1Barrier-Roiron Virginie: A Colonial Ghost Never to Be Banished? The Case of Zimbabwe

2When it took over from colonial Rhodesia in 1980, Zimbabwe had to recover from decades of civil war aimed at overcoming a political system based on racial discrimination. But in observing the political evolution of the country in the last decade, we may now wonder whether Cecil Rhodes’s ghost is not still hovering over Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

3The object of this paper is to ask whether the political and ideological system of Southern Rhodesia has really been exorcised when independence was granted. Assessing the weight of Southern Rhodesia’s history on Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, this presentation proposes to study the phenomena through which the former colony’s ghost has revealed itself in the governance of the state since 1980.

4Indeed, the way Robert Mugabe conceives power and his own relation to power is still marked by a colonialist-inspired idea of what the ‘majority’ is, therefore preventing the emergence of a definition of the nation which would now be based on objective criteria. Still haunted by the ghost of its own past, contemporary Zimbabwe still has to undergo the catharsis of the colonial system which presided over it creation.

5 Bhattacharya Tithi: Deadly Spaces: Ghosts, Histories and Colonial Anxieties in Nineteenth-Century Bengal

6In his autobiography Apan Katha [my own words/stories] (1946), the renowned artist and writer Abanindranath Tagore (1871- 1951) imputes an amazing historicity to space. An ancestral home, writes Tagore, ‘lives’ only through the ‘company of people’. In his characteristic lyrical style Tagore further elaborates this connection between history and location. According to him when the people leave the house, the ‘cobwebs of memory’ fly away in the wind and it is then that the house ‘truly dies’. What can we make of this beautiful connection between location and history or space and time? In particular, what do we make of his transposing the organicity of living and dying onto space in this evocative manner? In this paper I am going to advance Tagore’s claim about this relationship between history and spatiality in the context of Calcutta as a colonial city. I am going to argue that spaces acquired a certain kind of past-ness or the patina of antiquity through a very specific rhetoric related to death and dying, that of haunting. We are going to look at haunted spaces as locations of history from two separate perspectives: British and Indian; this is so because each side was invested in sets of very different arguments about Calcutta’s status as a city with a past, or its respectability as an old city. Ghosts, both Bengali and British, we will argue, determined and/or disputed the antiquity of the city and in turn questioned or consolidated the future of British rule.

7Calbi Maurizio: Writing with Ghosts: Shakespearean Spectrality in Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile

8The article focuses on the manifold ways in which the spectre of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra manifests itself in Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), a play which is to a large extent about a Trinidadian theatre company’s attempt to put on a production of Antony and Cleopatra. It argues that this spectre circulates trauma but it is also part of a process of re-articulation of the stage as a place where the ‘familiar’ and the ‘foreign’ interrogate one another. In particular, by responding to the spectre, the play marks a movement from a ‘writing against or without’ Shakespeare to a more complex sense of writing with Shakespeare, which is not, however, an uncritical appropriation of the Bard.

9Carrigan Anthony: Haunted Places, Development, and Opposition in Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ (2005)

10Kamau Brathwaite’s genre-crossing piece ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ (2005) is a polemical and intensely lyrical intervention into an ecologically destructive instance of tourism development in present-day Barbados. It portrays Brathwaite’s struggle against eviction from his home in CowPastor in the south-east of the island due to the proposed construction of what he describes as an ‘unnecessary and unethical’ airport access road. Spurred by his visionary encounter with the ghost of Namsetoura, a slave woman who asks him to defend her burial ground, Brathwaite suggests that the proposed development of CowPastor threatens not only to transform the visible landscape but also to destroy a site of deep historical and spiritual significance.

11In this paper, I explore how Brathwaite’s representation of Namsetoura’s ghost complicates the implementation of ecologically destructive and historically insensitive development in postcolonial Barbados. By highlighting the importance of understanding the spiritual and sacred dimensions of landscape in relation to one of its previously silenced ghosts, Brathwaite insists on a mode of evaluating natural environments (and opposing unsustainable development) which reclaims some of the island’s buried histories. I address specifically how Brathwaite’s opposition to the proposed development is discursively reinforced by his inclusion of a photograph he has taken of Namsetoura which challenges reductively dualistic divisions between the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the incorporeal. I proceed to suggest that Brathwaite’s poetic re-evaluation of local landscape and the spirits of its past paradoxically adds touristic value to the very site that is due to be transformed as a result of tourism industry demands. As such, the ghost of Namsetoura can be read as a powerful agent in the process of creating more sustainable tourism futures.

