104) poses a threat to this all-consuming transformation. In the last stanzas of the poem, the old woman asserts:

Strangers might occupy my house and land
from time to time, but from this redoubt,
I always repossess it, inch by inch.
With the help of the steadfast tropical
sun, wind, and rain, with the help of the
termites, the ants, the wood lice, and
the worms, I always reclaim. I can wait,
unforgiving.

(GT 106)

As it turns out, the 'miserable' woman proves unexpectedly powerful, as the shift in poetic voice concretely and symbolically allows her to have the last word in the conflict. Just as parasites may be barely visible but can destroy even the strongest architectural foundations, her refusal to sell her plot undermines the landlord's plans to transform the land into an attraction for foreigners. The old lady emerges as a token of continuity and slow time, as it is thanks to her refusal that the land will preserve some of its authenticity and will be transmitted to the next generations. This impression is further reinforced by her mention of the help of insects as well as the fact that she lives 'in the basement' of her property (GT 104), since those two elements visually associate the woman with the ground and reinforce her characterisation as the embodiment of anchoring. Likewise, the prototype of the old(er) woman as a guardian of cultural and biologic roots recurs in several other poems and stories; one can think of Jonathan's grandmother in 'Flying' or the gardener in 'Advice and Devices', two resilient women who both draw their agency from their intimate knowledge of the soil – and since the soil is a privileged place of reconnection with the 'bones' (GT 85) of the ancestors, as is illustrated in the poem 'Brief Lives', caring for the ground also represents a symbolic way of tending to one's ancestors and ensuring the preservation of cultural bonds. To that extent, one may also underline the role of the author herself, as gardener of her own literary landscape and careful unearther of Jamaican history and heritage.

Transmission, in this case, is not to be understood in a Eurocentric, patrilineal sense, but rather in a more cyclical perspective of constant regeneration. Even though these brave women embody stability in the face of change, the fact that many of them should be gardeners, carefully tilling the soil, but also (sometimes substitute) mother figures for children who may not always be their own, lays emphasis on the dialectic between anchoring and growing, or seeds and sprouts, which characterises their resilience. Likewise, the 'immovable tenant' does not
conceptualise her resistance as a form of immobile fixity, but rather as a continuous process which consists in reclaiming, 'inch by inch', the land that is being taken away from her. This is what led Nicole Ollier to analyse the role of these women as a 'tranquil revolution'<fnref n="182" /> – 'revolution' being understood here not as radical change but as a full circle, denoting an unwavering trust in the cycle of life.

Generally speaking, in the popular imagination, femininity is often associated with procreation – hence the significance of the image of the ‘womb’ in ‘Gourd’ (GT 7) which associates the poem’s theme of spiritual birth with the female<fnref n="183" /> reproductive organ: the association between femininity, reproduction, and circularity is therefore not unique to the texts. Yet, once again, Senior strays away from essentialising narratives. Her reframing of transmission as a cyclical, ongoing process of sustenance and creation through the portrayal of these women does not merely serve gendered clichés but rather brings to light the universal, human ability to regrow from uprootings and survive against hurdles. This is where the ethical dimension of her work lies: instead of dwelling on historical and contemporary traumas as irreparable fault lines which doom Caribbean people to rootlessness and incompleteness, as Naipaul did in *The Middle Passage*, Senior focuses on the potential of repotting and regeneration which lies underneath the surface of these scars, thereby delineating a portrait of Caribbean identity as an inalienable force bound to rise from its ashes.

## 2.3. *Rebirths and repottings*

Mirroring the patient tilling of those gardeners, both collections are shaped by a cyclical rhythm which echoes the pace of nature, in which nothing is lost nor created but everything is transformed, life turning into death just as death turns into life again. In *Gardening in the Tropics*, this cyclical rhythm is highlighted at the very start by the assonance between ‘womb’ and ‘tomb’ in ‘Gourd’ (GT 7), as well as in the poem ‘Brief Lives’, in which a burial ground turns into a site of growth where the speaker starts to unearth the bones of a deceased young man before deciding to ‘[bury] him again so he can carry on / growing’ (GT 85), with the enjambment formally mirroring this sense of continuity on the page. In *The Pain Tree*, the theme of natural regeneration is borne out by the titular tree, in the first short story, into the trunk of

<footnote n="182">¹⁸² Ollier, Nicole. ‘Voix jamaïcaines : Olive Senior, une révolution tranquille’. *Art. cit.*, n/p.</footnote>

<footnote n="183">¹⁸³ I use the term ‘female’ here to denote the biological sex assigned to individuals at birth depending on chromosomes and physiological attributes. The hormonal cycles of the biological female body further sustain the idea of women as cyclic beings in the popular imagination.</footnote>
which Larissa would regularly hammer nails to let the tree carry her pain in her stead. At the end of the story, Lorraine, the narrator, walks down to this tree in the bushes and sees that ‘what had been a sapling was now of massive growth, its trunk straight and tall’ (*PT* 16). This image of strength is significant insofar as it symbolically seems to compensate for the invisibility of the live-in maids like Larissa who knew, the narrator imagines, that ‘the tree would keep on bearing them up, higher and higher, year after year’ (*PT* 17). In other words, the disappearance of these women makes room for the steady growth of a tree, which therefore qualifies the pathos of Larissa’s absence by bringing the story to a close on a more hopeful note.

Interestingly, the parallel between humans and nature drawn in ‘The Pain Tree’ recurs throughout the two collections: for instance, in ‘Flying’, Jonathan is compared to a ‘shoot covered in debris’ (*PT* 162), while in ‘My Father’s Blue Plantation’, the speaker’s father seems to be undergoing a form of photosynthesis as he ‘lets that / Hot Tropical Sun pour down to fill his / blue lungs and warm his old and vegetating / bones’ (*GT* 86). The blurring of the boundary between humans and plants implies that the former, too, are subject to the cyclical pace of nature; and while this sense of circularity may be alienating when it denotes the repetition of traumatic historical events, which deprives the subjects of agency as they seem irrevocably doomed to be haunted by their past, circularity can also be understood as a more empowering phenomenon. As a matter of fact, even though circularity is often associated with stasis in Western cultures, Mervyn C. Alleyne has argued that several Creole cultures, including Jamaica, do not necessarily conceive it as such: for instance, Alleyne shows that the idiom ‘going round in circles’, which denotes confusion in several Western cultures, is replaced by ‘going left and right’ in Jamaican English<fnref n="184" />. To that extent, circularity may become a fertile form of resilience and strength: the cycle of life is what leads us to become ‘plant food’ (*GT* 64), but it is also what allows us to grow back under new forms.

Consequently, even in a fragmented history such as that of the Caribbean, there arises a possibility for healing and regrowth. This potential is perhaps best exemplified in the short story ‘Coal’, in which we follow the story of Boy, the grandson of a professional charcoal burner named Coal. Boy’s childhood is marked by trauma: he was abandoned by his parents to his grandparents, who both eventually died in front of him, and he was sent to live in another household led by a woman named Sarah, whose father used to be one of Coal’s clients, and Doll, the live-in maid, only to leave their house several years later to join the army during the

<footnote n="184">¹⁸⁴ Alleyne, Mervyn C. *Roots of Jamaican Culture*. Pluto Press, 1988, p. 161.</footnote>
Second World War. At first glance, Boy's life trajectory seems to mirror the history of uprootings which characterises the Caribbean; and yet, the narrative also underscores Boy's ability to create new roots and regrow as an individual despite his initial hurdles. Although Boy loses his biological family, the story depicts the formation of new bonds of affiliation between the characters, leading to the creation of a composite family between Sarah, who lost her parents, Doll, who has worked for Sarah's family for so long that 'she has no other home' (PT 47), and the young man, for whom the two women become adoptive mother figures. After Boy leaves, Doll indeed realises that 'he became the son she never had' during his time at the house – and in fact, by reading him 'bedtime stories' and 'looking after his clothes', Doll does act more motherly than the boy's absent mother ever has (PT 46). Moreover, the fact that Sarah eventually replaces the young man's nickname, 'Boy', with the name 'Vincent' (PT 50), casts her as another parental figure through the symbolic act of naming. Even though these new family ties initially seem threatened by the boy's departure, their existence is nonetheless reaffirmed by the fact that Vincent does eventually return home, following the Biblical motif of the prodigal son<sup>185</sup> – though with a less patriarchal twist, as he does not have a father but two substitute mothers waiting for him at home. At the end of the story, Vincent re-introduces himself to Sarah as Coal, the same name which his grandfather used to be known as. This scene of self-naming is significant insofar as it testifies to the young man's ability to carve out an identity for himself as an adult – an identity which draws from both his biological roots and his newfound family, whom he eventually goes back to. In that regard, the capacity of healing displayed by Boy/Vincent/Coal mirrors the process of coal burning itself, which consists in burning 'dead wood' to sell it and turn it into 'money' (PT 55) as well as an energy source – that is, bringing dead organic matter back to life. The story thus epitomises the human ability to rebuild a strong identity as well as meaningful bonds despite and through uprootings.

