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Closer to Home
by John Degen

0LIVE SENIOR ARRIVES FOR OUR APPOINTMENT ready for anything. On one of the first sharply cold days of a Toronto winter that seems never quite ready to begin, she is one of few on the streets who are adequately layered -- a skill she learned the hard way during her student years at Carleton University in Ottawa. Arriving there from Jamaica with only tropical clothing, she found Ottawa's fierce cold an unkind introduction to life "in foreign" ("The school wasn't so bad," she explains, "because it has a system of connecting tunnels; it was all the waiting at bus stops on my way to and from school

Accepting a cup of hot tea, Senior shuffles through a thick stack of photocopied sheets, arranging their order and stapling where necessary. She has spent the morning before our conversation collecting examples of the criticism and scholarly writing concerning her work. "It can be hard to find she remarks.

She's brought them, she explains during the course of our talk, because over her 20-odd years as a published writer she's developed a certain humility concerning what is happening in her own work. "Obviously the work operates at many levels," she says, "and one of these levels is the subconscious. Sometimes I'm astonished at what people see in my work, and -- though I wouldn't admit it to them -- I'm forced to admit to myself that, boy, yeah, they're very astute. I started out thinking that I'm very conscious of everything I do, but I've backtracked now; sometimes people do say the most astonishing things."

But I'm not buying it. Though the academic community may be capable of surprising her by pointing out a hidden metaphor or subtextual pattern (that is their job, after all), no one is more aware of the subtlety of meaning in her work than Senior herself. And the pile of reviews and essays on the table is evidence of both Senior's dedication to research, and to her wide and detailed understanding of her subjects.

Since 1972, Senior has written eight books, including the 1994 poetry collection Gardening in the Tropics (McClelland & Stewart), and, also from M & S, Discerner of Hearts, a new collection of short fiction to be published next month. Of that number, two are poetry collections, three are books of short stories, and the other three are meticulously researched sociological studies of Jamaican life. She is currently working on an encyclopedia of Jamaican folklore.

Viewed as a whole these seemingly disparate projects reveal an intricate coherence. Senior writes about identity from the perspective of a contemporary Jamaican woman still not entirely certain of her own place in the world. Her search for a personal identity takes her through Jamaican culture, at all its many social, racial, economic, and historical levels, and eventually includes an uncertain national identity in its questing.

"I would say this is the basis for all Caribbean writing," she explains. "We're all preoccupied with this search because it's operating at three levels: the personal level, the national level (for people regardless of their backgrounds), and also the psychic level. My personal search for identity came at the same time as my country Is search, because I came of age at independence. There was this big national dialogue going on about 'who we are,' and also then an attempt was made for the first time to claim our African identity. So there they were, these three levels, and I think they are all reflected in my work."

Now against the rhythms

Of subway trains my

heartbeats still drum

worksongs. Some wheels

sing freedom, the others

Home.

Still, if I could balance

water on my head I can

juggle worlds

on my shoulders.

("Ancestral Poem,"

Talking of Trees, 1985)

SENIOR HAS BEEN in Canada, writing and teaching writing, for the past four years, although before that she divided her time between Jamaica and the wider English-speaking world. Many of her earlier poems deal with her sense of displacement at leading a life juggling worlds and cultures. Her stories, though, and the poems in Gardening in the Tropics, have tended to focus almost entirely on "Home," which is to say Jamaica specifically, and the concept of home in general.

Many of the characters in her stories suffer from a weakened sense of their cultural home, which Senior places unequivocally in the realm of "folk values," as opposed to those values imposed on her own childhood by the remnants of British colonialism and the neo-colonial reality of modern-day Jamaica. There is a deeply grounded sense in her fiction that the world beyond Jamaica's shores is insidiously destructive to those without a strong sense of their cultural heritage.

A growing child is seduced away from her "folkish" grandmother by the glittering promise of an outside world represented in episodes of "Dallas." Parents whose values have been twisted by the flash and drugs of North America abandon their child, who is then rescued by the more culturally secure nanny.

In one absurdly comic story in Discerner of Hearts, a deranged man who has returned from 20 years of "study" in England launches a legal suit against the Queen for allowing his heart to be removed and replaced with a clock. His father, trying to ease the conscience of his wife, who blames herself for her son's madness, strikes Senior's clearest note on the subject:

"Lawd, woman, is foreign mad him ... I will never forget the day. We send off a good-good boy to England dress in him suit and tie, looking like a little Englishman before him even reach. Is them place there mash him up. People not suppose to go so far from home. It weaken yu constitution. You nuh see how much people round here gone mad from foreign?"

All this could be seen as a simple, postcolonial agenda enacting itself in metaphor on the page, but Senior shrugs off labels and schools of thought in favour of a broader concept of her art. "I'm writing about people and about basic human emotions," she insists. "I don't particularly care for labels, mainly because my life has been a struggle to break out of all these boxes into which I was born, and therefore I don't want to put myself back into one. If people want to stick on all the labels that relate to race or gender or whatever, I'm not going to quarrel with it, but I'd like my work to be considered for the intrinsic value of the work itself."

On the other hand, Senior feels less discomfort with the idea that wherever she may live she is a Caribbean writer, but this is as much a matter of chosen subject as cultural placement. The immediate world she is trying to capture on the page is the Caribbean reality she is most familiar with, both from personal experience and extensive critical observation.

"I would say that my work is strongly ethnographic," she explains. "I've done a lot of research in Caribbean culture. I think I know a lot about it, and in my stories I really feel that I ought to be true to the culture in that sense. I try to be as accurate as possible about whatever it is I'm describing, true to the people I'm writing about. I don't want to romanticize anything."

