Colonial Space in Wilson Harris’s Black Marsden and Jonestown
Colonial Space in Wilson Harris’s Black Marsden and Jonestown

Summary/Abstract: Wilson Harris, a Guyanese author, reflects in his works the Caribbean as a heterogeneous space with the mingling of Asian, European, Asian, African and ancient American cultures. Harris had spent fifteen years as surveyor before Guyana’s independence in 1966. Harris’s aim as an author was to search for an authentic language that would best reflect the relationship of the imagination to the land. The Void, according to Harris, is laid with creative potential. Harris himself suggests that “the Void is best understood as a noun, hence the capitalisation. In the same way that the creative writer is faced with otherness in the production of singularity, the Void represents the always present, unknowable state that lies outside cultural discourse and is available to consciousness as a source of originality” (qtd. in Burns 9). Harris believed in the importance of facing the past with all its suffering and pain. If one aimed at an authentic portrayal of events, this was essential. Space is not fixed and static but rather contextually contingent. Drawing on these observations, this essay aims to examine colonial space in Wilson Harris’ Black Marsden and Jonestown in the light of Doreen Massey’s conceptualisation of space.

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