12Collingwood-Whittick Sheila: The Haunting of Settler Australia: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River

13Though, as Gelder and Jacobs, have pointed out, ‘the ghost story in Australia is a minor genre, a marginal genre’, the semantic field of ghosts and haunting is repeatedly pressed into service whenever Anglo-Celtic Australia’s relationship with its colonial past is under discussion. It might legitimately be argued, in fact, that contemporary white Australia is haunted by its origins.

14Such was not always the case. The extremely violent nature of Australia’s colonisation was, until recent decades, concealed, glossed over, banished from the collective memory of the nation’s settler descendants. While the brutal dispossession of Aboriginal tribes and the frontier rhetoric that clamoured for the extermination of these ‘savage’ peoples were passed over in silence, the founding myth of Terra Nullius and the reassuring fiction that Australia was peacefully settled dominated historical accounts of the colonial era. But the past did not go away, it merely went underground, taking up residence in the white Australian subconscious.

15In the last few decades, however, a new generation of historians and a combination of historical circumstances (the ‘Mabo’ decision, the report on the ‘Stolen Generations’ and the launching of the Reconciliation process) have conspired to shatter ‘the Great Australian Silence’. Suddenly, repressed memories of rapine, theft and ‘dispersals’ have risen to the surface, disrupting settler descendants’ image of themselves as a civilised, ‘fair do’, egalitarian society.

16Among the recent literature that mirrors white Australia’s painful efforts to come to terms with the ghosts of its colonial past is Kate Grenville’s award-winning novel, The Secret River (2005), short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize. The paper I propose will analyse Grenville’s handling of her (real-life) convict ancestor’s experience of settling ‘vacant’ territory on the Hawkesbury River and the culmination of that experience in the massacre of an Aboriginal tribe—a fact-based fictional event that haunts both the novel’s main protagonist and the author’s imagination.

17Gibert Teresa: The Politics and Poetics of Thomas King’s Textual Hauntings

18This paper analyzes the use of the Indian ghost motif in Thomas King’s writings within the framework of postcolonial criticism about spectral narrativity, and in the light of both Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny and Derrida’s notion of spectrality. King outlines a politics and poetics of haunting that wholly contradicts Canada’s alleged ghostlessness, as expressed not only by pioneer Catharine Parr Traill in her famous 1833 statement about the complete banishment of ghosts and spirits from a ‘too matter-of-fact country for such supernaturals to visit’, but also by Earle Birney, who concluded his poem ‘Can. Lit.’ asserting: ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts/we’re haunted’.

19Unlike other instances of the genre, King’s textual hauntings are never horrific because the presence of spectral Native figures in his novels and short stories does not include any malevolent or macabre elements. Yet the subversive humor which often pervades these mysterious appearances and other fantastic manifestations in King’s poignant scenes of magic realism becomes an amazingly effective strategy to revise colonial history and raise important issues concerning the present day lives of Natives in North America, such as stereotyping, cultural appropriation and commodification, sovereignty, environmental degradation and territorial claims.

20Gunning Dave: History, Anthropology, Necromancy: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land

21This essay looks to Amitav Ghosh’s generically-mixed text In an Antique Land (1992) in order to explore the ways in which the writer stages the conjunction of types of writing that seem to find their discursive origin within the disciplines of anthropology and history respectively. In this meeting of modes, it is argued, a haunted space is opened which speaks of the past but is always orientated toward an ethical revisioning of the present and, more significantly still, of the future. Ghosh’s engagement with ghosts within his accounts of twelfth-century cosmopolitan connections and of the realities of contemporary Egyptian rural life allows him to develop an oppositional stance that stands outside of modernity’s enforced divisions. In attempting to speak to the ghosts that cannot be contained in an easily imagined past, but become manifest instead in the present, he finds a way of writing about a lost history that is more than just nostalgia, and a way of presenting ethnography that is always marked by a disruptive potential set into motion by the problematised position of the recorder.