All this sheds light on the fact that finding a sense of rootedness in the Caribbean is possible, but it implies a form of creation, as individuals are led to participate in the repotting of their own ances-trees. Just like in 'Coal', several stories depict the recreation of affiliations despite the failure of initial affiliations – in 'Lollipop' and 'Flying', for instance, the grandmother takes on the role of the absent mother, whereas it is the maid who assumes this function in 'The Pain Tree'. Portraying the resilience of human bonds allows Senior to show that home does not necessarily denote a singular point of origin, but can be found and recreated elsewhere – and in

<footnote n="185">185 This parable can be found in Luke 15:11-32 (King James Bible. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org. Accessed 12 May 2025).</footnote>
that regard, the poet herself asserts her belief in her ability to ‘find [her] way home again’ in ‘Meditation on Red’ (GT 53), in contrast to Jean Rhys, her literary foremother, who remained in a perpetual state of homesickness<fnref n="186" />. The strength of Caribbean people therefore paradoxically seems to lie in their flexibility and their ability to repot themselves, just like rhizomes which can easily grow back from cuttings. In similar fashion, Daniel Maximin characterises the peoples of the region through the image of the reed, another rhizomic plant, so as to lay emphasis on their ability to consistently move forward, rebuild and refashion themselves: strength and stability, as it appears, are not to be found in stable monuments or in patrilineal genealogies but within adaptability and recreation<fnref n="187" />. Identity formation in the Caribbean thus hinges on a dual movement which includes both the reconnection with roots and the ability to grow new branches. Once again, the complementary duality between preservation and creation is evocative of the rhizome, as a network of roots that is both anchored in the soil and which spreads horizontally to branch out into new forms above the surface.

The emphasis on regeneration which underlies Senior’s portrayal of her native Caribbean allows her to bridge the gap between the recovery of historical traumas and a more empowering depiction of the people’s resilience against these fractures. Unearthing the roots of Caribbean identity, therefore, does not amount to a nostalgic quest for an untraceable point of origins – instead, the recovery of multiple roots primarily foregrounds the ways in which these roots can nurture acts of creation.

### 3. From remembrance to creation

#### 3.1. *The hybrid garden as creative matrix*

Whereas V. S. Naipaul argued that ‘nothing was created in the West Indies’<fnref n="188" />, conceptualising Caribbean identity and heritage through the prism of Creolisation has allowed multiple thinkers and writers of the region to emphasise that, on the contrary, the Creole identity

<footnote n="186">¹⁸⁶ One still ought to keep in mind that Jean Rhys lived in a particularly tense period, as the heir of a family of white plantation owners during the dismantlement of the British Empire, and as a member of the Windrush generation, that is to say one of the first West-Indians to set foot on British soil after the implementation of the British Nationality Act. Since late 2017, the investigation of *Guardian* journalist Amelia Gentleman has brought public attention to the hostile treatment of the British Home Office towards Caribbean immigrants, leading to the rise of the Windrush scandal in the United Kingdom.</footnote>

<footnote n="187">¹⁸⁷ ‘C’est pourquoi, à partir de tout ce que je vois, j’écoute, je lis, je danse, l’image qui me semble convenir à propos des îles de la Caraïbe est celle de peuples-roseaux, échappés des chênaies, des déserts, des savanes et des jungles originelles des quatre continents.’ Maximin, Daniel. *Les fruits du cyclone. Op. cit.*, p. 14.</footnote>

<footnote n="188">¹⁸⁸ Naipaul, V. S. *The Middle Passage*. *Op. cit.*, p. 20.</footnote>
crystallises the epitome of creation since it corresponds to the ongoing product of the Creolisation process. Derek Walcott and Daniel Maximin, among others, have both underlined the unbounded creative potential offered by the Caribbean, which offers plenty of influences and traditions to draw from. In 'The Muse of History', Walcott draws a distinction between a radical view of the past, which considers history as a burden and refuses to acknowledge the cultural elements brought along by European settlement, and a classical view, which looks back upon this past as a form of potential enrichment and which he considers to be more productive from a poetic perspective, on the condition that poets create something new from this tradition<fnref n="189" />. Building upon Walcott, Maximin has argued that 'submission to inheritances is never a duty of imposed fidelity, and thwarting the score of the fathers is the right which every Caribbean musician bestows upon himself'<fnref n="190" />. These two writers herein pinpoint the duality of creation, as a process which can never truly ignore what comes before but which must also produce something new. This dual movement is made even more acute in the Caribbean context, shaped by shifting geographic and cultural boundaries and upon which new identities are constantly evolving, consequently making it a particularly fertile ground for creation.

Likewise, hybridity stands out as a catalyst of creation in the two collections – first and foremost because it is depicted as the natural order of things, and thus as a fertile process. In several poems, such as 'The Tree of Life' or 'Seeing the Light', Senior actively denounces monoculture as an unnatural way of cultivating the soil – and since, as we have seen, humans follow the biological rules of nature, the health of society also depends on its hybridity. This idea lies at the core of the poem 'The Knot Garden', which characterises the Caribbean as a garden in which 'you'll find things that don't / belong together often intertwine / all mixed up in this amazing fecundity' (GT 88) – unlike European botanical gardens which, as Donal McCracken has demonstrated, were historically tied to ideals of national identity and were surrounded by high walls which symbolically reasserted the exclusion of unwanted species and people<fnref n="191" />. It is significant, in that regard, that Kew Gardens should be located right in front of the British National Archives in Western London, as their geographical proximity echoes their

<footnote n="189">¹⁸⁹ Walcott, Derek. 'The Muse of History'. *What the Twilight Says, op. cit.* Walcott associates himself with the classical view. His ambition to build upon Western traditions is perhaps best exemplified in his 1990 epic, *Omeros*, which borrows many elements from Homer's *Iliad* but replaces the Ancient Greek epic in the setting of St Lucia, the poet's native island, and thwarts the traditional conventions of the epic as there is neither a linear direction nor a single protagonist of hero in the narrative. See Walcott, Derek. *Omeros*. Faber & Faber, 1990.</footnote>

<footnote n="190">¹⁹⁰ 'La soumission aux héritages n'est jamais un devoir de fidélité imposée, et déjouer la partition des pères est le droit que se donne tout musicien caribéen.' Maximin, Daniel. *Les fruits du cyclone. Op. cit.*, p. 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="191">¹⁹¹ McCracken, Donal. *Gardens of Empire: Botanical Institutions of the Victorian British Empire*. Leicester University Press, 1997, p. 3.</footnote>
shared ideological grounding, as epistemological and biological archives and sites of exclusion. However, the tropical Caribbean garden hinges on an opposite economy of inclusion and unbounded growth, as is illustrated by the gradual increase in length in the three aforementioned lines from ‘The Knot Garden’ which seems to mirror the rapid burgeoning of new species. The poem foregrounds cross-pollination as a natural, uncontrollable process which thwarts the political leader’s plans to separate ‘flowers from weeds’ and ‘woods from trees’: coming back from one of his numerous meetings with the IMF, the leader instead finds geographical and social boundaries being crossed regardless of his instructions, with ‘drug barons / moving into the more salubrious climes’ as well as ‘daughters of gentry’ sleeping with ‘ghetto boys with gold teeth’ (GT 88). In the last stanzas of the poem, the ‘new and twisted growth’ of nature proves too ‘impenetrable’ for the leader’s plane (GT 89), thereby forcing him to leave and metaphorically underscoring the cultural strength and political power which can be drawn from hybridity.

From a metatextual standpoint, the emphasis on creation through hybridity draws our attention to Senior's activity as a writer, since the poetic power of her work, too, lies in its ability to create something new from the multiple roots and branches which make up the Caribbean landscape. In terms of themes, to begin with, the collections draw from several influences: 'The Country Cousin' is reminiscent of a Cinderella story, 'Flying' borrows from the legend of the Flying African, popular in African-American and African-Caribbean folklores, while 'The Tree of Life' refers to pre-Columbian myths... and this cultural syncretism finds linguistic resonance in *Gardening in the Tropics*, as foreign languages make punctual appearances in some of the poems, as if to remind the readers of the former colonial presence: in 'Finding your Stone', the word 'stone' is substituted by its French translation, 'pierre' (GT 87, italics in the original), while Spanish words are included in 'Seeing the Light' and 'Brief Lives'. Moreover, the poems and stories crystallise a form of hybridity through their generic indeterminacy. Some short stories are so long that they seem closer to novellas, whereas some poems seem paradoxically more apt to fit into the short story genre: 'Amazon Women' and 'The Knot Garden', for example, rely on the same storytelling devices as those used in 'A Father Like That'. Not only is Senior's poetry often narrative, insofar as many poems are structured around the development of an event, but the author also frequently includes markers of oral storytelling in her poems, such as authorial intrusions from the speakers, who add their own comments on the story between parentheses, or addresses directed to the readers such as '[m]ark you' (GT 97) – something Reema also does in her narration. This does not mean, for all that,
that the poems simply *become* short stories, as the brevity of the poetry genre still entails a different reading experience: with poems, readers are perhaps more aware of the disposition of the lines on the page, networks of imageries and sounds, while the prose in short fiction allows us to better focus on the contents rather than the form, even if the latter remains important as well. Yet, it remains significant that Senior should not draw clear-cut boundaries between the two genres: by mixing the poetic tools offered by each medium in order to enrich both her prose and her poetry, the author demonstrates the fact that generic *mestizaje* represents a source of poetic strength rather than degradation.

