Abstract
Olive Senior has become a significant literary voice within Caribbean literature and the Caribbean diaspora, often providing light, sharp, subtle, and emotionally laden stories and poems of childhood and belonging. As she describes here, her work remains “embedded” in Jamaica, including its soundscape and its ecology, and stretches across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. For decades she has enjoyed a growing international audience, and her work is taught in schools in the Caribbean as part of an evolving literary curriculum. Senior’s short stories, the primary focus of this discussion, are especially well known for their enchanting, vibrant, and insightful children and child narrators — a trait that situates Senior’s work in relation to other famed Caribbean authors (Sam Selvon, Michael Anthony, Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Collins, and many more). In this interview, explorations of some of her young female voices are set within Denise DeCairns Narain’s sense of Senior’s “oral poetics”, and are also explored in relation to issues of wealth, privilege, and emotional sincerity. Senior’s work — fictional and non-fictional — is also heavily invested in ideas of land, labour, and migrancy, and so her recent and striking short story “Coal”, from her latest collection The Pain Tree (2015), is considered alongside her enormously impressive historical study of the role of West Indian migrant labourers in the building of the Panama Canal, entitled Dying to Better Themselves (2014).
Olive Senior is a Jamaican writer and prizewinning author of 15 books of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and children’s literature. She won the 1987 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Summer Lightning (1986) and was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry with Over the Roofs of the World (2005). Her other poetry books are Talking of Trees (1985), Gardening in the Tropics (1994), which is on the syllabus in Caribbean schools, and Shell (2007). Her novel Dancing Lessons (2011) was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, was a Globe Best Book, and was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin International Prize. Her recent collection of short stories, The Pain Tree (2015), discussed below, won the overall 2016 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and her non-fiction work Dying to Better Themselves (2014) won the non-fiction category of the same award in 2015. Senior conducts creative writing workshops internationally and is on the faculty of the Humber School for Writers, Toronto. She resides in Toronto, but returns frequently to her homeland of Jamaica, which remains central to her work.
Indeed, Senior’s creative and critical encounters with Jamaica continue to stimulate her vibrant and evocative writing style. This is a style she has described as driven by the “two disciplines” of her craft, “simplicity and restraint”, that enable her to “write tight” in the way that journalists are required to do (Rowell, 1988: 483; emphasis in original). Distinct, buoyant, and precise, her writing carries a concentrated and focused sense of word play and word purpose that is in evidence across her prose, poetry, and non-fiction. Often recognized for the emotional punch and layering of her short stories, Senior’s oeuvre exhibits a notably consistent mode of address — sensitive, thoughtful, clear, and oriented towards the off-the-page expansiveness of the world even, or especially, in the contained, everyday vignettes that dominate her work — and, as Liz Gerschel (1988: 995) has written, this makes for a “dynamic and powerful” tone that demands attention for its steely sense of detail. This combination of dynamism and detail stretches across her creative outputs, with poetry and prose showing sustained and similar characteristics and points of focus; though, as she has suggested, one might describe her poetry as “explicitly political” (Rowell, 1988: 482). Throughout her prose and poetry the impact of the voices created — voices of honesty, naivety, insight, and personality — is crucial and has been much commented upon by critics. In a particularly subtle and sophisticated response to Senior’s work, Michael A. Bucknor explains that she repeatedly “demonstrates the significance of voice in the staging of Afro-Caribbean rituals of revolt” (2009: 55), and that by working through Kamau Brathwaite’s “nation language”, Gordon Rohlehr’s “voice print”, and Carolyn Cooper’s “verbal maronage”, responses to Senior’s writing can more clearly identify her “poetics of sound”, and the links between her “performance poetics” (2009: 56), her deployment of verbal rhythms, and long-held and continuing protest strategies — as in “Meditation on Yellow” from Gardening in the Tropics. In his reading of this poem, Bucknor sees Senior as “recruit[ing] the renegade female voice” — here, as he says, the voice of a hotel waitress or maid — “in order to re-value ethical standards”, to link “past exploitation” with “current exploitation”, and to “retrieve Afro-Caribbean survival rituals”, such as the “cuss poem”, “as systemic weapons” (2009: 62–64).
