Moving between literature and history, this chapter has three objectives. First, it seeks to forge an unholy alliance between the cannibal and the ghost, and to explore their interworkings in the context of revisionist Caribbean history. Second, it examines the cannibal and the ghost as textual mediators, as means by which Caribbean writers re-imagine their European literary ancestry. And third, it charts the attempt through the shape-shifting cannibal/ghost alliance to transform the orthodox, largely negative perception of Caribbean history, and to set up a counter-memory to the hegemonic European record. The primary texts are the creolized ghost stories of two modern Guyanese writers: Edgar Mittelholzer's My Bones and My Flute (1955) and Wilson Harris's Palace of the Peacock (1960). In both of these stories the ghost – the ‘uncanny cannibal’ – has a dual function, reasserting the presence of a past (or pasts) that had previously been repressed while estranging that past and converting it into forms that sublimate material exploitation.

Uncanny Cannibals

It is little wonder that Derek Walcott, the Caribbean's best-known poet, begins an essay on the region's past by citing Joyce's familiar epigraph, ‘History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake’. For the Caribbean region is haunted by ghostly presences, reminders of a history seen as loss, distress, defeat. Walcott takes as his artistic task the deliverance from this collective trauma:

Walcott drives out the ghosts that crowd in upon ancestral memory, clearing the space for history to direct its gaze towards the future.