In that sense, the collections themselves mirror the image of the hybrid tropical garden and stand as the literary fruit of the cultural roots of the Caribbean – and it is thus all the more symbolic, in that regard, that the poetry collection should open on the literal image of a fruit. Indeed, the poem ‘Gourd’ seems to concentrate all those cultural influences within its boundaries, as the speaker refers to foundational spiritual and religious myths from several continents, both separated and united by ‘mystical shores’ (GT 7). While the ‘first Flood’, with an uppercase letter, may evoke the Book of Genesis in the Christian Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, the Flood as an origin myth is also present in Taíno mythology<fnref n="192" />, which immediately undermines the impression of a single cultural genealogy. This syncretism is further sustained by the mention of ‘orehu the spirit of water’, which refers to Amerindian beliefs<fnref n="193" />, as well as by the comparison between the gourd and ‘the houngan’s asson’, which is a reference to Vodou practices inherited from the African continent (GT 7). Moreover, Hyacinth Simpson notes that the gourd itself is geographically ambiguous as it could refer either to the fruit of the calabash tree, native of the Americas, or to the fruit growing on a vine, *Lagenaria siceraria*, which is mostly found in the African continent<fnref n="194" />. All the cultural influences which have shaped the Creole reality, as a result, are crystallised within a single poem and nurture its poetic quality by endowing the text with multiple layers of signification, resembling the multiple cultural strata which permeate the Creole identity.

As a result, the dynamic of perpetual creation which underpins Creolisation foregrounds the role of literature as a place – or garden<fnref n="195" /> – of choice to represent and contribute to this process, as the constant displacement of meaning mirrors the constantly shifting cultural boundaries of

<footnote n="192">¹⁹² See Wilkinson, Phillip. *Myths and Legends*. Op. cit., p. 306.</footnote>

<footnote n="193">¹⁹³ Senior, Olive. *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage*. Op. cit., p. 508.</footnote>

<footnote n="194">¹⁹⁴ Simpson, Hyacinth. ‘Gourd’. *Olive Senior’s* Gardening in the Tropics, https://www.torontomu.ca/olivesenior/poems/gourd.html. Accessed 10 May 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="195">¹⁹⁵ The analogy between literature and the garden is similarly established in the title of Jamaica Kincaid’s essay collection *My Garden (Book)* (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999).</footnote>
the Caribbean. In that sense, Senior's collections can be construed as a Third Space of enunciation, defined by Homi Bhabha as a space 'which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process'<fnref n="196" />, and which therefore best expresses the hybrid, translated subjectivities of postcolonial subjects. This does not mean that Senior blindly celebrates all forms of cultural assimilations as positive encounters for all that, as the author also takes care to underline the violent context of the historical encounters which took place in the Caribbean, as well as the psychological and emotional pains which can arise from exile. Yet, considering her work as a Third Space in which dichotomies are blurred to make room for ambivalence, syncretism, and multiplicity allows us to shift our perspective from a poetic analysis of hybridity to the more concrete, ethical and political implications of creation. Indeed, this liminal space offers the possibility for hybrid subjectivities and disparate communities to assert and fashion their own presence.

## 3.2. Storying the community

From primeval myths to more recent literary works, the role of storytelling as an intrinsic aspect of the human experience has been widely studied by scholars. The analyses of Joseph Campbell<fnref n="197" /> and Northrop Frye<fnref n="198" />, as well as the anthology directed by David Leeming<fnref n="199" /> have underscored the significance of myth – coming from the Greek root ‘mythos’, meaning ‘word’ or ‘story’ – in the way humans perceive and make sense of themselves and their surroundings. By extension, this shows that human beings are, by essence, storied<fnref n="200" />, and the Caribbean culture is no exception to this tradition. Nonetheless, the art of *telling* – rather than writing down – stories has borne out a particularly significant ontological and political role in the region, as Olive Senior underlines:

> The oral tradition is also the only conveyance for portions of our history. When I was growing up, the heroes of books were not people like us. The oral tradition therefore

<footnote n="196">¹⁹⁶ Bhabha, Homi. *The Location of Culture*. Op. cit., p. 36.</footnote>

<footnote n="197">¹⁹⁷ Campbell notoriously coined the concept of a 'monomyth', a universal poetic structure which encapsulates all models of myth and which would therefore demonstrate that no matter the cultural background in which they are created, myths speak to a universal human imagination. Campbell, Joseph. *The Hero with a Thousand Faces*. 1949. 3rd ed., Pantheon Books, 2008.</footnote>

<footnote n="198">¹⁹⁸ Frye aimed to demonstrate that literature aimed at retelling the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. Although his perspective is obviously very Eurocentric, his analysis remains telling through the links it develops between literature and myth. Frye, Northrop. *Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology*. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.</footnote>

<footnote n="199">¹⁹⁹ Leeming, David Adams. *The World of Myth: An Anthology*. Oxford University Press, 1991. See pp. 3-5 in particular for a concise summary of the functions of myth.</footnote>

<footnote n="200">²⁰⁰ This is also what Jonathan Gottschall demonstrates in *The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human*. Mariner Books, 2013.</footnote>
had to carry the weight of our own heroism and our own history. Voice, history, song, and story became conflated. When in a slave society language and other means of communication were repressed by the master class, song remained the most important vehicle for transmitting information and comment for several hundred years [...]. Part of the people's history, the ancestral connections with Africa, were preserved in religious rituals and transmitted orally through music and dance.<fnref n="201" />

In keeping with Daniel Maximin’s assessment of creation as a way to resist against oppression<fnref n="202" />, Senior here calls attention to the central role of storytelling as a tool of (re)connection with African traditions<fnref n="203" />, and therefore as a tool of resistance against the amnesia induced by colonial archives and forced displacement. In the same lecture, Senior also describes the ‘resonance’<fnref n="204" /> between the storyteller and the audience that is created during the storytelling performance, as both parties enter an implicit contract: the storyteller must engage with the audience, and the audience, in turn, must listen. This other, more horizontal form of connection also stands out as a means of resistance, as it reinforces the ties of the community against the ongoing traumas of (neo)colonialism which impose artificial boundaries onto the natural and social landscape. Storytelling, as a consequence, fulfils a vital function for the Caribbean community, as it is through stories – and the act of telling and listening to them – that individuals can re-imagine themselves as part of a group, to return to Benedict Anderson’s notion of the imagined community. While Anderson rightfully argues that ‘no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers’<fnref n="205" />, the oral storytelling tradition makes for a more shifting, perhaps unstable, but also more *alive* ground of transmission and belonging for the Caribbean community, whose (imagined) boundaries are therefore less clear-cut than those of the Old World nations but are caught in a perpetual process of redefinition.

The central role of storytelling in the community is highlighted in *The Pain Tree* and *Gardening in the Tropics*, which include several figures of storytellers. In ‘Flying’, for instance, it is through his mother’s and his grandmother’s stories that Jonathan is able to reconnect with his forgotten childhood, while Doll, in ‘Coal’, resembles about Queen Victoria through the stories which her grandfather told her (PT 45). In ‘Boxed-In’, however, the absence of

<footnote n="201">²⁰¹ Senior, Olive. 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su'. *Art. cit.*, p. 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="202">²⁰² '[...] tout acte de création s'impose comme résistance à toute forme d'oppression'. Maximin, Daniel. *Les fruits du cyclone. Op. cit.*, p. 31.</footnote>

<footnote n="203">²⁰³ The figure of the Caribbean storyteller owes much to griots, bearers of the oral tradition in West Africa. See Simpson, Hyacinth. ""Voicing the Text"". *Art. cit.*, p. 835, and Maximin, Daniel. *Les fruits du cyclone. Op. cit.*, p. 18. Maximin nonetheless diversifies this inheritance by relating Caribbean storytellers to the troubadours of Medieval Europe.</footnote>

<footnote n="204">²⁰⁴ Senior, Olive. 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su'. *Art. cit.*, p. 37.</footnote>

<footnote n="205">²⁰⁵ Anderson, Benedict. *Imagined Communities*. Op. cit., p. 9.</footnote>
communal storytelling leads to forgetting and alienation, as the community does not want to
listen to Mr. Everett’s stories about the slave trade, seeing ‘none of it as relevant to their lives’
(PT 106), only to end up blindly selling the land to foreign mining companies without fully
realising the implications of this sale. And behind all those storytelling figures lies, of course,
another invisible storyteller – that is, Olive Senior herself, whose own work intentionally<sup>206</sup>
builds upon the oral storytelling tradition of the Caribbean. Standing at the threshold between
orality and the written tradition, the poems and stories in the collections thus fully partake in
the communal function of ‘survivance’, defined by Gerald Vizenor as ‘an active sense of
presence under absence, deracination, and oblivion’ and ‘the continuance of stories’<sup>207</sup>. By
continuing to tell stories, the past is not merely represented as a distant object of study; instead,
storytelling keeps it alive, allowing it to sprout into new forms. This phenomenon also testifies
to the primordial role of creation as a tool of resistance against erasure, as well as a place of
*autopoiesis* – or self-creation – for the community, as telling these stories allows individuals to
regain a form of agency and present themselves in a way that strays away from miserabilist
narratives.

