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"In 1970 and 1971, Wilson Harris published two short story collections that explored the myths, fables and fragments of history of the Amerindian peoples of Guyana and the Caribbean. These are brought together in the current volume. The Sleepers of Roraima, subtitled ""A Carib Trilogy"" focuses on the ironic fate of the Caribs, the feared conquerors of other Amerindian peoples, the cannibals of European legend, but in the present the most vanished, almost extinct of all these groups. In The Age of the Rainmakers, each of the stories focuses on one of the groups still present in Guyana: the Macusi, Arecuna, Wapisiana and Arawaks. In the absence of reliable history, and in the face of the stereotypes attached to these people (such as stoicism or a propensity for laughter), Harris makes no attempt to write conventional fictional reconstructions of an ethnographic kind, but subjects the fragments of tribal lore to imaginative revision. His stories work towards the discovery of what is ""original"" in the sense of primordial in these narratives, in discovering such common patterns as the loss of innocence, the connections between sacrifice and transcendence, or even the shared identities of cannibal and Eucharistic consumption."

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9781845231651

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Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in British Guiana, with a background which embraces African, European and Amerindian ancestry. Between 1945-1961, Harris was a regular contributor of stories, poems and essays to Kyk-over-Al and part of a group of Guyanese intellectuals that included Martin Carter, Sidney Singh, Ivan Van Sertima and Milton Williams. His first publication was a chapbook of poems, Fetish, (1951) under the pseudonym Kona Waruk, followed by the more substantial Eternity to Season (1954) which announced Harris's commitment to a cross-cultural vision in the arts, linking the Homeric to the Guyanese. Harris's first published novel was Palace of the Peacock (1969), followed by a further 23 novels with The Ghost of Memory (2006) as the most recent. His novels comprise a singular, challenging and uniquely individual vision of the possibilities of spiritual and cultural transcendance out of the fixed empiricism and cultural boundedness that Harris argues has been the dominant Caribbean mode of thought.

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