Walter Roth, Wilson Harris, and a Caribbean/Postcolonial Theory of Modernism

RUSSELL MCDOUGALL Walter Roth, Wilson Harris, and a Caribbean/Postcolonial Theory of Modernism New Year's Day, 1933 - The English society author, Evelyn Waugh, visiting British Guiana for the purpose of writing a book on his impressions of the colony, recorded in his diary: 'On Monday of last week I went to tea with the Wilemses and met Dr Roth, an opinionated and rather disagreeable old man who said he was willing, if I paid his expepses, to take me to the only place where unsophisticated Indians are still to be found - in the headwaters of the Essequibo. He estimated that this would take three months and £30. At first I was not attracted by the proposition, but later grew more enthusiastic and saw the possibility of a good book in it' (Waugh, Diaries, " 361).1-The next day Waugh wentwith the governor on a trip by launch from Georgetown to the former convict station of Mazaruni, and there he encountered a Mr Davies, who warned him that Roth was 'an irresponsible traveller' (ibid), w~th no sense either of time or money, who ahnost killed himself every time he journeyed Up-COtilltry through his neglect of basic precautions. Roth was seventy-two. On his previous expedition, seven years earlier, he had lost forty-seven pounds in just over six months. Waugh was twenty-nine, and just ten days into his South American jaunt; he heeded Davies' warning, which is just as well, as 'within a few months Roth was dead' (Stannard, 314). Waugh had only met the old man on one other occasion, and that was when he went to tell him that he had changed his mind about the expedition. In his travel-book, Ninety-Two Days, he does not even mention Roth. But, as Waugh's biographer, Martin Stannard, notes: 'The image of this elderly" opinionated, experienced bush man must have lodged in his imagination, as Dr Messinger in A Handful ofDust bears a distinct resemblance to that J1irresponsible traveller;" [and] Waugh's own irrational determination is matched by his hero's equally foolish infatuation with the Doctor's expedition' (Stannard, 315). Walter Roth, when Waugh met him, was the government archivist and curator of the dilapidatedGeorgetown Museum - the Museum of the Royal Agricultural and Commercial Society, which produced the journal Timehri, where he had earlier published a number of articles based on his 1 Throughout this essay, for reasons of historical accuracy, I have preferred the period spelling 'Guiana' (except where 'Guyana' appears in quotation or as part of an original title, or where the term dearly refers to post-independence). UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2, SPRING 1998 568 RUSSELL Me DOUGALL ethnographic field-work: studies of Indian mimicry, fraud, and imposture; native drinks; scalping, tattooing and so on. He had recently retired after twenty-three years in the British Colonial Service, first as the goverrunent medical officer, magistrate, and Protector of Indians in the Pomeroon district, then as stipendiary magistrate of the Demerara River District. And now he nested among 'the faded photographs and badly stuffed fauna' of the museum (Waugh, Diaries, 360). But it was said still that no one knew more about the 'traditional' Indians of the Pomeroon than he. In 1915 the Bureau of American Ethnology had published his vast etlmographic work entitled An Inquiry into the Animism and Folklore of t~e Guiana Indians; in 1924, it published his Introductory Study ofthe Arts, Crafts, and Customs ofthe Guiana Indians; and it was just five years before his encounter with Waugh that he had published his third major work on Guiana, entitled Additional Studies of the Arts, Crafts, and Customs of the Guiana Indians, with Special Reference to those ofSouthern British Guiana. It was by these publications that American anthropologists knew his name; and it is testament to the hegemony of American anthropology that it is by these still that he is known internationally, if he is known at all. But within Australia, as I hope to show, he has a very different importance; and ultimately it is the crosscultural potential of his work that I want in this paper to develop. Nevertheless my own interest in Roth begins...