Olive Senior

This study of Olive Senior's writing includes comprehensive coverage of her poetry, short stories as well as her non-fiction, placing this work in the context of debates about what it means to be Jamaican and Caribbean in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Jamaican writer, Olive Senior, has been writing and publishing since the 1980s. Her oeuvre includes poetry and short stories, as well as journalism, a sociological study of Caribbean women and a comprehensive encyclopaedia of Jamaican culture. Although Senior now lives in Toronto, her work remains intensely focused on loving portraits of 'ordinary' Jamaicans, whether they are struggling to make a living off the land in harsh rural contexts or to negotiate the complex postcolonial realities of life in the city. Senior scrutinises the way power operates at global and local levels, and the reader is always made aware of the bigger historical narratives which position (but don't quite 'fix') the individuals that she writes about. Senior's work is always attentive to detail and to the texture of literary language and she has established a tone that is distinctly understated and wry, insinuating rather than declaiming its truths. In opting for a more cunningly mild-mannered literary voice, Dr Narain argues that Senior's work provided a nuanced, engaged and gendered alternative definition for 'writing resistance' than is usually associated with Caribbean writers.