Harris's tenacity and patience in continuing to pursue his commitment to challenging normative frameworks for understanding our world, in some 23 novels, is remarkable. Speaking to him, I was also struck by the passion with which he continues to express these views and the breadth of his vision. One of the first questions posed to Harris, in the interview for Stabroek News, concerned the issue of literacy in the Caribbean. One of the consequences of the middle passage was that Africans were forbidden by rules to learn to read - we've forgotten how such obscure motivations and compulsions would give an involuntary momentum to illiteracy. Yet no European novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ventured profoundly out of their strict linear home premises in fiction, though they ruled the world.
Marginality is a profound phenomenon that questions endemic polarizations or closures of boundaries.
To be marginal does not mean irrelevancy. Far from it. The unusual quantum discoveries that are neglected in the European novel form bear, I think on a language of profundity and diversity beyond the fixed form we take for granted. It seems to me, therefore, that illiteracy is not a mere social accident - it is an omen that runs into the light of civilization. We need to come to it with a sense of the inadequacy and the partiality of the literary forms we take for granted as absolutes.