While Senior’s work stretches back to slavery, concentrates often on mid- to late twentieth-century rural Jamaica, and sometimes moves into the present — into the imperial continuities evident in the Caribbean today and the significance of US influences — it also exhibits a set of core intellectual interests within this historically large socio-economic and cultural frame. These interests might be best thought of as revolving around the emotional complexities felt, explored, and survived by those cast as “small” — whether children, adults, or islands — and caught within the everyday pressures of (post)colonial existence. And it is worth noting that Senior’s writing, and especially her fiction, appears acutely sensitive to the emotional shortcomings of, and losses incurred by, those who attempt to “rise above” where they come from, and repeatedly works through the growing pains caused by the admixture of cultural pressures and modes of self-understanding structuring efforts at independence, self-discovery, and maturation. Martin Japtok (2009) sees her writing as offering sophisticated renderings of the interactions between race and class, especially the colour-coding of privilege and its correspondence to economic opportunity and/or security, while also exposing the ways in which colonialism “imbue[d] colour differences with mysticism” (2009: 56). As Japtok writes, Senior shows that “it is important not to forget the economic basis of colourism”, with “[w]hiteness [being] primarily desirable for the material rewards it is seen as enabling” (2009: 57), even or specifically when carried via normalized and everyday patterns of cultural imperialism.
For Senior, literature “can be created out of the fabric of everyday lives” (Rowell, 1988: 484), and in her creative world that material is often pulled from her own childhood experiences of Jamaica and her own movement into a questioning and journey-bound adulthood. Her writing works through, rather than takes for granted, subtleties of gender and femininity, of childhood, motherhood, and parenting, and of growth, independence, and escape — notable categories and areas of interest within Caribbean literature — and related explorations of domesticity, education, food culture, and consumption. But she also very often depicts and probes ideas of land and labour, most explicitly via gardening, horticulture, and cultivation, as well as issues relating to energy, environment, and ecological relations: areas we might think of in relation to the most recent developments in explorations of Caribbean, postcolonial, and world literature.
From Summer Lightning (1986) to The Pain Tree (2015), Senior’s short fiction, in particular, taps into the intersectional pressures of race, class, education, and developmental strains experienced in rural Jamaica across the author’s own lifetime, and often does so by depicting childhood and offering young, seemingly naive but knowing or insightful, voices. As Gerschel (1988: 996) says, the adult world comes at us “from the child’s point of view”, and in this way the legacies of colonialism as conflicting influences and ongoing personal, socio-cultural, and economic pressures are exposed, called into question and, we might hope, pushed towards future improvement. This is explicitly the case in a set of stories about young girls exposed to competing ideological and cultural systems: on one hand the seemingly more refined, elegant, and respectable cultural imperialism derived from empire, and on the other hand the embedded, grounded, and open identification with the land and African inheritances. With strained and/or missing parents, surrogate or substitute parental influences, and children attempting to make sense of the world in their own terms reoccurring, readers repeatedly encounter a fictional unpacking of both Senior’s critical claims for the educational importance of Afro-Jamaican heritage, and the place of childhood in the conceptualization of Caribbean potentiality. Unsurprisingly, then, “the topic of the Caribbean mother”, cast by Senior as “one of [the] greatest literary preoccupations” of Caribbean authors (Rowell, 1988: 485), also features strongly in her work, and in her most recent works for children — the collaborative picture books Birthday Suit (2012) and Anna Carries Water (2013) — maternal figures are central to the domesticated and communal patterns of childhood acculturation that come via food, cooking, gardening, and play.
