeps individual conscience alive and attuned to the chaos theory of the planet.  A good and great man.

© Fred d'Aguiar

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