Displacement and Doubt in Post-Colonial Literature. Olive Seniors Gardening in the Tropics is an example of a collection of work that through the use of poetic and literary techniques, effectively displays her ambivalence towards h

University Degree Linguistics, Classics and related subjects

LITERARY ESSAY

“The Post-Colonial writings of women throughout the African diaspora often reflect ambivalence toward place and language (Teresa Zacoolink).” Discuss with reference to Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics.’

Displacement and Doubt in Post-Colonial Literature

Nostalgic yet ambivalent, is the unrelenting reaction expressed by Post-colonial female writers of the African diasporic community living and writing abroad. Jean Rhys and Olive Senior are two such female writers who portray via their literary works, the personal struggles they experience, of yearning to be home whilst fearing rejection and seeking their own national and cultural identity through their own displacement. Olive Senior’s ‘Gardening in the Tropics’ is an example of a collection of work that through the use of poetic and literary techniques, effectively displays her ambivalence towards her identity whilst gaining affirmation.

Post-colonial writing embraces the language and ideas that have been rejected by the Europeans while seeking to disseminate the Hegemonic thinking imprinted on the West Indian groups and reshaping our values and identity. This literature is rich in passionate and determined female writers that seek to present a once muted female voice on issues that may arise in the mind of individual who feels out of place and doubtful. Sushiela Nasta quotes that “the Post-Colonial woman writer is not only involved in making herself heard, in changing the architecture of male-centred ideologies and languages, or in discovering new forms and languages to express her experience. She has also to subvert and demythologise indigenous male writings and traditions which seek to label her.”

Language is an important technique utilized by Post-colonial writers to express frustration and grievance. As Sushiela Nasta states in the book, Motherlands: Black women’s writing from Africa; Caribbean and South Asia, “language is both a source and womb of creativity, a means of giving birth to new stories, new myths, of telling stories of women that have been previously silenced.” Language is in fact a creative medium to express a writer’s deepest thought, experiences and struggles. Olive Senior utilizes language in an interesting way that has garnered much attention by critics. Her life history stems from a bi-cultural childhood that has allowed her dynamic use of language to not only represent her Caribbean and African roots that are embraced by Senior, but as well her English heritage. In an interview with poet and novelist Kwame Dawes, Senior expresses how ‘Gardening in the Tropics’ is a medium to give a voice to the voiceless and the collection explores gardening as metaphorically representing a quest through the landscape for her identity and place of belonging influenced by her Jamaica and English mix.

‘Talking in the Trees’ is another collection by Senior in which she first explored the personal questions that remained in her mind of where she belongs. Her racially and culturally mixed background amidst social rejection in her Mother Country and abroad has caused her experience a feeling of displacement and to seek greater affirmation of her Caribbean identity whilst embracing her current Canadian culture as she states below:

“I affirm myself as a Caribbean person and identity and the way I define that is somebody who, precisely like me, embodies not different races, and different cultures. I mean people just have ...

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“I affirm myself as a Caribbean person and identity and the way I define that is somebody who, precisely like me, embodies not different races, and different cultures. I mean people just have to take me or leave me.”

Olive Senior is attributed for her technique of tonial and linguistic variation and her ease of switch. As she has often expressed, her switch is effortless due to this being her natural style influenced by her dynamic cultural background.

“Though I not quarrelsome

I have to say:

look I tired now”

The lines above from the poem, ‘Meditation on Yellow’ exhibits one of Senior’s dialect changes. Whilst ambivalent to her identity, it can be said that Senior manipulated her creole language to have a wider range of people who themselves are as ‘indecisive’ and culturally dynamic and as well, mark her identity.