Issues of motherhood, land, and cultivation also come together repeatedly, and in interesting ways, as demonstrated by stories in Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories (Senior, 1989). In the collection’s titular and opening story the Indo-Caribbean “snake-woman” complicates creolization processes, moving the reader beyond any simple black/white, African/European binary. Living an isolated, distinct life among the rural peasant class and ultimately maintaining her affinity with India, this woman also enters the church and understands that it is only through education and land ownership that the rural community will be able to claim the (is)land as their own, to occupy, manage, and grow themselves through a combination of grounded nurturing and the necessary determination to enter the knowledge domains of core power/s. Ameena Gafoor (1993: 37) explains the necessity of compromise for survival for “Miss Coolie” and how she rewrites the “Garden of Eden myth” by substituting the temptation narratives of the snake and the “[m]other of mankind” as bound to “knowledge […] of sexuality, shame, guilt and the pain and penalty of mortality” with new claims to knowledge that “awaken the peasantry, initiate social change and create awareness of alternatives”. Yet such a politically aware reading has to sit against the adulterous moment of independence cast in the collection’s very next story, “The Tenantry of Birds”, in which the domestic management of a garden space sets a masculinized, symmetrical, and managed attitude to land, held by Philip, the People’s National Party (PNP)-bound husband and adulterer, against the desire for the unruly sights, sounds, and comings-and-goings of the “bird tree or tenantry” (Senior, 1989: 46), with its chatterbox kling-klings, that put his wife “in touch with something pure and free, natural and unfettered, something that demanded nothing more than the delight of her senses” (1989: 48). This sensual experience keeps her connected to her childhood experiences in the country, ultimately motivating her to escape her mother’s insistence on life in Miami. When she returns from the US and discovers the fullness of her husband’s other life, she reclaims the garden, declaring that she will “plant a new garden” and reclaim, for herself and her children, “her tree and her house” (1989: 61; emphasis in original). Here, then, the political independence of the mid-twentieth century is surpassed by, or redirected through, a return and reworking of the land by a maternal figure coming to know herself, her place, and the possibilities embedded in an environmentally-aware childhood.
From Talking of Trees, via the famed and often taught Gardening in the Tropics, through to her continuing writing projects, Senior has dedicated much creative energy to the land, of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean, and to issues of belonging and migration that are complicated by a landed/grounded sense of home. Clearly, this investment in what we might call “the culture of cultivation” feeds into (and is in its way ahead of) the environmental and ecological turn within Caribbean and postcolonial literary studies, and accounts, in part, for the place of Gardening in the Tropics on school curricula in the Caribbean. In her review of Over the Roofs of the World, Kim Dismont Robinson (2005: 51) explains: “[n]othing in the landscape Senior imagines reflects a static, Edenic paradise; rather, she weaves together visions of a natural world in constant relation with the world of humanity preoccupied with conquest, ancestry, folk culture, history, sex, music, and the afterlife”. Similarly, Jordan Stouck’s (2005a) sustained engagement with Senior’s ecopoetics suggests that Senior’s work tracks a long paradise-bound line of development, from mythic presentations of the origins of the “New World”, especially of El Dorado, through colonialism with its intensive labour and resource extraction practices, and through to the seemingly golden — sunshine- and dollar-bound — tourist industry that now dominates the Caribbean and its economics. Stouck (2005b) also reads poems from Gardening in the Tropics like “The Knot Garden” and “Plants” as “us[ing] language that references Glissant, as well as Delueuze and Guattari” in “stress[ing] the rhizomatic quality of plants as figures for political and social processes” (2005b: 23). And we can also see this in the number of Senior poems capturing or tracking the long history and ramifications of sugar in the region, as in “Canefield Surprised by Emptiness”, “Cane Gang”, and “Sweet Bwoy”, all from the collection Shell, as well as in more oblique ways across her oeuvre, as with examples like “Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure” from Over the Roofs of the World. Dismont Robinson (2005: 55) rightly highlights this poem’s concern with ecological destruction and species