A Celebrated Writer: Olive Senior
“Why do I write? Because the imperative to do so has been the strongest single force in my life… writing is what I am supposed to do with my life; it is how I affirm myself.” – Olive Senior
Olive Senior, born in rural Jamaica in 1941, is one of the most celebrated Caribbean writers in the world today. Influenced by the oral tradition, the storytelling and preaching and concerts of her childhood, Senior has gone on to explore Caribbean identities of gender, ethnicity and privilege in a prolific and marvelous career that covers everything from poetry to short stories to novels, even an encyclopedia of Jamaican heritage.
In Trelawny’s Cockpit Country, Olive was the seventh child out of ten to her peasant farmer parents. It was an isolated and humble life, but Olive was sent off to live with an affluent aunt and uncle in Haddo, Westmoreland for extended periods of time. In this interview, Senior remembers having a “very strong visual sense” from a very young age. She was a voracious reader, an introverted and curious child who looked for answers and escape in books—from romance novels to the King James Bible. The glaring extremes between her parents’ home and the wealthy relatives she came to live with (what she later referred to as “the polarities of colonial society”) shaped her childhood, and then, her writing.
Olive won a scholarship to Montego Bay High School for Girls, an exclusive school which aimed to “socialize its girls into being English.” Olive did well in school, even though she frequently bucked against this conformity machine. At 19, she worked at The Daily Gleaner, a leading newspaper in Jamaica, where she was a reporter and sub-editor. While studying print journalism at Carleton University, Canada, between 1964 to 1967, she began to work on the short stories and poems that would appear in Talking of Trees (1985) and Summer Lightning (1986) which won the inaugural Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.
The language in Olive Senior’s books is witty and gorgeous, ranging between deep Creole to ‘standard’ Jamaican English; a lot of her poetry uses a conversational tone. She believes in simplicity and restraint as disciplines. Accessibility without forsaking complexity is important to her. Between proverbs and fables employed, to magical incantations, to folkloric styles, Senior’s work is a rich tapestry. Her work renders well-detailed portraits and depictions of Caribbean community life. “Racially and socially a child of mixed worlds,” her work grapples with the dichotomy of urban and rural, traditional and modern, colonization and its victims, and the displacement resulting from moving between.
After her degree, Senior travelled and worked as a freelancer: writing, public relations, publishing, speech writing, etc. She was an editor in Jamaica before she settled in Toronto in the early 1990s. She has received many awards for her work: Norman Washington Manley Foundation’s Award for Excellence, and the Musgrave Gold medal from the Institute of Jamaica for her contribution to Literature in 2005, among many others.
Senior calls herself a “country girl at heart,” but this world-traveler portrays the human condition outstanding well. Her work is concerned with self-affirmation, with creating self-identities out of chaotic personal and social histories. “I am trying to find a way of apprehending reality and presenting it so that for the reader there can be that moment of recognition, of saying “yes,” to a world that is familiar yet new,” she writes. And the many people around the world who have read her work and been affirmed by it, they all say “yes!”
Photo: "File:Olive-senior.webp" by Tatiane-Laurent is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
