Статья о Синиор Олив (Olive Marjorie Senior)

Olive Senior
Martin Mordecai

The very first poem, “Homescape”, in Olive Senior’s first collection of poetry, Talking of Trees, begins: “I was born with the knowledge / of mountains and solitaires”.

Those two lines are as good an entrée as any into Senior’s work. It is knitted closely to the place in which she grew up, within the mountains of Trelawny and Westmoreland in rural Jamaica, but also has a bird’s sharp view of that world: its natural and human splendour, but also its meanness and its limitations, human and natural. Mountains, in Senior’s work, nurture life and dreams, but they also restrain and constrict. Birds are a symbol of freedom across cultures, and an abiding presence in much of Senior’s writing; the solitaire, a member of the thrush family, is found in the mountains of Jamaica and has a distinctive and very beautiful song. It is not difficult to see also a play on the word: the solitary singer of tales.

That singular voice has carried through a lifetime of writing that has produced some of the most memorable and evocative stories and poems in Caribbean literature, as well as significant works of non-fiction, one of which is possibly unique in any literature. Her witty, tragi-comic tales of peasants and pretentious “gentry” in mortal combat for the hearts and minds of children, her plangent “storypoems” that question our old nostrums, continue to delight and engage readers in the Caribbean and further afield.

But although Olive Senior has lived in several countries, travelled to dozens of others, and been feted in most of them, she still unabashedly, and without false modesty, calls herself “a country girl”. Her navel string is buried under a tree in Trelawny.

Senior embodies in her physical person many of the histories she writes about so eloquently, and their contradictions. She is light-skinned, with “good” hair, in a country (and a region) that places an automatic and very high value on skin shade and hair length. A reflexive assumption would be: child of privilege. Not so. Senior’s mother “deeply breathed country air / when she laboured me” (“Ancestral Poem”, Talking of Trees), but it was not the air of entitlement. Olive was seventh of ten children born into very humble circumstances, her parents small farmers in Trelawny’s isolated Cockpit Country for whom, in the words of the Jamaican saying, “water more than flour”.

Senior was sent to live for extended periods, and eventually to elementary school, with a better-off aunt and uncle on her mother’s side in Westmoreland — not that far from her native ground, as the solitaire might fly, but a hemisphere away in social culture and expectation. There, the focus of her affluent family’s attention — and control — she was “a lump of clay which held every promise of being moulded into something satisfactory” (“Bright Thursdays”, Summer Lightning).

Satisfactory in that context meant, above all else, growing into the “proper” attitudes: to her eld. . .