eradication in the land that “was fair” once but has been, and is, organized and exploited according to a plantation logic and division of labour that fuels the paradisiacal imaginary of contemporary tourism. Stouck (2005a) critically unpacks the tensions built into Senior’s horticultural moves, as land, nation, and home are set against and within the brutalities of empire and the diasporic interconnections, even cross-pollinations, prompted by migratory experiences past, present, and continuing. Using “My Father’s Blue Plantation”, from Gardening in the Tropics, Stouck (2005b) explains how “the banana’s colonization and continued exploitation on the world market represent[s] the tragic history of many Caribbean people”, and how “the banana plantation is a source of dis-ease as well as inspiration, a space of possession as well as dispossession” (2005b: 22) thanks to the father’s efforts to use bananas to become self-determining. In this way, the poem bespeaks much that is held in Sylvia Wynter’s (1971) famed explanation of “plot and plantation”, while feeding into more recent studies of bananas, of food industries, and of the world market’s culture of contamination and eco-stripping. Indeed, the “blue” treatment for “spot disease” of Senior’s poem undercuts any claim to potential self-determination (Stouck, 2005b: 22), offering instead a toxic discolouration of infertility and hence the curtailment of any sense of reproductive futurity — however hard anyone, or any one family, is able to work. And, we should note, the issue of work, of moving for work, of working to live, and labour-based energy systems also reoccur across Senior’s canon, including within recent work, as discussed below.
The following interview took place at the University of York where Olive Senior read extracts from her latest collection of short stories The Pain Tree, and from her award-winning work of non-fiction, Dying to Better Themselves, which explodes the myth that the first major migration from the Caribbean was to the UK in the Windrush era; instead, from one generation after abolition onwards, a huge number travelled to Panama to build its railways and canal. The event was organized by the Writers at York Programme run by the Department of English and Related Literature and was co-organized by Speaking Volumes Live Literature Productions.
In an earlier interview with Hyacinth Simpson (2008: 11) you explained that your “whole literary consciousness is […] embedded in Jamaica”. Is that still the case, or is your experience of Canada slowly gaining ground in your imaginative work?
It is certainly still the case that my literary consciousness is embedded, not just in Jamaica, but in the wider Caribbean.
Yet in your new collection, The Pain Tree, the short story “Lollipop” depicts a young girl’s arrival in Canada from the Caribbean.
Yes, but that’s the only one I’ve written that deals with the Canadian immigrant experience.
Your work has a notably international audience, and I wondered if you had experienced any change in the audience that reads your work in recent decades?
I’ve always had an international audience because my first book Summer Lightning won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1987. What has changed is the developing interest in my work in the Caribbean, along with that of other Caribbean writers. I think a lot of this has to do with the teaching of Caribbean literature at the University of the West Indies, and in the changed curriculum in Caribbean schools, which now includes Caribbean writers. My books have been set texts in Caribbean schools, and one of my collections of poetry is currently on the CAPE syllabus. Like other writers, I am benefitting from a developing interest within the Caribbean itself in literature and in encouraging writers; even if our books continue to be almost unavailable in bookshops there. There are literary festivals all over the Caribbean now, like Calabash in Jamaica and Bocas in Trinidad. In fact, there are literary festivals now in just about every country, including in the smaller islands like Montserrat. When Summer Lightning won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize it was not even mentioned as an item of news in Jamaican newspapers.
Can I ask you about those curriculum links? Did you get asked about your texts being used in schools, or did you just get told later?
I have nothing to do with the choices; a committee makes the selection and I only find out what they have chosen afterwards.
Your short story collections often make great use of child narrators, or of narratives that move in and out of a child’s perspective and voice. In addition, your work is often praised for the fresh, vibrant orality of its young voices. How do you construct the voices of such young and sensitive characters? And, has it got harder (or easier) to write in the idiom of a young Jamaican child in recent years?