22Hennard Dutheil de la Rochère Martine: Rattling Perrault’s Dry Bones: Nalo Hopkinson’s Literary Voodoo in Skin Folk

23Nalo Hopkinson’s collection of short fiction, Skin Folk (2001) includes imaginative and innovative variations on classic fairy tales, including ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘The Fairies’ and ‘Bluebeard’. My contention is that as she rewrites these stories from a postcolonial perspective, Hopkinson inflects them to explore body politics as she combines issues of gendered and racial identity, encapsulated in the central metaphor of ‘skin’. Further, by submitting the European tale of magic to a process of cultural translation, Hopkinson practices a form of literary voodoo that gives it new life and bite by challenging the norms and values encoded in the traditional, and naturalised, versions. While her de-centering of Perrault’s literary tales (among others) enacts the struggle with the fairy tale canon represented by the French writer, she also invokes him as a ‘Papa Legba’ figure who opens up new possibilities and facilitates a dialogue between Europe and the West Indies, the dead and the living, past and present.

24Layne Prudence: Reincarnating Legba: Caribbean Writers at the Crossroads

25For Caribbean authors exploring new ways in their work of navigating the various hyphens and margins they straddle in their experiences of travel, displacement and exile, and of moving beyond the processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, reincarnating Legba, a metaphorical correlate of ‘the crossroads, ’—the hybrid space of dichotomous experience— emerges as a mechanism through which the production of liminality and difference helps redefine and construct political and social Caribbean postcolonial identity. Legba’s reincarnates, these postcolonial ghosts, including the transvestite, transsexual, and the mixed ethnic, are emerging as haunting presences in contemporary Caribbean fiction. Like Legba, bridge between the powerful and the powerless, the aged and the young, the disabled and the strong, within these crossroads characters resides the power to mediate, regenerate, disintegrate and transform normalizing narratives of oppression into resistance strategies. As Caribbean subjects, both real and imagined, attempt to articulate and negotiate the relationship between territory/place, political structures, cultural traditions, and the national and cultural identity schisms that characterize the postcolonial experience, Legba becomes one of the primordial influences in the contemporary literary re-imaginings of these complex negotiations.

26McLeod John: Business Unbegun: Spectral Subjectivities in the Work of Jackie Kay and Pauline Melville

27This essay explores the rhetoric of the ghostly in postcolonial literary and critical contexts. With reference to the work of Simon Gikandi and Salman Rushdie, it considers, firstly, the ways in which the vocabulary of ghostliness has been used to expose the violent origins of modern subjectivity in the bloody business of colonialism. At the end of empire, the ghosts of colonialism return with ‘unfinished business’ to haunt the scene of subjectivity and point to shadowy histories of subaltern subjecthood. The essay then considers a second form of postcolonial ghostliness: the haunting presence of those lives attenuated by colonial modernity’s quest for legitimate identity—projected lives which have not been allowed to develop and might be thought of as raising up ‘business unbegun’. These forms of spectral subjectivity are articulated in the work of Jackie Kay, whose writings on adoption and race both build and set such subjectivities against the embodied legitimate identities of modernity. The essay concludes by engaging with Pauline Melville’s short fiction, where the difficult business is raised of raising the forgotten ghosts of modernity and colonialism while enabling their exorcism in order to begin a new future.

28Peeren Esther: The Postcolonial and/as the Spirit World: Theorizing the Ghost in Jacques Derrida, Achille Mbembe and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

29As that which keeps returning, the ghost is a highly suitable figure for thinking the postcolonial. However, the seminal theoretical text of contemporary ‘ghost studies’, Derrida’s Specters of Marx, does not include the postcolonial subject as an agent and places the ghost in a distinctly western tradition. This paper uses Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road to argue for the need to explore the ghost as a culturally specific concept whose workings cannot be generalized. Although Derrida’s western notion of the ghost as a figure of temporal disturbance and disjointing is pertinent to Okri’s text, its African setting prompts a supplementary theorization of the ghost through the work of the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe and his conceptualization of ghostly power and violence through the notions of living in death, specular experience, the wandering subject and necropolitics. Whereas Mbembe tends to present ghostly power as an oppressive force wielded by the state or the autocrat, The Famished Road illustrates in several ways how ghostly power is not invincible, but can be interrupted and turned against itself, precisely because of its ungraspable, shimmering status. In the end, therefore, neither Derrida’s nor Mbembe’s perspective on the ghost is fully vindicated by The Famished Road. Rather, the novel brings the two together in a syncretic move that preserves Mbembe’s idea that the ghost can be an oppressive, deadening force aligned with the state, as well as Derrida’s notion of spectrality as a resistive force and possible figure of justice.