The manipulation of characters in a literary piece can reflect the writer’s views as well as their innermost struggles and conflicts. In ‘Hurricane Story 1903’ it is noted that Granny is instilled and rooted with her Jamaican culture. Likewise, this relates to Senior herself who tries to hold onto her Caribbean roots whilst remaining in Canada, despite her uncertainty of belonging. Renu Juneja in her discussion about “Contemporary Women Writers”, states that as reaction to their prolonged invisibility in Literature, the women writers have offered literary works expressed with a female autobiographical sensibility and reflecting their past experiences. Jean Rhys is another West Indian writer whose life parallels with that of Olive Senior and others in the African diaspora. As a white girl growing up in a predominantly black community in Dominica, Rhys experienced levels of isolations and rejection but she however did migrate to England, only returning once to her homeland. Though critics have described her attitudes towards her home country as ambivalent and uncertain based on her experiences, she faced an inner conflict of self-doubt and nostalgic feelings. In the poem, ‘Meditation on Red’, Olive Senior makes references to Rhys’s life, characters and themes in her novels such as Wide Sargasso Sea where Senior feels the same sentiments and connects with Rhys and her experiences through the pieces that dealt with the issues of displacement and isolation.

Growing up in rural Jamaica enabled Senior to be conscious of her environment that facilitated her to manipulate the Edenic imagery and gardening motif in ‘Gardening in the Tropics’.

“I think one of the things that have also shaped my sensibilities as a writer is the intense beauty of the country in which I grew up in as I have internalized this landscape. Not lost on me as a child was the fact that the beautiful landscape marked a lot of hardship and pain and so on.”

The landscape and scenery of her homeland symbolized the painful experiences by those Senior considered her people and as well represented her quest to dig into her own insecurities and uncertainties regarding her identity and place in society. It can be argued that the nostalgic reminiscence is presented in ‘Meditation on Yellow’ where Senior writes “I want to feel mellow, in that three o’clock yellow’ where she muses on the sun’s glow at that time of the afternoon in such a tropical setting. This greatly contrasts to her environment now in Canada which varies drastically. It can be argued that Senior, though feeling displaced in her homeland and society on a whole, still admires and yearns for her country as this is seen in the gardening motif throughout Gardening in the Tropics.

Bruce King in his introduction of the book, West Indian Literature, states that “West Indian Literature is more about coming to terms with exile, rapid change and the desire to belong in a region of the world…” Many female West Indian writers of the African diaspora are subject to this exact sentiment and thus release their frustration and uncertainty through their work. Olive Senior and others effectively utilize their creative literary techniques to often display their feelings of displacement and ambivalence throughout their work. This is in fact often done, not as means of ‘wanting to’ but instead fulfilling a ‘need to’ provide a voice to others who may feel such ambivalence, likewise as Jean Rhys connected to Olive Senior.

Word Count: 1,211 words

References

Books

Chamberlin, Edward (1993). Come Back to Me, My Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Dawes, Kwame (2001). Talk yuh talk: Interwiews with Anglophone Caribbean poets. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Gilbert, Helen & Joanna Tompkins (1996). Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge.

King, Bruce Alvin (1995). West Indian Literature. London: Macmillan Publishers.

Morris, Merlvyn (2005). Making West Indian Literature. Kingston 6, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers.

Nasta, Sushiela (1992). Motherlands: Black womens writing from Africa the Caribbean and South Asian. New Brunswick, Canada: Rutgers University Press.

Scott, Helen C. (2006). Caribbean Women Writers and Globalization. London: Ashgate Pub Co.

Websites

Prose Quotes. Retrieved January 3, 2012, from http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/prose

Dawes Kwame, Kwame Dawes: The Use of Poetry (January 10, 2011), Retrieved January 2, 2012, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FTJ7imc2ag&feature=related

Ramon Paredes, Aristotle’s Definition of Tragedy. Retrieved January 2, 2012 from http://www.paredes.us/tragedy.html

Sushiela Nasta “Motherlands: Black womens writing from Africa the Caribbean and South Asian”

Chapter 8, “Contemporary Women Writers”, West Indian Literature

Quote from Olive Senior in an interview with Kwame Dawes in, “Talk Yuh Talk”