“Many Rivers to Cross:” Orphic Confluences of Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise and Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock

Seldom does criticism address cross-cultural issues in terms of confluence. In fact, scholars tend to use chaos theory (Glissant, Benitez-Rojo), oceanic tropes (Gilroy, Brathwaite), and linguistic foci (Chamoiseau, Bhabha) to deal with them. This is peculiar, first of all because many cities, on all continents, owe their cosmopolitanism to their having been founded on riverbanks and seashores. Moreover, the word fluency and its derivatives can metaphorically relate watery patterns and linguistic phenomena: metaphor itself can be described as the confluence of a syntagm with an unusual paradigm. As a consequence, if the flowing together of two rivers, springing from different topoi, potentially populated with different cultural groups, can be translated into metaphor, it is likely that topographical confluence lead to tropological manifestations of the cross-cultural: fluid topos and fluent tropos, tropics and tropes, would intertwine into what I tentatively call tropicality. However, although scholars in cross-cultural fields rarely address the fluvial theme, Caribbean novelists Wilson Harris and Fred D’Aguiar show, in their novels, an exceptional awareness of the poetic potential of looking at creolization through the lens of confluence, which is apt, knowing that both authors are of Guyanese upbringing, Guyana meaning “land of many waters” in the language of one of its indigenous tribes: it is in these fluvial waters that Harris, originally a land-surveyor, found his source of inspiration for novels that would, in the next generation of Guyanese authors, greatly influence Fred D’Aguiar. This suggests that in addition to metaphoricity and topography, intertextuality might be looked upon as a third type of confluence, and it is these three types of confluence that I propose to track in D’Aguiar’s latest novel Children of Paradise (2014) and Wilson Harris’ Palace of the Peacock (1962), paying particular attention to how both novels themselves gather into a confluence founded on romantic and Orphic subtexts that, in turn, suggest that romanticism and magic(al) realism might consist in analogous translations of a common, Orphic perception of the environment.