The Guyanese/British writer, Wilson Harris, in his theoretical essay “Apprenticeship to the Furies”, Harris argues with hindsight that the ancient Mayan “concept of blended pasts and futures … was intuitively alive in [his] own work” (233-234). Above all, Harris contends that such pre-Columbian vestige has an “intuitive ...correspondence” with “the black West Indian presence” in his fictional narratives (“Jean Rhys’s ‘Tree of life’” 119-120). This essay will demonstrate that Wilson Harris has intuitively infused the ancient Mayan linguistic representation of the past, present and future time with the Haitian vodun possession trance/dance in his first novel Palace of the Peacock to create a cross-cultural and re-visionary narrative.