The poem ‘Amazon Women’ is a prime example of the ways in which a painful moment of
history can be recreated into a joyful, captivating moment through the art of storytelling, as the
poem gives voice to a woman who endeavours to retell the story of the mythical Amazon
women in the Americas. The legend was first spread by two Englishmen who travelled to the
Americas, Sir Walter Raleigh and Rev. William Henry Brett<sup>208</sup> – and a stark contrast appears
between the two versions of the tale, as it was first told by the explorers and then retold by the
storyteller on the page. This difference highlights the ways in which stories can be used to heal
or destroy. On the one hand, the legend of the Amazons as it was spread by Raleigh and Brett
encapsulates the fact that such stories were part and parcel of colonial ideology and could be

<footnote n="206">206 Senior, Olive. 'Lessons from the Fruit Stand'. *Art. cit.*, p. 42. See also Simpson, Hyacinth.</footnote>

<footnote n="207">207 Vizenor, Gerald Robert. 'Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice'. *Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence*, edited by Gerald Robert Vizenor, University of Nebraska Press, 2008, p. 1. Vizenor coined the concept of survivance in the context of Native American studies, which does not completely overlap with the Caribbean context. Nonetheless, using the notion of 'survivance' to apprehend Caribbean storytelling remains useful as it allows for an emphasis on the ontological and political signification of performance as a continuous re-assertion of presence.</footnote>

<footnote n="208">208 William Henry Brett was a nineteenth-century missionary to British Guiana and wrote an account of the *Legends and Myths of the Aboriginal Indians of British Guiana* (W.W. Gardner, 1880), while Walter Raleigh was a seventeenth-century explorer who travelled to South America in search of the mythical El Dorado and spread the legend of warlike women in the region in his travelogue, *The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa... Performed in the Yeare 1595*. 1596. Edited by Robert Schomburgk, The Hakluyt Society, 1848.</footnote>
used as a tool of domination. Indeed, the image of these wild matriarchs crystallises the wider conceptualisation of these lands as feminine, virgin places which were yet to be symbolically penetrated – a rhetorical and ideological strategy which betrays the ‘porno-tropics’<sup>209</sup> underpinning the (primarily male) colonial gaze. Furthermore, that Raleigh and Brett should have transposed what is originally an Ancient Greek myth<sup>210</sup> to the New World corresponds to another form of symbolic violence which scholar Barbara Fuchs defines as ‘colonial quotation’<sup>211</sup>:

> The quotation of colonialist discourse from one instance to the next naturalizes expansion by bringing newly “discovered” lands and people under the conceptual domain of the already-known, the already-digested.<sup>212</sup>

In other words, through the analogy between the warrior women of the *Iliad* who, despite their warlike qualities, were still eventually conquered by Bellerophon, and the newfound lands across the Atlantic, Raleigh and Brett already conceived these lands as bound to be tamed and symbolically deprived them from their independence. However, in the poem, these colonial and misogynistic undertones are substituted for humour and female empowerment. The speaker focuses on the story of Toeyza, the founder of the Amazons, who drove all the women in her community to flee with her after her husband discovered that she had an affair and killed her lover (GT 97-98). The story is interspersed with numerous comments from the storyteller, who, despite initially warning us that she is ‘not into sensationalism’ (GT 97), truly brings the story to life under our eyes. For instance, when the speaker relates that Toeyza’s husband hanged the corpse of his wife’s lover in the women’s hut in order to deter them from being faithless to their husbands, she ironically remarks, ‘(Though if men go around in jaguar disguise, what can they expect?)’ (GT 98). Through these interventions, the speaker grounds the ethereal world of myth into the real, concrete world of her audience – and in the real world, according to her, men who are always absent and wear ridiculous attires should not be surprised when their wives eventually find someone else. Despite the apparent triviality of these remarks, and the implied unreliability of the speaker, who relates a story she heard from her aunt’s ‘husband’s uncle’s grandfather’ (GT 98) as unquestionable fact, her tale still epitomises the way in which creation can become a tool of resistance. In telling the tale, the storyteller indeed co-opts an alienating

<footnote n="209"><sup>209</sup> McClintock, Anne. *Imperial Leather. Op. cit.*, p. 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="210"><sup>210</sup> The Amazons first appeared in Homer’s *Iliad*.</footnote>

<footnote n="211"><sup>211</sup> Fuchs, Barbara. ‘Conquering Islands: Contextualizing *The Tempest*. Shakespeare Quarterly’, vol. 48, no. 1, Spring 1997, p. 47.</footnote>

<footnote n="212"><sup>212</sup> *Ibid*.</footnote>
narrative, asserts her own presence within this narrative, and reshapes it into a story that resonates with her audience.

The transformative power of stories is similarly enacted by Senior herself, who argues that ‘the writing coming out of [the oral] tradition must not only engage with the tradition, but must build on it’<fnref n="213" />. In the same paper, the writer insists on the fact that her short fiction goes beyond oral storytelling through its specific focus on interiority, and more generally, her ability to merge the techniques of oral storytelling with the tools of written literature creates an original, Creolised literary fruit. As a result, it appears that through storytelling, specific voices can become agents in their own (hi)stories. By foregrounding and enacting the art of storytelling, Senior goes beyond the recovery of lost voices; instead, she brings them back to life on the page.

### 3.3. *Presencing the voice(s)*

The question of voice has been the object of many debates in the context of (post)coloniality, as historians, writers, and scholars of the field have wondered how to best give their voice back to historically silenced subjects. This raises several questions: who can speak, and for whom? And *how* to speak? In the 1970s, the Subaltern Studies Group in South Asia endeavoured to create an alternative history from below, which would focus on the subaltern<fnref n="214" /> rather than on the hegemonic voices usually found in historical narratives. However, recovering the voices of the subaltern proves difficult when the methods of historiography are shaped by the dominant classes: as Gayatri Spivak underscored, ‘practical historiographic exigencies will not allow such endorsements to privilege subaltern consciousness’<fnref n="215" />, because the task of research itself is ‘essentialist and taxonomist’<fnref n="216" />, a product of the same ideologies which were used as tools of subjection during colonisation. The reason why the subaltern cannot speak, according to Spivak, is that any attempt to give a voice and a *locus* of agency to the subaltern is mediated by numerous institutions of power and knowledge which decide what can or cannot be said – Spivak heavily borrows from Foucault’s philosophy – as well as logocentric assumptions of

<footnote n="213">²¹³ Senior, Olive. 'Lessons from the Fruit Stand'. *Art. cit.*, p. 42.</footnote>

<footnote n="214">²¹⁴ The term ‘subaltern’ was initially coined by the Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and is opposed to the notion of ‘hegemony’ in his framework. See Liguori, Guido. ‘Le concept de subalterne chez Gramsci’. *Mélanges de l’École française de Rome - Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines*, no. 128-2, 2016, https://journals.openedition.org/mefrim/3002. Accessed 16 May 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="215">²¹⁵ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' *Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, op. cit.*, p. 284.</footnote>

<footnote n="216">²¹⁶ *Ibid.*, pp. 284-85.</footnote>
what constitutes ‘the authenticity of the Other’<fnref n="217" />, inevitably recalling Edward Said’s theory of
the essentialising way in which the West has constructed the hegemonic representations of the
Oriental<fnref n="218" />. Spivak’s own methodology has since been criticised by some scholars – David
Punter, for instance, has pointed out that it is also through the screen of Western theory that
Spivak claims that the subaltern cannot speak<fnref n="219" />. And yet, her argument remains crucial insofar
as it warns us against the dangerous gap of representation created by ‘the first-world intellectual
masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves’<fnref n="220" /> and
who thus tries to convey the impression of an authentic voice which remains but a simulacrum.

Nonetheless, Senior’s insistence on storytelling seems to be a way for her to avoid this
pitfall. Indeed, in doing so, she draws our attention to the voices behind the stories themselves
– not only her own, but first and foremost those of her characters:

> Although I started writing from an early age, I didn't find my own writer's voice until I allowed my characters to speak in their own voice. [...] Once the character is allowed to speak, then everything else that contributes to story—narrative, scene, setting, description, other characters, etc. will automatically fall into place, for speakers do not arrive empty-handed. They bring their entire worlds with them.<fnref n="221" />

The writer, as it appears, is not so much an almighty puppeteer as a soundbox of sorts, letting
other voices resonate instead of (or in addition to) her own – just like the empty, dried out gourd
that is invoked by the community at the beginning of *Gardening in the Tropics* as a musical
instrument which will ‘resound’ to let their voices be heard against its surface (GT 7).
Throughout the collections, Senior clearly showcases her ability to play with voices, from that
of the rural child in ‘A Father Like That’ to that of the transclass socialite in ‘The Country
Cousin’, including a speaking bird in ‘Flying’ and a gossiping woman in ‘Amazon Women’,
among many others. The voices of her characters may overtake the entire narration, as in ‘A
Father Like That’ and ‘Amazon Women’, or they may be included more punctually within the
narration, through direct or indirect speech. On the one hand, Senior’s attention to the various
kinds of voices which coexist in the Caribbean allows her to avoid any essentialist,
homogenising representation of what would be a representative Caribbean voice; instead, she
foregrounds the fact that each character’s way of speaking is influenced by their social status,

<footnote n="217">217 *Ibid.*, p. 294.</footnote>

<footnote n="218">218 Said, Edward. *Orientalism. Op. cit.*</footnote>

<footnote n="219">219 Punter, David. *Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order*. Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="220">220 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ *Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, op. cit.*, p. 292.</footnote>

<footnote n="221">²²¹ Senior, Olive. 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su'. *Art. cit.*, p. 39.</footnote>
but also the circumstances in which they speak, which may lead them to speak differently over
the course of a single story. For instance, in 'The Country Cousin', Mrs. Fennell switches
between Standard English, which she uses with the Fennell family whom she esteems, and
Jamaican Creole, to which she resorts behind closed doors to talk to the servants working
around the house. Her speech is therefore a perfect example of the sociological model of the
Creole continuum, theorised by linguist David DeCamp as a linguistic spectrum oscillating
between the 'educated standard' and 'bush talk'<fnref n="222" />. In 'The Goodness of My Heart', however,
the two ends of this Creole linguistic spectrum are represented by different characters, making
the distinction even more explicit. Mrs. Bailiff, the respectable housemistress and widow,
speaks in Standard English, whereas the destitute women who have to surrender their children
to her, for want of money to raise them, use Creole, as is illustrated in the following extract:

"Who is this little child," she asked the bigger girl who was now so
cowed she was whimpering.
"Is Miss Mirrie daughter, mam."
"You're her child too?"
"No, mam, is mi anty."
"And who is the child's father?"
"Me doan know mam."

