| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Callaloo 18.1 (1995) 94-108 "Hell is the kingdom of the animal that swallows up the memory of all things . . . Between life and death there is no destiny except memory. Memory weaves the destiny of the world." --Carlos Fuentes, Terra Nostra One constant in all the theorizing of post-colonial literature is the centrality to both literary creation and its criticism of involvement in historical process. This engagement with history becomes at once a pre-condition and a problem for the Caribbean writer, whose past appears to have been erased by the imperialist extermination of the indigenous population, the uprooting of slaves and indentured labourers from their languages and cultures, and the control of all written records. V.S. Naipaul addresses this issue in The Loss of El Dorado (1969)--his elaboration of a tiny detail buried in the annals of Trinidad about the torture of a slave. Wilson Harris, in his early essays on fiction, similarly asks how, within the conventions of realist historiography and the limitations of "comedy of manners" fiction, we can write about the faceless, nameless slaves of the past. Later, in the process of creating his impressionistic fiction of poetically sliding metaphors, Harris quotes Eliot's Four Quartets: "A people without history / is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / of timeless moments." Post-colonial writers like Naipaul and Harris work at a double task: on the one hand, imaginative liberation from the tyranny of a history which denies them a past (and thus a presence), and, on the other, immersion in history to recover/recreate a past. Writers grapple with the paradox of shaping narrative to affirm an evolving recovery of identity while resisting the totalizing hold of a single linear flow of time (especially as represented and controlled by hegemonic power). Their historical witness is at once a confession and a denial of the selective effacements of the recorded past. We can play on the notion of "witness": firstly, there is the writer as witnessing observer of historical events; secondly, the writer as witness for some court of historical review; thirdly,witnessing may be taken in the religious sense of giving testimony of grace and vision. At the root level, there is also the old English wit --"to know"--which for the oral "counter-histories" of the enslaved and the colonized also means to remember. Such definitions could form an outline for a model of literary history -- one of those privileging evolutionary structures in which the colonial diarist traveler or "artless" recorder of folkways operates at the first level. Thus Lady Barker, Susannah Moodie, Olandah Equiano and Amos Tutuola are "passive" witnesses of historical process. At the second level we find the nationalist writer consciously bearing witness against colonial events and attitudes -- Achebe, Anand, Lamming, Kasaipwalova, and so on. The third category, seen in this context, implies either eccentricity or literary maturity beyond the struggles of submission and rebellion that form the history of post-colonial cultural politics: Patrick White, the later Raja Rao, Sheila Watson perhaps. Such a model will be familiar to most of us. It is one which has held a good deal of prestige among critics, though it has been dressed up in different metaphorical arrangements. In shaping the reception of new work it has placed an emphasis on the middle of the scale, so that the visionary witness has more often than not been denigrated as too "universal," too aestheticist, too removed from present realities of historical moment. There may be grudging admiration for the originality of conception or for technical virtuosity (with corresponding attempts to co-opt the writer into a pantheon of national literature now "come of age" internationally), but the spiritual witness is generally held to be an isolated phenomenon, raised in the shelter of neo-colonialist elitism or riding on the back of more committed social realists. As nations turn back to analysis of the other two kinds of witness, however, they discover that even the early diarists are by no means innocent reflectors of an objective reality. History is shaped according to the observer's preconceptions and literary mental baggage. The fictional rendering of history is even more problematical. Assumptions...
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