I don’t think about constructing voices because my characters arrive with their voices. Once I know who the character is, I know how that character will speak. I like to use the voices of people who are unusual, or naive, like the “mad” woman in “You think I mad, Miss?” in the collection Discerner of Hearts (Senior, 2002). I like the outsider voice, of someone on the margins, and of course children are often on the margins. So, when the characters arrive the voices come with them, and the story proceeds through them. But it is not something I have to sit down and think about in a conscious way.
In her book-length study of your work, Denise DeCaires Narain (2011) homes in on the dynamism of the “oral poetics’” seen in Summer Lightning, specifically in “Ascot”, “Real Old Time T’ing”, and “Do Angels Wear Brassieres?” I wanted to ask about this last story because unlike many of your other stories the child protagonist is overtly precocious, informed, and pointedly humorous. Beccka’s knowledge of the Bible and her riddle-based testing of the archdeacon demonstrate her combination of oral dexterity and, as DeCaires Narain explains, her acquisition (limited though it may be) of book culture. Can you talk about Beccka’s combination of insight and precociousness, how the story combines oral and scribal puns, and say whether you see Beccka’s interrogation of the archdeacon as an insistence on woman-centred materiality?
This was one of my first stories, so it is quite old, and people are always asking if Beccka is me. I wrote Summer Lightning out of a position of great innocence. I am still in total awe of what I accomplished in the story and the book, because I didn’t yet know what I was doing as a writer. I had great fun writing this story. Beccka isn’t me because I was a very shy child so I would never have duelled with the archdeacon. That said, I have always been in rebellion against society, or societal norms, but not in Beccka’s challenging way. I was creating this character before the days of feminism and so I had no feminist notions; any such ideas would only have been implicit. I was simply telling a story that entertained me and — as it turned out — my readers. As for the “play” around oral and book culture, I grew up exposed to both and they were equally influential. From an early age I think I understood the nature of adult hypocrisy, much of it based on the Bible as “the book”. In the oral culture, “book” also means the Bible as a magical object. For instance, people put it under the pillow of a baby to protect it as it contains word magic. So if the witch Ol’ Higue comes to harm the baby, she has to count all the words first. I grew up being conscious of that mixture of scribal and oral cultures. And this consciousness has infused the story, all the stories really in Summer Lightning and later books. As for what you call woman-centred, I don’t even know that Beccka was thinking seriously about the question she was asking or that she intended it to be as challenging as it might be read. She is an intensely curious child who wants to get her questions answered and nobody wants to answer them. So by introducing the taboo topics of women’s undergarments and (implied) bodies into the conversation, she has transgressed in the worst possible way. However, I don’t think she is aware of the size or nature of her transgression.
Another very striking young female voice is found in “The Two Grandmothers”, included in the Arrival of the Snake-Woman collection. Here the girl grows up negotiating her way between two spheres of female influence, between “First World” aesthetics, economics, and culture, suggested by the life and views of Grandma Elaine (Towser), and a move away from seemingly “Third World” sensibilities, from what appears to be the homely and honest life as well as life-force of Grandma Del. Could you talk a little about the development of this voice, its changes, and the tension between the two worlds at work in the story?
The young girl in “The Two Grandmothers” is growing older as the story progresses, so at the end she is a teenager. This child is typical of children who are torn between two worlds, whatever those worlds are, and she is trying to navigate her way through, with the two worlds here represented by the two grandmothers. It is a coming-of-age story. She has to learn about life, and because of the different forces imposed by class and race, and tradition versus modernity, she has to do it the hard way. So in one place she is regarded as beautiful and in another she is a “nigger”. This story is realistic. I don’t think it is unusual. What is unusual is the way I have structured it — as a clear opposition between the two poles. I love to explore the point/counterpoint structure, the elements of contradiction and conflict. One of the things I wanted to bring out in the story is that you hear the child’s voice talking to the mother all the time but you never hear the mother’s. Her responses are only ever implied. I think this reinforces the girl’s alienation as she grows and it embodies an implied critique of parenting. This girl really is on her own.