(PT 63)

This back-and-forth dialogue between the two women testifies to the author's ear for the nuances of Jamaican speech and her subsequent capacity to put forward a realistic portrayal of her community, without letting her own voice overtake the reality of her characters – an ability which she developed through her intimate knowledge of what she calls ‘the two Jamaicas’<fnref n="223" />, from the rural Jamaica of her childhood to the more urban, developed areas which she later got to know in adulthood, at university and later on as a writer.

Yet, besides contributing to the social realism of her work, Senior's careful representation
of the Jamaican linguistic landscape also endows her own literary scape with a distinctly oral
quality which Hyacinth Simpson has described as an 'oral poetics'<fnref n="224" />. This poetics is most
noticeable when characters take over the narration in her short fiction, as is the case in 'A Father
Like That'. Reema's narration is indeed very musical in its lack of punctuation, endowing the

<footnote n="222">²²² DeCamp, David. 'Toward a Generative Analysis of a Post-Creole Continuum'. *Pidginization and Creolization of Languages*, edited by Dell Hymes, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 350.</footnote>

<footnote n="223">²²³ See *In Conversation with Olive Senior, Poet Laureate of Jamaica 2021-2024*. 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjA9tYK_Bao, 4'04" for Senior's description of the 'two Jamaicas' she has experienced.</footnote>

<footnote n="224">²²⁴ Simpson, Hyacinth. "'Voicing the Text': The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior's Short Fiction". *Art. cit.*</footnote>
narrative with a rapid, breathless rhythm, and it is also ripe with grammatical Creole inflections,
as the following sentence illustrates: ‘*I paying* no attention to what she is saying for *I passing*
through a part of the world *I never see* before’ (PT 34, my emphases). The tense levelling of the
past perfect, as well as the omission of auxiliaries, are clear markers of the geographic and
social situation of the protagonist and create a striking effect of presence, as readers are
therefore constantly reminded of the voice behind the story. Standard English, on the other
hand, would act as a transparent screen, since it is not as clearly associated with a specific place
or demographic and has rather become the expected norm in the literature of the English-
speaking world – no doubt because of the long-lasting influence of language-related politics
across the Empire, making Standard English the norm for written formats, as well as the
historical imposition of the English literary canon in school syllabi across the Empire, which
implicitly posited British English as the literary standard.

As a matter of fact, Senior’s use of non-standard English speaks to wider debates in the
Caribbean and wider postcolonial literary world. Language was indeed one of the tools with
which colonised peoples were subsumed into the colonial Empires, and the fact that English,
Spanish, and French should remain some of the most spoken languages in the world today<fnref n="225" />
constitutes yet another haunting trace of past colonial endeavours. Some postcolonial writers
thus argued against using the language of the coloniser: such was the case of Kenyan writer
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who bid his ‘farewell to English’<fnref n="226" /> in *Decolonising the Mind* and
encouraged other African writers to follow suit, arguing that writing in foreign languages
amounted to ‘continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit’ which was already being
established by ‘the neo-colonial economic and political relationship [of African countries] to
Euro-America’<fnref n="227" />. However, the ambition to completely reject English in favour of more
indigenous linguistic roots proved complicated in the Caribbean, where the multiple cultural
encounters between Indigenous, African and European peoples and languages have resulted in
the creation of composite Creoles, which can no longer be simply dismantled into their various
parts. This is why the West Indian scholar and poet Kamau Brathwaite coined the phrase ‘nation
language’ to define ‘the language which is influenced very strongly by the African model’<fnref n="228" />.

<footnote n="225">²²⁵ According to a 2022 study conducted by the CIA, English ranks first in the list of most spoken languages and is spoken by 18.8% of the world's population, while Spanish and French respectively come at the 4th and 5th ranks with 6.9% and 3.4% of speakers around the globe. 'World'. *The World Factbook*, Central Intelligence Agency. CIA.gov, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/world/#people-and-society. Accessed 16 May 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="226">²²⁶ wa Thiong'o, Ngũgĩ. *Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature*. James Currey Ltd, 1986, p. xiv.</footnote>

<footnote n="227">²²⁷ *Ibid*., p. 26.</footnote>

<footnote n="228">²²⁸ Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. *History of the Voice*. 1984. Villiers Publications, 1995, p. 13.</footnote>
Despite its mainly English lexical features, nation language is more indigenous to the Caribbean experience ‘in its contours, its rhythm and timbre, its sound explosion’<fnref n="229" /> and is therefore more adequate to properly represent the Caribbean since, as Brathwaite poetically summarises, ‘[t]he hurricane does not roar in pentameters’<fnref n="230" />.

Senior’s oral poetics is thus linked to Brathwaite’s idea of nation language and denotes a clear ambition not only to represent, but to *presence* the voices of her community by turning their existence into the focal point of her writing. Presence, or the act of presencing<fnref n="231" />, is defined by Gail Lewis as an ‘epistemological and ontological praxis of emergence based on felt connection’<fnref n="232" />: poetics thus meets *poiesis*<fnref n="233" />, just as the words on the page become almost embodied. The text constantly confronts us with the sounds and rhythms of Jamaican speech, making the characters’ voices almost palpable. The sounds create a connection between the stories in the texts – and their storytellers, by extension – and the readers, who cannot ignore the presence of these voices. Consequently, this leads me to argue that Senior goes against Spivak’s conclusion, as she does make subaltern voices speak within her pages. Of course, the transcription of orality into a written format as well as the creative input of the author necessarily qualify this statement, as the voices which Senior portrays in her books are, by essence, literary artifices. Nonetheless, the author’s willingness to recreate the intricacies of the spoken speech of her community remains a poetic feat, as well as a powerful ethical and political act since through her oral poetics, subaltern voices can make themselves *heard* – both literally and metaphorically. The (re)creation of voices on the page epitomises the shift from remembrance to creation in Senior’s writing, as it shows how the literary medium can be used both to denounce the historical silencing of subaltern voices and to endow these voices with newfound aliveness through poetic tools.

<footnote n="229">²²⁹ *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="230">²³⁰ *Ibid.*, p. 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="231">²³¹ The notion of presencing as an ethical and political tool first emerged in the field of Indigenous studies. For instance, the Autochthonous Canadian artist and scholar Leanne Simpson studied the way in which meaning, in the Indigenous world, is created through an embodied engagement with the palpable environment and the spirit world. See Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. *Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence*. ARP Books, 2011. Nonetheless, it has since been applied to other fields: Gail Lewis, for example, has used it in the context of Black feminism.</footnote>

<footnote n="232">²³² Lewis, Gail. 'Questions of Presence'. *Feminist Review*, vol. 117, no. 1, Nov. 2017, p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="233">²³³ Even though the two words are often assimilated, *poiesis* contains a dimension of praxis, as it is linked to the act of poetical creation itself.</footnote>
All this goes to show that Senior’s literary gardening effectively becomes a catalyst of creation, mirroring the ongoing process of Creole identity (re)formation in the Caribbean. The major creation of Senior’s texts seems to be the voices emerging from them, diverse and unapologetically present, allowing readers to hear their music across the literary medium. Therefore, it appears that unearthing does not simply correspond to the representation of hidden stories, but to their re-presentation or presencing – that is to say, the assertion and re-creation of their presence as an inalienable fact. Yet, presencing these voices in such a way has wider consequences, as they gain agency through their materiality and can thus destabilise other narratives in their turn.

* * *
Part Three:
Remapping the Garden

By creating an empowering narrative of Caribbean identity, asserting its aliveness and presence across seemingly unreconcilable fractures, Olive Senior effectively enacts the shift from islandness to ‘I-landness’, identified by M. NourbeSe Philip as the transition between the conception of an island passively shaped by exterior forces to an island which can be reappropriated, from the inside, by its own subjects<fnref n="234" />. This recovered subjectivity, which NourbeSe Philip underlines through the typographical emphasis on the first-person pronoun, corresponds to the assertion of an ‘I’ which has historically been erased and othered by colonial discourse – and this assertion, in Senior’s collections, is enacted through the recreation of numerous voices on the page. Nonetheless, while it is true that the recovery of usually invisible subjectivities allows counter-discourses to resurface, several critics have stressed the need to be wary of oppositional thinking: quoting Susheila Nasta, Evelyn O’Callaghan has indeed asserted that ‘any theoretical approach to the writing needs to go *beyond* the limited notion of a “literature of opposition” set up by such dialectics “and make space for the expression of a “multiplicity of perspectives”””<fnref n="235" />. Recovering voices does not merely amount to ‘writing back’, but it paves the way for a more profound questioning of the oppositional systems which have othered and buried those voices in the first place.

This is why the third part of my analysis will focus on the ways in which Senior’s excavation of marginalised voices allows her to unsettle the very dichotomies between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘coloniser’ and ‘colonised’, or ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ which underpin (neo)colonial discourse. Yet, I will also endeavour to show that, once again, Senior does not stop at deconstruction but also gestures towards a more healing, constructive dynamic, by mapping out other, more sustainable ways of thinking about alterity, including both the human and the nonhuman. The literary garden of the author by no means resembles the Garden of Eden or European botanical gardens, built through the exclusion of an unwanted ‘other’; instead, it becomes a space of care and inclusion where each being has its own place – whether it be beneath or above the surface.

