SOURCE: Mackey, Nathaniel. “Limbo, Dislocation, Phantom Limb: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Occasion.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 22, no. 1 (1980): 57–76.

In the following essay, Mackey explores the sense of geographical “place” in Harris's representations of the Caribbean.

… in a context such as the Caribbean and the Americas … the life of situation and person has an inarticulacy one must genuinely suffer with and experience if one is to acquire the capacity for a new relationship and understanding.

—Wilson Harris

She succeeded in getting rid of the scaffolding of the song, to make way for a furious and fiery duende, companion of sandladen winds, that made those who were listening tear their clothes rhythmically, like Caribbean Negroes clustered before the image of St. Barbara.

—Federico García Lorca

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To go back to Lorca's “Theory and Function of the Duende” perhaps offers a usable route into what Wilson Harris...