The shamanic and quantum womb of nature: Wilson Harris’s ‘immunity from evil that is embodied in sexual gymnastics, sexual consumerism and sexual escapism’

Abstract

Until Wilson Harris, the Guyanese/British fiction writer and theorist, made his ubiquitous mark within the literary tradition of the Anglophone Caribbean in 1960 with the publication of his first major novel, Palace of the Peacock, few Anglophone Caribbean writers and theorists in the first half of the twentieth century focused on non-normative concepts of gender and sexuality in their fiction. As far as he was concerned, gender could be authentically related to ancient pre-Columbian shamanistic traditions that possessed an inherent quantum value. Harris developed this perception into a concept that he termed the shamanic womb of nature (1996, p. 227). 

This paper begins with Harris’s shamanic womb of nature as derived from the pre-Columbian myth of Omeoteotl, an androgynous deity. Next, I will discuss the inherent nature of quantum immediacy found in the shamanic womb of nature. Moreover, the implicit yet nuanced correspondences that Harris’s gender fluidity shares with queer theory and transgender studies will be introduced. There will also be an examination of critical scholarly works that discuss Harris’s subversion of the conventional male/female binary. Finally, I will show that Harris, in his literary experimentation of language in Carnival, plots a way to reinsert the notion of gender fluidity found in the shamanic womb of nature into the present-day politics of cisheteronormativity.