<footnote n="234">234 NourbeSe Philip, M. ‘A Piece of Land Surrounded’. *Writing It Down for James*, op. cit., p. 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="235">²³⁵ Nasta, Susheila. *Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia*. Rutgers University Press, 1992, p. xvi, quoted in O’Callaghan, Evelyn. *Woman Version*. St. Martin’s Press, 1993, p. 9, emphasis in the original.</footnote>
# 1. Un/settling deep-rooted narratives

## 1.1. Uprooting the myth of the single story

The dynamic of unearthing which underlies Senior’s writing is oriented towards the emergence of multiplicity. Just as the rhizome is privileged over the single root in order to reclaim a sense of heritage for the peoples of the Caribbean, the various voices which crop up throughout the collections make for a polyphonous counter-archive, undermining the univocity of Western archives. This emphasis on multiplicity over unicity, which, as we have seen, is a recurring poetic motif in Senior’s works, is reminiscent of the philosophy of Édouard Glissant, who argues that '[t]he single root kills what surrounds it' whereas ‘identity-relation authorises infinitely’<fnref n="236" />. Unicity, in that sense, becomes deathly, and this statement can also be applied to stories. Indeed, in a now famous TED talk, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns us against what she calls ‘the danger of a single story’, arguing that

> [...] it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.<fnref n="237" />

Adichie then goes on to describe the damaging consequences of the ‘single story of Africa’, a continent which is often portrayed as monolithically derelict in the West<fnref n="238" /> even though it encompasses many different situations, just like any other place – and the same analysis can be applied to the Caribbean. Throughout its history, the region has indeed often been reduced to such fossilising ‘single stories’, whether it be that of Columbus, who portrayed it as an Eldorado inhabited by ‘naked people [...] very deficient in everything’<fnref n="239" />, or more contemporary representations of a glossy tourist paradise which is nonetheless best kept at a distance. The distancing purpose of this homogenising conception inherited from the colonial era is

<footnote n="236">²³⁶ Glissant, Édouard. *La cohée du lamentin. Op. cit.*, p. 38.</footnote>

<footnote n="237">²³⁷ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. *The Danger of a Single Story* | TED. 2009. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg, 13'46". Accessed 23 May 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="238">²³⁸ One may, for instance, recall the infamous 1962 essay *L'Afrique noire est mal partie* (Éditions du Seuil, 1962), in which French engineer and politician René Dumont portrays Africa as stricken by poverty and corruption and still dependent on Europe in the wake of decolonisation. More recently, still in the French-speaking world, we may also refer to the Dakar address given by Nicolas Sarkozy on 26 July 2007, aiming at mending the relations between France and the African continent. While the former French president officially denounced slavery as a crime against humanity, he also denied the full responsibility of France for what he called ‘the tragedy of Africa’ (‘*le drame de l’Afrique*’) – an idea which is in keeping with Adichie’s notion of the ‘single story of Africa’. To him, this ‘tragedy’ was because the African man himself ‘has not fully entered into history’ (‘*l’homme africain n’est pas assez entré dans l’histoire*’). See *Le discours de Dakar de Nicolas Sarkozy*. 9 Nov. 2007. Le Monde, https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2007/11/09/le-discours-de-dakar_976786_3212.html. Accessed 6 June 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="239">²³⁹ Columbus, Christopher. *Journal*. Translated by Cecil Jane, Bonanza Books, 1989, p. 23.</footnote>
exemplified by a saying attributed to the former French president Charles de Gaulle who, during a trip to Martinique in 1964, allegedly described the islands as 'dust specks on the sea'<fnref n="240" />, barely noticeable yet profitable enough from an economic perspective<fnref n="241" /> to be conveniently integrated into the French territory during decolonisation. Moreover, one could argue that even more well-meaning approaches replicate this tendency towards homogenisation: in the academic field, for instance, even the 'Caribbean studies' category is questionable, as it imposes a single label onto many different regions – mostly islands, but also continental territories – which certainly share common experiences but cannot simply be assimilated to one another either<fnref n="242" />.

However, *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain Tree* both undermine the possibility of casting one single definitive story onto the Caribbean – and onto anyone, for that matter – by putting forward a polyphonous narrative. Each story, each poem corresponds to one story of the region, and the juxtaposition of all these fragments creates a kaleidoscope of sorts where different perspectives sometimes complete and enrich one another but can also clash and overlap. For instance, each collection opens on a somewhat pessimistic view of Jamaica, seemingly delineating a single story of the island from the very first pages, but this initial portrayal is then qualified by the rest of the collections. The short story 'The Pain Tree' dramatises the remaining tensions between black and white Creoles in post-Independence Jamaica, a story which is not new – it was already widely addressed by Jean Rhys, whose work became part of the literary canon in the West<fnref n="243" /> – and which does point to an ongoing reality in the region<fnref n="244" />. Likewise, the poem 'Meditation on Yellow' which opens the 'Travellers' Tales'

<footnote n="240">²⁴⁰ This saying recurs in Glissant’s *Caribbean Discourse* (op. cit., see opening citations, p. xxxix, and p. 261) and is also included as an epigraph in Puri, Shalini. *The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity*. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 44.</footnote>

<footnote n="241">²⁴¹ It is thanks to its overseas territories that France currently enjoys the largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the world, before the United States of America.</footnote>

<footnote n="242">²⁴² The most striking evidence of this is the case of Haiti, where a slave revolt led to the independence of the island from French rule in 1804. Thus, even though the island was subject to colonisation and slavery like the rest of the French Caribbean, its history starkly differs from that of Martinique and Guadeloupe, which were integrated into overseas France as overseas departments (*départements d'outre-mer*) in 1946 during the decolonisation era, whereas Haiti remains an independent country.</footnote>

<footnote n="243">²⁴³ *Wide Sargasso Sea* (op. cit.) was included in the Big Jubilee Read, a list of 70 books written by authors from the Commonwealth, published in 2022 on the occasion of the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.</footnote>

<footnote n="244">²⁴⁴ This tension is prevalent in the literary sphere. Kamau Brathwaite was notoriously critical of white Creole authors who, according to him, ‘have separated themselves by too wide a gulf and have contributed too little culturally, as a group’ to associate themselves with the Caribbean (*Contradictory Omens. Op. cit.*, p. 38). More recently, the white Creole author Monique Roffey, from Trinidad, was called a ‘latter day Columbus’ by several authors of the region after she published a (now deleted) post on the *Waterstones* website aiming at giving British readers an overview of new Caribbean literature. See Lucien, Vladimir. ‘Monique Roffey’s Discovery of Caribbean Literature’. *Caribbeanlitlime*, 23 July 2014, https://caribbeanlitlime.wordpress.com/2014/07/23/monique-roffeys-discovery-of-caribbean-literature/.</footnote>

<footnote>Accessed 24 May 2025.</footnote>
section in the poetry collection sheds light on similar conflicts between the inhabitants of the
island and travelling foreigners – a phenomenon which, once again, hints at an actual reality,
but which also perpetuates the single story of an island stricken by its own past. Nonetheless,
in each case, this first impression is qualified by the following stories and poems which tell a
different story of the region. This is most striking in the poetry collection, which can include a
wider variety of points of view due to the shorter format of the poems: for instance, ‘Moonshine
Dolly’ and ‘Cat’s Cradle’ centre on traditional children’s games in the Caribbean, while the
speaker in ‘Tropic Love’ explains how one can overhear poetry in even the most unsuspecting
street corner on the island, and these three poems – among others – put forward a more positive
representation of Jamaica. In the short story collection, it is mostly through punctual touches of
humour that the author attenuates her portrayal of Jamaican society: for example, at the end of
‘The Goodness of my Heart’, we learn that Mrs. Bailiff has finally decided to ‘use up the
children’s inheritance like rejuvenation cream’ after decades of charity work and selflessness
(PT 79), with the unexpected simile bringing the story to a close on a comical note. Besides, in
nearly all the short stories, the emphasis on human connection allows Senior to foreground the
fact that there is more to the islands than their postcolonial hauntings. It thus appears that putting
forward a multilayered representation of the Caribbean demands that the writer avoids both
romanticisation and miserabilism – and it is by shedding light on the ambivalence of the region
that Senior avoids the pitfall of the single story and can thus give her subjects a form of ‘dignity’
within her stories and poems, to quote Adichie.