30Potts John: Rough Justice and Buried Country: Australian Ghosts

31This paper examines the cultural significance of Australian ghost stories, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. The paper considers the specific qualities of these stories in the context of the colonial experience of Australia. The foundation of the penal colony and the dispossession of the Aborigines are proposed as significant contributing factors to any specificity relating to Australian ghost stories. The narrative theme of ‘buried country’ coming to the surface is a feature of late nineteenth century ghost stories, told from the colonisers’ perspective, concerning encounters with Aboriginal burial grounds or massacre sites. The uniqueness of the Australian landscape is also considered as a contributing factor to ghost stories or alleged hauntings occurring in the Australian interior.

32Rushdy Ashraf H. A.: Ghosts of Sorrow: the Haunted Dialectic of Historical Apologies

33In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of public apologies for historical atrocities as a form of post-colonial exorcism. What does it mean for heads of state or churches to apologize for events in which they did not materially participate? What do such acts of apologizing tell us about the contemporary meaning of the events themselves, about a nation’s or church’s sense of corporate identity that extends to the past, and about the role of the aggrieved people in this discourse? One useful way of imagining this dialectic is for us to see these apologies as attempts to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism. The presence of ghosts is perhaps most symptomatic of unresolved lives, of failed closure, of the thwarting of the revelation of truth. Those who were wrongfully killed haunt the sites of their violation until the truth is revealed and their souls allowed to rest.

34This paper will examine a representative public apology in order to explore in what ways we can say who is haunted—the descendants of the victims or the descendants of the victimizers—and who benefits, and how, from a discursive act that simultaneously represents and exorcises the effects of the past.

35Sacksick Elsa: ‘Ghosting’ in Roy’s and Rushdie’s novels

36 Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses by S. Rushdie and The God of Small Things by A. Roy are novels plagued by ghosts. The main characters—who at one point or another turn into ghosts as their bodies vanish or become blurred and malleable— share at least two characteristics with the ghost figure: their wandering and their liminal position which could make them a logical figure of the postcolonial migrant evolving on the fringe and opening onto a ‘third space’. However, the ghost condition, or what we could call after Deleuze the ‘devenir-fantôme’, also shapes language which wanders in the territory of ‘Le reste’—, that limbic state of language from where the wildest inventions can spring. We can then work on the notion of textual haunting. Indeed, if language is haunted by another grammar (see the verbal creations of the two writers) and by the linguistic ghosts of colonisation, we will find out that even the narrative structure, entirely shaped by repetition, is articulated around the notion of ‘haunting’. However, if ghosts are systematically summoned, they take on a different function in the two novelists’ works. In Rushdie’s novels, the ghost intervenes as an extreme representation for the migrant and takes on a positive value (the migrant borrows from the ghost its movement and malleability, two qualities in Rushdie’s works and becomes an emblem of rebirth). On the contrary, ghosts in Roy’s novel work as a sign of exhaustion and rather refer to a compulsive and death-like value. In The God of Small Things, repetition or the return of the same (leitmotiv, analepses, alliterations) haunts the text in an obsessive and traumatic way, referring thus to haunting with negative connotations. In this postcolonial and postmodern context of literature haunted by the feeling of exhaustion, we will point out that the ghost embodies a different approach to the question of mimesis.

37Sasso Eleonora: ‘It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted’: Margaret Laurence and the Spectral Process

38This paper takes as its starting point Derrida’s notion of spectrality, which ‘is at work everywhere’, and uses this theoretical concept to advance a new reading of The Diviners itself, one which sees it as a ghostlike manifestation of the other.

39The Diviners not only develops its own detailed blueprint of personal hauntings, but is also a broad philosophical meditation on the entire spectral process associated with the Canadian sensation of cultural unease. As part of this overview, Laurence devotes close attention to the question of literary hauntology, displaying considerable ambivalence towards it. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues—the prospect of losing our self and being taken by another, unfamiliar self, literary phantoms which haunt the Canadian imagination etc.— which they raise.

