Olive Senior

Olive Marjorie Senior (born 23 December 1941) is a writer who was born and raised in Jamaica and since the 1990s has been based in Toronto, Canada.

Quotes

She let herself out by the back door and carefully shut it behind her, and ran through the short cut that led to the main road, hoping that no one would see. (beginning of "Discerner of Hearts")

...Swimming? In the Ba'ma grass? Who ever heard of such a thing and a big man at that? (beginning of "Swimming in the Ba'ma Grass")

I am not a scrupulous plotter of fiction or poetry – I write intuitively, thinking for a long time about my subject and also allowing my unconscious to work on it until the day comes when it seems ready to be written. (2014)

(Q: advice for struggling writers?) OS: Keep at it. Writing is a craft like any other and you get better with practice. Have faith in yourself but dampen unrealistic expectations. Remember that words are your raw material – love them, acquire them, use then, lose them when necessary. Read widely. Question what you are reading. What works? What doesn’t? How does the author achieve certain effects? This is a good way to learn. (2014)

I was always going to be an artist or a writer, because I was talented in those areas, but also, I now think, because they held out the seductive whiff of freedom. I was always in silent rebellion against the conformity and authoritarianism of the world I was born in. (format 2006)

published in Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets

Somebody, I forget who it was, said that I was like a literary archeologist, which pleased me because that is how I look at it myself.

OS: There is a certain imperative about what I write and how I write, and I'm going to follow that imperative regardless. (KD: And that imperative is prompted by...) OS: the desire to explain. It's the why, the who and the why. I am driven by those issues.

I suppose the main thing about me is that I don't feel or see any disjunction between life and land or between living and landscape; I don't make those separations at all. I imagine that I'm like that because I grew up in deep rural Jamaica and I was conscious from earliest childhood about the power of plants.

I also think that one of the things that has shaped my sensibilities as a writer is the intense beauty of the country in which I grew up. I have internalized this landscape; the mountains, in particular, the valleys... Those are the profound elements that have shaped me: the fact that we lived with trees as a part of the social fabric of our lives-with plants-and the fact that we lived in this intensely beautiful landscape. Not lost on me as a child was the fact that it masked a lot of hardship and pain and so on.

I haven't done research for any specific poem, but my writing is not separate from my life; and I have spent my entire life doing research (if you want to put it that way) in order to answer all the fundamental questions we ask about ourselves in the first place, starting with the existential questions like "who am I?" But that, of course, inevitably leads into "who are we?" And that, in turn, leads into "where are we coming from?" And it seems to me that this is my engagement, which is an engagement with history-both a personal and an ancestral history, but also with a wider notion of history: the history of the Caribbean, and indeed of the so-called New World.

I am very conscious as a writer of removing myself and my personal concerns from what is going on in the text. I try to become these people that I am writing about; I assume various personas. The other question is whether or not I see myself a griot. I see myself as making things possible for my characters, like setting the stage and giving these unknown people from history the chance to speak to the other world. But I, personally, do not assume any roles for myself; that is not what I want to be. I want to be the archeologist, to dig and to bring up these things and say to the world, "Here they are." And let people draw whatever conclusion they want from it. But I don't see myself taking an activist role or playing or assuming a role that is mystical or ordained or anything like that.

I think that there are three major influences on my work. One is that I had what would have been called a classical English education, which it was at the time I went to school. So, of course, I grew up on this diet of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and, you know, the great English classics. So I think that has influenced my work. I also grew up on the bible, and I regard the oral tradition as having played a very important part in shaping my work. And when I talk about the oral tradition I'm talking about not just the content but the rhythms, because a lot of our games in school, for instance, were based on rhythm and physical dexterity-you know, clapping and all this kind of thing. Everything was performed to rhythm: the floor was cleaned to rhythm, the clothes were washed to rhythm - you just couldn't escape this. Therefore, I feel that all of these things are coming together in my writing, because I am very conscious of rhythm in my prose as well. I think I have a good ear. It's all there in my head, all these sounds. And of course, I've read, and read, and read, and read, all my life.