Conversely, this multiplicity of stories sheds light on the inadequacy and the violence of the
single story itself, which, as it appears, is but a partial representation, and not the objective truth
it may seem or claim to be. This partiality becomes especially problematic when the single story
is imposed as an authoritative, definitive discourse: as Adichie underscores, '[p]ower is the
ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that
person'<fnref n="245" />. This applies to history, which, under the appearance of an objective discourse about
real events, is a form of story too: indeed, Hayden V. White has demonstrated that the work of
historians corresponds to an emplotment – or storying – of elements into a narrative form, which
is made to convey a specific meaning depending on the ideology behind it<fnref n="246" />. This idea is

<footnote n="245">²⁴⁵ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. *The Danger of a Single Story* | TED. 2009. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg, 10'13".</footnote>

<footnote n="246">²⁴⁶ According to Hayden, history is ‘a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them’. White, Hayden V. *Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe*. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, p. 3.</footnote>
similarly suggested by the speaker in 'Amazon Women', who asserts, after relating the tale of Toeyza and the Amazons, that 'the rest (as they say) is history' (GT 97). While the idiom 'the rest is history' usually means that a story does not even need to be told because it has already entered the realm of 'history' and is therefore supposedly universally known, the authorial intrusion which grammatically interrupts the sentence also metaphorically unsettles the apparently finite linearity of the march of history. Not only does this suggest that something else needs to be added, but it also points to the agency of an unidentifiable 'they' in the construction of history, which highlights the fact that history is not an objective, almost transparent rendition of past events but well and truly an emplotted narrative – to borrow Hayden White's term – and the product of a specific subjectivity, which has nonetheless been imposed as the single story of humanity. While the storyteller goes on to add her own comments and interpretations to the single story of the Amazon women, several other voices in the collections also point out the inadequacy of hegemonic narratives, such as Lorraine in 'The Pain Tree' who resents the 'condensed' version of history which has been passed on in her family (PT 7), or the speaker in 'Seeing the light' who points out that the settlers' 'effort to bring light' onto the islands – whether it be the symbolic light of God or the light which literally overtakes the landscapes which are being deforested by the settlers – might have been recorded under another name in their 'chronicles', such as '[c]onquista' or '[e]vangelismo' (GT 95). The single story, as a result, emerges as a form of symbolic violence – and this is also why putting forward a single story of the Caribbean as a maritime place is ultimately insufficient since, as the poems and stories illustrate, this does not represent the reality of all Caribbean individuals. The collections indeed depict multiple situations in which the land plays an important part in the characters' lives, whether it be women like YaYa in 'Flying', the old lady in 'The Immovable Tenant', Katie's grandmother in 'Lollipop', or the characters who travel abroad and still return to the islands, such as Boy in 'Coal' or even the author herself, who relates one of her trips to Barbados in the poem 'Guava/2'. The need to consider both maritime routes and terrestrial roots to apprehend the insular reality has similarly been borne out by Elizabeth DeLoughrey<fnref n="247" />, whose approach to the Caribbean and Pacific landscapes stands out as a more adequate way to tackle the intrinsically dialectic reality of the archipelago, as a geological formation defined both by the ocean and the islands which emerge from it.

All this sheds light on the fact that the single story is both a myth and a form of violence, for it can never encompass the complexities of the landscape nor its inhabitants, in the

<footnote n="247">²⁴⁷ DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. *Routes and Roots. Op. cit.*</footnote>
Caribbean as in any other part of the world. By putting forward a multiplicity of voices and stories, Olive Senior does not so much intend to create another single story of the region as she encourages her readers to question the very possibility for a single story to exist in the first place. The two collections do not offer definitive answers or representations; instead, they expound a plurality of possible stories, none of them taking over the others, which unsettles the very discursive and epistemological foundations of the myth of the single story.

## 1.2. *A poetics of the in-between*

The two collections hinge on a poetics of the in-between which constantly confronts the readers with the impossibility to find definitive answers, leaving space for doubt and uncertainty instead. This is due, in part, to the generic choices of the author, as the short story and the poem both lack the totalising – almost totalitarian – ambition of exhaustivity which can be found in the nineteenth-century novel, for instance: one can think of Balzac who aimed to become the secretary of human history in his *Human Comedy*<fnref n="248" />, or, in the Anglophone world, of novels such as Emily Brontë's *Wuthering Heights*<fnref n="249" />, which follows the story of the characters across two generations, or the *Bildungsromane* written by Charles Dickens, including *Oliver Twist*<fnref n="250" /> and *David Copperfield*<fnref n="251" />, which depict the formative years of their protagonists against a realistic backdrop of socioeconomic struggle in early-nineteenth-century England. However, the brevity which characterises short fiction and poetry allows for no such exhaustivity, and Senior has commented on her use of short fiction as follows: 'I can say that I see short fiction, first of all, as a confession that I do not have the complete picture'<fnref n="252" />. Indeed, short fiction has often been characterised by its ability to make use of the implicit<fnref n="253" /> through specific narrative

<footnote n="248">²⁴⁸ ‘La Société française allait être l’historien, je ne devais être que le secrétaire. En dressant l’inventaire des vices et des vertus, en rassemblant les principaux faits des passions, en peignant les caractères, en choisissant les événements principaux de la Société, en composant des types par la réunion des traits de plusieurs caractères homogènes, peut-être pouvais-je arriver à écrire l’histoire oubliée par tant d’historiens, celle des mœurs.’ de Balzac, Honoré. ‘Avant-propos à La Comédie Humaine’. Œuvres complètes de H. de Balzac, vol. 1, Éditions Houssiaux, 1855, p. 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="249">²⁴⁹ Brontë, Emily. *Wuthering Heights*. 1847. Edited by Alexandra Lewis, 5th Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.</footnote>

<footnote n="250">²⁵⁰ Dickens, Charles. *Oliver Twist*. 1838. Penguin, 2009.</footnote>

<footnote n="251">²⁵¹ Dickens, Charles. *David Copperfield*. 1850. Penguin, 2024.</footnote>

<footnote n="252">²⁵² Senior, Olive. ‘Lessons From the Fruit Stand’. *Art. cit.*, p. 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="253">²⁵³ Frank O’Connor argued against the definition of the short story through criteria of length, as shortness is relative. According to him, brevity is particularly characterised by the narrative devices used by the writer, to create an effect of concentration. See O’Connor, Frank. *The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story*. 1963. Harper & Row, 1985, pp. 16–20.</footnote>
techniques in order to create what Baudelaire called the ‘totality of effect’<fnref n="254" />, in which both the words on the page and the unsaid come together to create powerful meaning. This is particularly noticeable in the short story ‘Moonlight’, which is barely three-pages long and heavily relies on the implicit in order to convey a haunting impression to the reader, mirroring the growing unease of the young narrator who witnesses her world crumble in front of her as she discovers that her father regularly visits the maid of the house at night. What is striking in this short story is that the main event in the narration is never explicitly named – instead, both the narrator and the readers have to infer what happens through the narrator’s partial point of view, as is illustrated by the following extract:

> I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a man's voice inside and Dorleen's voice, saying "No. No," then the man's voice again. I stood still, listening. And I heard the voice again. His voice. My father's. Speaking rough, in a way he never spoke to me or my mother. What was he doing in Dorleen's room? I closed my eyes and held my breath too long. I felt the world turning upside down.

*(PT 18-19)*

This passage relates the moment when the narrator discovers what is going on for the first time. She lets the readers know that it is her father's voice but does not exactly seem to grasp what is happening, hence the question, 'What was he doing in Dorleen's room?'. Readers may infer that the father is actually raping the maid, which would account for Dorleen's double expression of refusal; and yet, the answer to the narrator's question remains left in the air. The weight of the unsaid then seems to grow more and more intense as the story unfolds, since the narrator's mother eventually announces that Dorleen is pregnant and that she 'know[s] who the father is' because '[t]he dog never barked', implying that she knows her husband is the culprit because the family dog only ever barks at strangers (PT 20) – but once again, nothing is said aloud. This story epitomises Senior's 'confession' and exemplifies how the author can deliberately play with a sense of void. As for the poems, which are even shorter than the stories, they also testify to the author's reluctance to tell an exhaustive story as they only allow for fleeting glimpses into an event or a landscape. For instance, the poem 'Sun and Moon' (GT 71), which relates a myth explaining the opposition between sun and moon, is a case in point: not only is it extremely short, but each line is made of only one word, with the exception of 'to play' and 'to run', which creates a very peculiar, vertical reading experience in which the typographical blank surrounding the text seems to overshadow the words themselves. The extreme brevity of the

<footnote n="254">²⁵⁴ Baudelaire, Charles. 'New Notes on Edgar Poe'. 1857. *Baudelaire As a Literary Critic: Selected Essays*, translated by Lois Boe Hyslop and Francis E. Hyslop, Jr., The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1964, p. 128.</footnote>
poem, nonetheless, does not deprive it of meaning; in fact, the almost overbearing presence of rhymes – between ‘desire’ and ‘fire’, ‘Sun’ and ‘run’, as well as in the near entirety of the last stanza, ‘Let’s / pray / they / stay / that / way’ – endows each word with an unsettling sonic weight and makes the poem sound like an incantation. As a result, the warning formulated by the speaker at the end becomes oddly threatening, as though the equilibrium between the two celestial bodies could be ruptured at any second. These two examples are extreme cases of brevity, but the implicit is part of all the poems and stories, in one way or another. This demonstrates that, from a generic perspective, Senior’s poetry and short fiction are necessarily geared towards a form of uncertainty.