So the cultural xenophobia present in many of her characters is less a politically motivated construct than an accurate reflection of the society she observes with such intense scrutiny. To illustrate, she points to Working Miracles: Women's Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean, a sociological study she published in 1991, which details the social, political, and economic structures determining the lives of the women she so often uses as characters in her fiction. Much of the information in Working Miracles is supported by oral histories collected from around the entire English-speaking Caribbean, and the book is written with Senior's characteristic respect for authentic voice.

Combine this authoritative text with her work as a collector of folklore, and her years of experience as a journalist in Jamaica, and you begin to see why her focus remains so consciously narrow. Senior knows these people intimately; she is these people. Her childhood was spent split between the twin realities of poor country parents and more well-to-do relatives to whom she was sent for her schooling (similar displacements can be found throughout her fiction, as well as in Working Miracles).

"I feel I can write for all of that society," she says, "because I lived that experience. And I want to write about those people who do not have a voice of their own. I feel very strongly about that."

She is attempting to create, or reflect, a world that is valid in and of itself. In her fiction breathes a culture as full and relevant to today's global consciousness as any other. While she stresses its uniqueness through the use of voice and rhythm (many of her pieces are narrated in the first person in a seamless mixture of rural Jamaican dialect and standard English), illustrating her respect for the oral tradition of storytelling, an attention to authenticity ensures her writing a wide readership. "I don't feel that I should choose my audience," she adds, "my audience chooses me. I'd like to feel that people can identify with my characters, that there's a universality."

Winning the 1987 Commonwealth Writers Prize must have helped dispel any anxiety about being restricted to a regional audience. She won the prize (the very first CWP ever awarded) for her first book of short fiction, Summer Lightning and Other Stories, a slim collection of stories that, by her own description, draws heavily on her childhood experiences of displacement and isolation from familial emotion. "When I wrote the stories in Summer Lightning," she remarks, "I was still feeling my way, and the Commonwealth Prize greatly helped my self- confidence. Though I'd always wanted to be a writer, it's just not that easy in a society like Jamaica, and I needed confirmation that I was on the right path. And, of course, there was some money involved."

The poetry and short fiction following Summer Lightning show the benefits of bolstered confidence and a widening scope. Gardening in the Tropics picks up themes from her earlier poetry and explores them with more maturity. The voice displays a greater certainty; searching less, knowing more. Her two most recent fiction collections, Arrival of the Snake Woman and Other Stories (1989) and the forthcoming Discerner of Hearts, open up the childhood world of Summer Lightning and take a broader approach to the same closely observed milieu. Senior moves more easily between past and present, rural and urban life, allowing all facets of her culture to comment on and inform each other.

Are there any plans for a novel?

"I have, in fact, written a novel," she admits, shyly. "It's a bottom-drawer novel, although people have read it and said it should be published. I didn't set out to write it; it just came and I was obsessed by it. But, to be honest, I feel much more comfortable, temperamentally, writing shorter fiction and poetry because I like to really polish my work and spend a lot of time on it, and that's so much easier to do, of course, with something short.

"Although," she adds, laughing, "my short fiction does seem to be getting longer, and really, I have no agenda as far as writing is concerned. Who knows, tomorrow I may go home and write a novel, I can't tell."

Senior attributes a good deal of influence on her work to the Duppy and Anansi stories (folk-tales featuring spirits of the dead and animal trickster figures) that are told to children from generation to generation in the Jamaica of her upbringing. These tales are referred to from time to time in her own stories, and often play a central role in the relationship between sympathetic adults and children. And the same tone of matter-of-fact storytelling drives the narration of Senior's own work.

"I write everything to be read aloud," she says. "I'm not just putting words on paper; I'm hearing them as if they were being told. As a child I grew up hearing stories, in the schoolyard we had ring games and verbal dexterity was valued, and of course, you know, people sang as they worked. I think what I'm trying to do is to fuse the scribal and the oral tradition in a way, so I regard myself as a storyteller regardless of what I'm writing."

This concentration on orality in her work has also lead Senior to become accomplished at public readings -- often the greatest fear of the traditionally sequestered writer. "I enjoy reading my own work in public. I used to be extremely shy, but now I like reading because it's the only time I get to see my readers face to face; I enjoy that interaction. And it also helps to sell my work. I think when people hear me read they say, "Oh, I'm going to buy that book now that I've heard it." There's something, another dimension, to the work when you hear it read aloud." The succinctness and extreme readability of Senior's writing have helped her reach an even wider audience on radio and tape, both in Britain (on BBC 4 and "Book at Bedtime") and here in Canada (through North York's Books on Tape program).

Whether it's through longer short fiction and poetry, or an eventual novel, Senior is sure of the structural form of the reality within her writing. She has set herself a delicate and complex project: the revitalization of local history and everyday folk reality, and its incorporation into contemporary Caribbean life and thought. Discerner of Hearts accomplishes all this quite nicely, spending more time in the present day than any of her past collections, but always with a shimmer of non-nostalgic past just below the surface. These stories sustain entire worlds and achieve a brilliant universality through subtly detailed characterization and the simple telling of an engaging tale. In these traits Senior is a lot like the writers she admires.

"I don't like to speak of literary influences, but I would say that the writers I am most profoundly impressed by now," she offers, attempting to explain her literary aims, "are the Latin Americans. Someone like Garcia Marquez is so brilliant because he has found a way of writing about his society that does not follow the conventional path, either of writing or of how he uses history in his work. What I find exciting about this writing is that it's saying we don't have to measure our world against any other. You, the reader, must recognize that this world has a coherence. I think the same thing is happening with Caribbean literature, with African literature, and Australian, and Canadian to some extent; writers are claiming their place in the world and saying, My place is as good as your place."

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