40But my central purpose will be to re-read the spectral condition of water on the base of Bachelard’s essay L’eau et les rêves. I will reflect on the importance of liquid images which represent the inner world of Canadian dreams, the socio-cultural spectres that return in a sort of a ghostly act of disfiguration with important consequences for the phantasmatic condition of Canada, in which representation is fragmented.

41Selles Colette: David Malouf’s Haunted Writing

42David Malouf’s writing, notably The Conversations at Curlow Creek and Remembering Babylon, is informed by the notion of exile and the opposition between centre and periphery, which are crucial issues in postcolonial societies. A sense of alienation pervades the texts, emphasising the difficulty of coming to terms with otherness. In Remembering Babylon, set in nineteenth-century Australia and the First World War, the experience of Gemmy—a white boy who shared the life of an Aboriginal community—illustrates the historical encounter between Aborigenes and Europeans, while his in-betweenness haunts the white settlers who come to interrogate their certainties about humanness and animality, the evolution of man and the primacy of whiteness. Malouf’s writing evokes the ongoing trauma of the beginnings of the colony. But if redemption is intimated by The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Remembering Babylon suggests that historical wounds are far from being exorcised, and that reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians will be a long and difficult process.

43Suchet Myriam: Tutuola and the Haunted Translation or Zazie in the Ghost Train

44Amos Tutuola’s novels, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My life in the Bush of Ghosts and The Witch-herbalist of the remote town are all haunted by ghosts. While spirit-characters intervene in the narration, a metaphorical ghost subverts the English syntax and lexicon. A brief linguistic survey will allow us to describe the traces left by Tutuola’s mother tongue, Yoruba, between the lines of the written English. Although many critics assert that translation is the most appropriate model to account for the postcolonial stereophonic writing, it will appear that both the production and the reception of the haunted text require a more complex procedure than the mere transfer from a source to a target language. Freud’s psychic model of translation and Riffatterre’s conception of intertextuality may help to explain why translation appears to be such a vivid metaphor in the critical literature about postcolonial writing. We shall finally observe an effective translation, namely Queneau’s French version of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. At once domesticating and creative, Queneau’s translation appears to have exorcised the Yoruba ghost that haunted Tutuola’s English. But has the ghost vanished or will it come back within another text? Zazie might finally take her turn in the ghost train...

45Torrent Mélanie: Commonwealth Diplomacy Today: Transcending Colonial and Post-colonial Ghosts?

46Does the fact that Commonwealth membership criteria now focus not only on a historic constitutional association with an existing Commonwealth member but on the respect of the Commonwealth’s core values—rule of law, democracy, human rights, human development—mean that all British imperial ghosts have been banished from the Organisation? Has the true transformation from the British Commonwealth to the Commonwealth of Nations really occurred? The emergence of Canada as an increasingly influential developed member in the Organisation, the affirmation of South-South diplomacy and the establishment of a successful Secretariat, based in London but apparently free from British dominance, seem to prove the point. Yet many of the values, institutions and modes of working of the Commonwealth are indebted to the British past of the vast majority of its members. This article will attempt to address these issues by focusing on the ambivalence at the heart of the Commonwealth’s diplomatic dynamics: while Commonwealth identity was built against British dominance and while the leaders of the new Commonwealth nations in the post-independence era strove to make it the negation of empire, the Commonwealth has kept alive a number of ideals that do seem to emanate from Britain. But the presence of ghosts does not necessarily mean that the Commonwealth is a form of neo-colonialism, even in disguise, as a comparison with the French post-colonial model might show. Ultimately, the objective here is to assess to what extent the Commonwealth has transformed colonial and post-colonial relations into a fully evolved form of multilateral diplomacy between independent States.

47Turcotte Gerry: First Nations Phantoms & Aboriginal Spectres: The function of ghosts in settler-invader cultures

48This paper examines a number of recent ghost stories produced by minority writers in Australia and Canada—from Tracey Moffatt to Thomas King—to highlight the way such tales have been used to interrogate dominant systems of control. If Derrida is correct that ‘haunting is central to any hegemony’, but also that we must learn to ‘talk’ with ghosts, then the way the spectres of minority and dominant structures are negotiated says a great deal about relations of power, especially in the context of race, ethnicity and whiteness. This paper argues that where once Indigenous and minority ethnic writers were metaphorised as spectral within dominant hegemonic structures in order to effect actual political disenfranchisement, contemporary writers and filmmakers have repossessed the spectres of nation to critique, interrogate and reverse such deterritorialising practices. The contestatory politics that have played out as a result of these strategic interventions have in effect ‘ghosted’ dominant players, highlighting the racial dimensions of whiteness and spectralising dominant agency in complex and intriguing ways.

49This paper will examine films such as Atanarjuat and Bedevil, and novels by Thomas King and Tomson Highway to consider the way this spectral discourse has come to dominate contemporary texts.

50Vanon Alliata Michela: ‘Waiting for a Ghost’: J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

51This paper is about the psychological, political, and artistic declinations of the figure of the ghost in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. By using as his center of intelligence the historical Dostoevsky at the time he was preparing to write The Possessed, a political novel about nihilism and revolution and by manipulating facts and fiction, Coetzee writes a dark and poignant tale which subtly investigates the complex relationship between reality and art, historical discourse and private drama. While hinging on the experience of mourning and guilt, in itself a Dostoevskian and a post-colonial epitomatic theme, the novel provides an indirect commentary on post-colonial South Africa in the throes of repressive authority and dangerous radicalism.

52 The ghosts to exorcise in this novel are not just those of pre-revolutionary Russia which so closely resemble South Africa poised on the brink of upheaval, or those of fatherhood adumbrated in the theme of generational strife—the divide between a disillusioned and conservative father who rejects vengefulness and the Nihilist, radical and self-destructive views espoused by the young; they are those of a man who, distraught by remorse, in the end finds himself unable to wring meaning and redemption from his work.

53Wallart Kerry-Jane: Memories of the Spectre in Guyana Quartet, by Wilson Harris

54In most ghostly fashion, the plot of this tetralogy presents vague and blurry contours, but its capacity to terrify its spectator remains potent. It tells of an afterlife journey on a river which seems always to lead farther than Hell, of reaching beyond our human, contingent experience, of a fragmentation of the individual being as we think we know him or her; it tells of an odyssey which stages protagonists who, to all intents and purposes, appear as apparitions. The said journey is also composed of memory traces which not only haunt the characters but seem to constitute them, so much so that they are finally bestowed in turn a spectral identity, that they seem both present and absent to the world, visible and invisible; their unstable ontology allows them to swap identities, along the lines of one of the main postcolonial literary themes. The present paper will attempt to show to what extent the tetralogy is inserted within a time that takes place after the disaster, a time that comes too late, and where only a ‘second death’ (it is the title of the third book in Palace of the Peacock) could take place to break up a time that seems perenially stopped. Such a time, which is merely that of lingering memories, is also that of intertextuality. Intertextuality densely proliferates in The Guyana Quartet, and works through embedding. Such a textual memory leads straight to the amnesia which lies at the core of the journey, which directs its course and may explain away its apparent failure. Indeed, this spectrality is also, and lastly, a reverie around a lost world: more so, perhaps, than any other Caribbean author, Harris interrogates the disappearance of the Indian world, he sets these hardly perceptible echoes, these pieces of a lost language, into texts. Intertextuality becomes a sheer substitute to a spectral idiom which no one can grasp any longer. The ‘namelessness’ which occupies the dark centre of these four texts might eventually be the most stable attribute of the ghost which passes through them.

55Weiss Tim: The Living and the Dead: Translational Identities in Wilson Harris’s The Tree of the Sun

56For Harris, all entities and identities are translational in the sense that they undergo constant transformation, and for human beings this necessarily involves processes of interpretation and expression. The translational nature of existence and human identity takes artistic form in narratives, or stories; folklore and myth, which bear witness to the past yet at the same time treat universal, timeless themes and evoke the perennial presences of the natural world, can function as translational vehicles that facilitate a movement across the gulf separating the past from the present and future. In Harris’s fiction the living regularly encounter the dead, who haunt the present in the form of traces, consequences, or ‘ghosts, ’ with which the contemporary generation must come to terms. The verbs translate, transform, and their variants occur repeatedly in Harris, and this essay turns to concepts of translation to analyze his visionary project, focusing on a lesser-known work that illustrates well his innovative splicing of New World and Old World folklore and myth. Translations between the living and the dead support a larger idea that his novels poetically reach toward: the interrelatedness of being and the obligation for each contemporary generation to come to terms with the past in order to continue the always unfinished making of the world.