Omeros and Beloved through Wilson Harris’s Cross-Cultural Imagination

This text offers a contribution to the large body of work that is dedicated to unraveling the significant ideas of the Caribbean thinker, Wilson Harris. This study applies his notion of a cross-cultural imagination to a comparative discussion of the literary treatment of the trauma of New World colonialism and slavery in Derek Walcott’s Omeros and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Concerned with the themes and tropes of loss and ‘re-memberment’, these narratives highlight Harris’s focus on the ‘flexible arcs and patterns of community’ that are possible within a cross-cultural awareness of human society’s involvement with ‘legacies of conquest’. This reading uses the work of a Caribbean critical lens, with its acknowledgment of the heterogeneity of the Americas, to emphasize a redemptive poetics for the re-visioning of the ‘postcolonial’ condition. The dialogue across Harris’s, Morrison’s and Walcott’s work presents an alternative critical praxis for those interested in the development of Caribbean literary theory and of Caribbean and African- American literature in diaspora.