The difficulties of attempting to move towards greater security and privilege, whether by moving in with wealthier relatives (as in “Bright Thursdays”, from Summer Lightning) or by emigrating for work opportunities (as in “Ascot” and “Lollipop”, in the same collection), emerges in a lot of your short fiction, and the tensions it brings seem an ongoing area of exploration for you. Do you see this as something you are repeatedly trying to address and grapple with in your writing?
It is something that I’m interested in and grapple with, and probably always will because it is so embedded in who we are as Caribbean people.
In The Pain Tree, the titular story takes up the issue of privilege and wealth, as the narrator reflects on her treatment of her childhood servant/carer Larissa she realizes that even as a child her “inheritance” already possessed her. In this opening story to your new collection it seems that you unpack the ways an adult consciousness is forced to reassess their childhood behaviour, their lack of understanding, and the consequences of structural privilege. However, at the close of the story, the narrator is able to punch a nail into the pain tree for the first time — the action repeatedly undertaken by Larissa and others to release their emotional burden. Is this closing gesture a move towards some kind of reconciliation? It seems hard to see why this returnee should be allowed to share in the very act that marked her separation from Larissa and other black serving staff (the staff of servitude)?
If you grew up in Caribbean society you would understand that the relationship between the child and the carer can sometimes become tighter than the relationship between the child and her parents. In the story, Larissa and her room represent the child’s safe place, and the person that she goes to for comfort and companionship. The point is that as a child, the narrator has no sense of her privilege; she takes everything for granted. It is only when she returns for the first time as an adult that she realizes how unconscious she was of the inequalities in the relationship and the world at large. Therefore she feels guilty as an adult, although she didn’t have any of that feeling as a child. She says at the start of the story that she had a vision of Larissa with a gift in her hand waiting to greet her as she arrives home but she knows Larissa was a poor woman with nothing to give. To me, the gift from Larissa is the permission to use the pain tree once she has had her epiphany. I think the narrator is deserving of the gift because in the course of the story she has arrived at insights that other people of privilege, of her class, would never have — her mother, for instance. What I’m trying to show is a different kind of person that has emerged out of this life of privilege, based on reflection, understanding and remorse. I can see her as transcending the upper-class, privileged life she is born into and maybe merging her interests with those of the wider culture, as some people have done, becoming a force for good rather than exploitation. So I think she is entitled to use the pain tree. Personally, I felt that it was important to end the story with that.
It seems useful that she has come to understand her own structural position but I wonder if allowing her to complete the same act as Larissa, the housemaid, works to equalize the two figures, to unite them in an emotional or empathetic fashion that bypasses the structural inequality that the story has worked hard to expose. It seems that even though her insight is useful, and her act of emotional reconnection understandable, her empathic awakening does not change the structural position of either figure, it does not undo her privilege and it might enable an imagining of their two positions as equal, at least in emotional terms.
I’ve had other people say similar things, but you’re talking about structural position and I’m writing not from an ideological posture but out of my knowledge of human nature and the interactions that are possible. I care to write about flesh and blood human beings who are flexible and capable of change in the dance of life. Though domestic servants are often treated horribly, there are other relationships that last a lifetime. The closeness between Larissa and the child is not so unusual. To focus as you do on the structural position is to deprive Larissa of agency, to diminish her and her role. In her interactions with the child, she acts as a surrogate mother, a woman who is wise and understanding and — yes — superior.
It seems to me less about whether the character is worthy or unworthy, and more about the way that it becomes just about those two characters, instead of the network of relations that determines their unequal relationship. The story points to problems that are much bigger than the two characters, but then recedes in the face of a claimed emotional reconnection, by the privileged figure.
I think I’ve answered some of this above. To me the story is very much about these two characters and their emotional connection. This is how I write, through characters. But perhaps I have failed with this story. It would be interesting to debate this, hearing what other people have to say because you are not the first to suggest that the recipient is unworthy of the gift.
