‘When the news of the death of the Child,’ said my judges, ‘seeped through to the waiting populace they turned upon you with a vengeance. They sought to tear you limb from limb, Deacon. You had become their Prisoner. But you escaped with the Titan’s (Jonah’s) help. He was able to bar them out. He was an American! We warned you but you forgot or ignored the curse.’ They stared at me with a veiled but savage humour. ‘Did you suffer another Eclipse of Memory, Deacon, when you lost the Child and were driven from your wife? You hid in the Shadow of a great Cat that covered the sun. Rich folklore, Deacon, but you won’t deceive us again. We have brought you out. Out into broad daylight in the setting sun …’
‘I am not Deacon,’ I cried for the last time in the Play.
‘Who then is to be tried and judged? If not Deacon, who? Does no one claim the part? Is everyone innocent, no one guilty or responsible?’
I was still. I was a mere Colonial. Not an Imperialist. My limbs had aged nevertheless under the burden of Eclipses of Memory. Are Colonials the only potential creators of the genius of Memory theatre? I was weak but I had gained the other side of the Dream.
‘Who then are we to judge?’
‘Judge me,’ I said at last. ‘I am here before you. I have nothing. I am poor. Judge me. It is no accident.’
They took me without further ado to the edge of the cliff. The sun was still high though setting on the Skin of the Predator. It shone there, it was imprinted there. It was alive. It fell with me, the Predator fell with me, when their hands, the judges’ hands, drove me over the edge of the cliff. Black-out music. Black soul music. I fell into a net of music, the net of the huntsman Christ. The Predator peered through me, in me, but was held at bay in the net. We stood face to face, Dread and I, Predator and I. Old age and youth parted and I was naked in the lighted Darkness of the Self. The Child rode on the Predator’s groaning back. Lightness becomes a new burden upon the extremities of galaxies in which humanity sees itself attuned to the sources and origins of every memorial star that takes it closer and closer — however far removed — to the unfathomable body of the Creator.
About the Author
Wilson Harris was born in 1921 in the former colony of British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before leaving for England in 1959 to become a full-time writer. His exploration of the dense forests, rivers and vast savannahs of the Guyanese hinterland features prominently in the settings of his fiction. Harris’s novels are complex, alluding to diverse mythologies from different cultures, and eschew conventional narration in favour of shifting interwoven voices. His first novel Palace of the Peacock (1960) became the first of The Guyana Quartet, which includes The Far Journey of Oudin (1961), The Whole Armour (1962) and The Secret Ladder (1963). He later wrote The Carnival Trilogy (Carnival (1985), The Infinite Rehearsal (1987) and The Four Banks of the River of Space (1990)). His most recent novels are Jonestown (1996), which tells of the mass-suicide of a thousand followers of cult leader Jim Jones; The Dark Jester (2001), his latest semi-autobiographical novel, The Mask of the Beggar (2003), and one of his most accessible novels in decades, The Ghost of Memory (2006). Wilson Harris also writes non-fiction and critical essays and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several universities, including the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Liège (2001). He has twice been winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature.