Reading


"He had a print: SHANG DYNASTY on his vest. It was but a vague reminder of times ancient, long past and forgotten, but they had touched each other across the Seas through related civilizations - a relationship in which art itself appeared to forget the life of the Brush or the Knife that had carved and painted us into existence. No one remembered the feel of the Knife that had turned hard and cool as a gun. Yes, a collective gun with which to fire at each other from impregnable-seeming, secure-seeming fortresses. Each step that we took fell away into another loss, another lost civilization, each Word that we spoke into another vanquished language save for the Beggar's formless visionary speech through cracks or crevices translated into tongues. Did the memories of all this exist in pre-Columbian South America? The artist made a Note in his Book."

{ Wilson Harris, The Mask of the Beggar, Faber & Faber, 2003 }

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"The postindian encounters with manifest manners and the simulations of the other are established in name and literature. This is a continuous turn in tribal narratives, the oral stories are dominated by those narratives that are translated, published, and read at unnamed distances. Stories that arise in silence are the sources of a tribal presence. The simulations of dominance and absence of the other are the concern of manifest manners. The simulations of survivance are heard and read stories that mediate and undermine the literature of dominance.

The names of the postindian warriors are new, but their encounters are consistent with the warriors who tread the manifest manners of past missions in tribal communities. The warriors of simulations, then and now, uncover the absence of the real and undermine the comparative poses of tribal traditions.

The warrior modes and postindian interpretations, in this instance, at the closure of the colonial inventions of the tribes in literature; the warriors, then and now, observe postmodern situations, theories of simulation, deconstruction, postindian encounters, silence, remembrance, and other themes of survivance that would trace the inventions of tribal cultures by missionaries and ethnologists to the truancies of a melancholy civilization."

{ Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Wesleyan University Press, 1994 }