It is interesting to think about the way the stories address or encode social, even structural issues. Thinking along this line, in The Pain Tree collection a number of the stories are expressly about father figures and what a child, typically a daughter, does or doesn’t know about their father. This is the dominant issue in “Moonlight” and in “A Father Like That”. Could you say more about these stories and their interest in knowing or not being able to know the father?
This is an issue that interests me. I dealt with it in the book Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (Senior, 1991), because a significant number of children are raised solely by mothers in the Caribbean and fathers are often absent physically or emotionally. In Caribbean Literature there is so much of the powerful mother that the absent father is often taken for granted, though they are really two sides of the same coin. I have explored the psychological impact of absence in some of my stories and poems but most extensively in my novel Dancing Lessons and I was struck by the number of women who told me how much this issue resonated with them on reading the novel.
The two stories you mention were written before that novel though. With “Moonlight”, I wanted to tell the story of the master taking advantage of the maid from the child’s point of view, a child who is a witness to something she doesn’t understand and the impact it has on her own development. She is a very young child who realizes she now knows something dangerous, something that she can’t talk about. She is expecting the adults to address it in some way but nothing happens. The story is negotiating a way between her innocence and her knowledge that some line has been crossed, involving her father, and we assume that this will affect their future relationship. But I’d like to think this story is about the mother’s emotional absence as much as the father’s. Both are too concerned with preserving surface appearances to notice the child’s pain. The question is, who or what will she grow up to be?
Perhaps she will learn self-sufficiency and self-preservation and develop “attitude” like the child from a completely different class — the feisty abandoned child in a children’s home — in “A Father Like That”. In that story I was playing with the urban legends about paternity involving some famous man and turning the idea on its head. The child in the story is the one who rejects the story of this supposed rich father, reinforced by a visit to his funeral, but she still fantasizes about the kind of father she would like to have. In the orphanage, some of the girls have fathers, so there is peer group competition centred on who has a mother and who has a father, and set against those with no pedigree at all, and all this contributes to the girls’ respective status, the highest status going to the ones with fathers.
As DeCaires Narain (2011) appreciated, much of your writing is about labour, about the labouring bodies of slavery and the post-slavery manifestations of labour that structure Caribbean lives. To stick with fiction for a moment, the short story “Coal” shares with “The Pain Tree” story a binding together of labour, land, and emotion and sees a young boy lose his grandfather — rather than his father. Can you talk about “Coal”, as it is one of your newest short stories?
The people who do the dirty work of the world interest me; I grew up amongst labouring people. The story “Coal” came out of my desire to use my writing to explore different historical periods. I wanted to write a story set in the period of World War Two and the impact it had on Jamaica — an aspect that people hardly ever think about. I’ve also been intrigued by people who burn coal, the men who go off into the forest, spend days and weeks and months, doing this horrible labour, and then produce something that becomes as desirable as diamonds. The coal man and his cart are hardly ever seen now, but they were a fixture even in the towns in an earlier era. Often the coal man was a small old man with stacks of coal bags on a rickety cart pulled by a mule and a small boy beside him. I probably started with the image of the old man and the boy and then all the characters coming together in an isolated setting during wartime. Coal as a transformative element seemed a fitting symbol for the way the main characters — the isolated young woman and the damaged boy — are transformed in the course of the story. This story pulls together a number of topics that interest me, such as how children severely traumatized in childhood manage to become functioning adults. And how their trauma is sometimes expressed in silence. The main character is known throughout as “Boy” but calling him by his “true-true name” is what sets him off to become a man. The act of naming by the young woman is her way of recognizing her own earlier failure to establish his presence officially and to do something to correct that failure.
To continue with the issue of labour — would you say the interconnection between land and human labour has been a critical concern throughout your fictional work and poetry?
Yes, these are critical concerns but I am even more interested in the symbolic importance of land and landscape and the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world and how this is expressed not just as physical labour but also spiritually. These are issues I have explored repeatedly, especially in my poems.
That brings us to your fulsome study of labour in Dying to Better Themselves. This is an immense study, and one that shows the longevity of your thinking about and research on the Panama Canal project. In the “Preface” you explain that when you undertook sizeable archival research in the 1970s your tapes were stolen before you had a chance to transcribe them. Did this absence of earlier material hinder this project, and did your approach to the historical material change between your first archival work and this finished book?
I transcended the loss of tapes, of the oral testimonies, in the writing of an early draft manuscript. I did nothing with that manuscript but I did write a couple of articles for Jamaica Journal. After that I moved on to other things and I lost interest. At that time I didn’t know how to get the manuscript published. I only went back to it in 2012 when I realized that the centenary of the opening of the Panama Canal was coming up in 2014. So much time had passed between my original research and my renewed effort that I had to read everything that had been published in the interim. I’m glad that the first manuscript I wrote never saw the light of day because it was just a straightforward and intensely boring narrative. Whereas by the time I came to write Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, I had learnt a lot more about writing. I was a different person. I was much more conscious of the reader and the challenge became how to present this enormous story in the most interesting way.
I used some of the techniques of fiction to tell the story. The structure was important but I also played around with the narrative voice. Within the overarching narrative, I broke each chapter down into smaller and smaller narratives, each with a beginning, middle, and end, so that each section is a story in its own right. I also wanted the illustrations to be an integral part of the book because of the nature of the work, and the scale of the project undertaken; the book includes over 200 images that are there to reinforce the text. This is a story that impacted the West Indies both at the official level and at the smallest domestic level, which was why I used letters, newspapers, and songs and stories from popular culture alongside the official accounts, just to show how pervasive the coming and going was, how it affected things like the birth rate on the islands, and how women and children were often abandoned.
Dying to Better Themselves covers an enormous chronology and almost every issue that anyone could want to take up in relation to the Panama project (from the first failed French project, through the gendered patterns of labour and barrack life, through to the presence of women and the after-effects of the canal and return to the Caribbean). Was there anything that you were not able to fit into the book that you wished you’d be able to write about?
I’m happy with the book although there were tons of things that were interesting that I could have pursued. One element that fell outside the scope of the work, because I cut it off at 1938 — the year of the riots in the Caribbean — was the experience of another set of West Indians who went to Panama in the 1940s, to build a third set of locks. This later period deserves its own study. Now new studies are coming up about the migration to Cuba and Costa Rica, the building of the railroad in Ecuador and so on. Still, an endless number of stories are waiting to be told.
You make clear from the outset and throughout that this is a study of labour and labourers, of the Caribbean migrants and their physical efforts to carve out a route between the Americas. Are you able to talk about why labour and labouring have to remain at the core of thinking about the history, present, and future of the Caribbean and its resident as well as migratory citizens?
Labour implies payment for work; there are many reasons for the massive migrations that have defined the Caribbean since Emancipation, but the main one continues to be that there is not enough work to be had there or that labour does not yield a living wage. So this connection between labour and migration as the search for a better life both defines Caribbean life and represents our tragedy — the tragedy of underdevelopment. Tragedy because Caribbean nations have not found a way to create the opportunities that would allow their people to stay at home and benefit from their own labour. Isn’t it ironic that these islands promoted as “paradise” attract visitors who come and stay in gated enclaves while their citizens flee to elsewhere and other forms of gated enclaves?
In your Encyclopaedia of Jamaican Heritage (Senior, 2003) you explain in the “Acknowledgements” that the text grew out of your shorter, early A-Z of Jamaican Heritage (Senior, 1983), and so was indicative of “how much that earlier exercise taught [you] about what [you] didn’t know, and how much more there is to learn” (2003: vii). Are you still on the “path” that you identified then, looking to learn more about Jamaica, its heritage, and its ties to the world beyond?
The short answer is yes. I never stop learning. My driving force, since childhood, has been curiosity, and I still have that. I am still learning, every day.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.