Nevertheless, this inability to tell the entire story is not considered as a failure but is rather cultivated by the author, whose thematic and poetic choices sometimes seem to actively shed light on a sense of ambivalence. This is especially noticeable in the very last poem of *Gardening in the Tropics*, entitled ‘Guédé: Lord of the Dead’ (GT 136). In Haitian Vodou, the Gede (or *Guédé* in French) are the family of deities ruling over the dead, and the poem gives voice to one of them. At first glance, it may seem logical to bring the collection to a close with a figure of mortality, and therefore – one may think – of finality; and yet, it quickly appears that this ‘lord of the dead’ is no Grim Reaper and subverts all the expectations a Western reader might have. To begin with, the Guédé is personified and wears ‘top hat and tails, dark glasses on [his] face, puffing big Havana’. This description corresponds to traditional representations of the Vodou spirit of the dead<fnref n="255" />; yet, traditional as it may be, the personification of the deity conveys an impression of uncertainty as the Guédé seems to be in-between the worlds of the living and the dead, as both a spirit and a hat-wearing, Havana-smoking man. This ambiguity is reinforced by the assertion ‘[y]ou think I’m just a trickster’, through which the spirit associates himself with the archetypal figure of the trickster – an idea which is further sustained by the mention of ‘the sign of the crossroads’ at the beginning of the poem, which evokes Eshu, spirit of crossroads in Yoruba religion and trickster god<fnref n="256" />. Tricksters are present in many cultures<fnref n="257" /> and embody a form of liminality as they are known to regularly cross boundaries – whether these boundaries be geographic, ontological or symbolic. In our case, the ‘lord of the dead’ does not bring the collection to a close on a clear-cut ending but on a looming, liminal sense of

<footnote n="255">²⁵⁵ In popular culture, it also inspired the character design of Doctor Facilier, the evil witchcraft doctor who turns Prince Naveen into a frog in Disney’s animation picture *The Princess and the Frog* (directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2009).</footnote>

<footnote n="256">²⁵⁶ See Beier, Ulli. *Yoruba Myths*. Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 55-58.</footnote>

<footnote n="257">²⁵⁷ One can think of Brer Rabbit in African American folklore, Anansi in West African folklore, Odysseus in the *Odyssey...*</footnote>
uncertainty as he threatens readers of the possibility of his visit, cunningly encouraging us to
'pray' that he 'don't get more hungry than that / this very night'. The Guédé may get 'hungry'
that night and come for us, or he may let us live – but it all depends on what he fancies. The
ambivalence which pervades the last poem of the poetry collection thus seems to stand as a
metaphor for Senior's refusal to give clearly bounded stories with definite endings to her
readers. The same idea is suggested in the short story collection but through a more metatextual
way, as several storyteller figures prove unreliable: for instance, in 'Coal', Doll recalls her
grandfather telling her a story about Queen Victoria, who allegedly roared 'Let my people go'
to the plantation owners and thereby effectively put an end to slavery in the British colonies
(PT 45). However, such a sight of the famously austere head of the British Empire co-opting an
African American spiritual is hardly believable, and it thus calls into question the veracity of
Doll's grandfather's stories – and of stories in general.

By intentionally making space for uncertainty within the texts, Senior draws our attention
to the craft behind her work and simultaneously sheds light on the fact that all forms of
discourse, whether they be literary or scientific, are the product of an agency which is all but
transparent and transcendental – just as the stories of her storytellers may or may not be
completely true to reality. The idea of discourse as inherently constructed, and therefore
subjective and partial, was similarly borne out by Mikhail Bakhtin, according to whom all
languages were not unitary but corresponded to the stratification of several belief systems<fnref n="258" />,
as well as Donna Haraway, who, in the footsteps of Foucault, has argued that knowledge is
necessarily situated<fnref n="259" />, and that objectivity thus becomes a myth, as sciences and discourses of
all kinds are always biased by several factors – masculinity, in Haraway’s case. Nonetheless,
colonial discourse could not justify its own ideology without positing itself as objective and
transcendental: if the (soon-to-be) colonised ‘other’ is not truly different and dangerous, then
its subjection to the Western ‘self’ is no longer justified. Sylvia Wynter has indeed demonstrated
that fifteenth-century Western humanism hinged on a dichotomy between a normative, rational,
European subject (Man1) and natural, chaotic, racialised others (Man2)<fnref n="260" />. In similar fashion,
Edward Said has analysed the ways in which knowledge of the Orient, in the West, was

<footnote n="258">258 Bakhtin, Mikhail. *Discourse in the Novel*. 1975. Translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press, 1982, p. 288.</footnote>

<footnote n="259">259 Haraway, Donna. 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'. *Feminist Studies*, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–99.</footnote>

<footnote n="260">260 The distinction between Man1 and Man2 is established throughout Wynter's entire body of work. See in particular Wynter, Sylvia. 'Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument'. *CR: The New Centennial Review*, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.</footnote>
predicated upon arbitrary binaries between the white 'self' and the Oriental 'other', which were
not objective but the product of situated assumptions, to use Haraway's terminology - but this
dichotomous conception was promoted as and believed in as though it corresponded to
objective facts: '[k]nowledge of the Orient, because generated out of strength, in a sense *creates*
the Orient, the Oriental, and his world'<fnref n="261" />, Said writes. While Said's analysis focuses on the
nineteenth- and twentieth-century perceptions of the Middle East, the same thing can be said
about any form of knowledge about the colonised world produced by the West, hinging on
similar black-and-white dichotomies between coloniser and colonised or Western and non-
Western subjects. This ideological pillar of colonialism points to the root of the epistemological
and ontological *construction* of colonised subjects as 'other' - and their subsequent invisibility
in colonial discourse and hegemonic representations.

This is why Senior’s choice to put forward a poetics of the in-between is significant, as the
shiftiness of meaning it unveils (or unearths), in turn, sheds light on the arbitrariness of
discourse. While this may lead to a form of unsettling instability, it also opens the possibility
for several discourses to coexist and it allows the author to create space within seemingly
fossilised, transcendental narratives, thereby opening up their seemingly rigid boundaries to
welcome the presence of the very subjects which these boundaries have othered.

1.3. *Making space for other plots*

As a postcolonial writer, Senior does more than reveal and deconstruct the foundations of
the single story. Just as the gardener unearths the weeds to plant new seeds in a healthier soil,
the author, too, uses her questioning of the boundaries of stories and discourse as a way to lay
the groundwork for the construction of new stories in which the colonial dichotomy between
‘self’ and ‘other’ is blurred in order to welcome new voices. This does not mean, for all that,
that the Caribbean (post)colonial subjects are blindly assimilated into the Western single stories
– indeed, such an assimilation would echo the colonial utopia of unproblematic hybridity
described by Shalini Puri<fnref n="262" />, and would therefore perpetuate another form of symbolic erasure.
In her two collections, Senior does not silence the various forms of violence which have
inevitably created a drift between the colonising ‘self’ and the colonial ‘other’, but she asserts

<footnote n="261">261 Said, Edward. *Orientalism*. *Op. cit.*, p. 40, emphasis in the original.</footnote>

<footnote n="262">²⁶² Puri argues that colonial manifestos of hybridity testify to a utopian 'desire for vital and harmonious community'. Puri, Shalini. *The Caribbean Postcolonial*. *Op. cit.*, p. 83.</footnote>
the presence of those ‘others’ *within* the homogenising, single stories of humanity which have been put forward by hegemonic Western voices.

One of the ways she does this, as we have seen, is by creating a new archive. Senior’s archive of Caribbean history does not erase the long-lasting impact of the white settlers on the region, from the initial 1492 discovery depicted in ‘Meditation on Yellow’ to the remains of their presence embodied by Lorraine and her family in ‘The Pain Tree’, but which also rewrites and reasserts the presence of other voices within the historical narrative. This includes the presence of the Indigenous ‘desaparecidos’<fnref n="263" /> (GT 85), as well as the ‘wild Indians’ who survived the repression of the settlers (GT 107), the maroons who fled the plantations, ‘the six million Africans torn from their homes and brought to the New World as slaves’ (PT 105). This also includes all the silent (or silenced) voices which are usually not deemed important enough to be integrated into the grand narrative of humanity: the stowaway in the poem of the same name, the immigrant child in ‘Lollipop’, the young orphan in ‘A Father Like That’, the elderly woman in ‘The Immovable Tenant’ are all given the same platform of expression within the literary medium. On the one hand, the inclusion of their stories, combined with the author’s specific attention to voice, testifies to the conclusion drawn by Jamaican sociologist and writer Erna Brodber, who, in her attempt to write a social history of the Caribbean, emphasised the need to take into account the oral sources which can be found among the common people<fnref n="264" />, as these stories from below may reveal a very different perception of history from the one delineated from above by the written narrative<fnref n="265" />. Senior’s attention to small, unheard voices enables her to build a more diverse, and arguably more authentic archive of Jamaica. On the other hand, it is significant that the author should allow all these stories, voices, and characters to coexist side by side within the collections without letting one take over the others, as it foregrounds a sense of equality between all of them – an equality which has, of course, not always been at play throughout the many physical and cultural encounters which have marked the history of the Caribbean. This aspect bears both poetic and political implications: not only

<footnote n="263">263 It is significant that Senior should include the term in Spanish in addition to its English translation, as it firstly refers to the Argentinian victims of the *guerra sucia* between 1976 and 1983 under General Videla’s military dictatorship and thus inscribes the Taíno genocide within a wider history of violence through forced disappearance.</footnote>

<footnote n="264">264 Brodber, Erna. ‘Oral Sources and the Creation of a Social History of the Caribbean’. *Jamaica Journal*, vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 2–11.</footnote>

<footnote n="265">265 Brodber, Erna. ‘Oral History and the Other Perspective’. *Caribbean Quarterly*, vol. 59, no. 1, 2013, pp. 20–30. In this article, Brodber relates that for a study which she conducted in the 1970s, she asked ninety people born around 1900 about their memories from the previous decades. To her surprise, the social revolts of 1938 bore little importance in the testimonies, even though it is usually marked as a turning point in the country’s history by historians. Instead, the people she interviewed mostly talked about the hurricanes which struck Jamaica throughout the century, which points to a discrepancy between foreign versus insider perceptions of history.</footnote>
does it allow Senior to embrace a truly Creolised poetics, according to Édouard Glissant's definition of Creolisation as a process requiring equality between the different parts of the cultural encounter<fnref n="266" />, but it also enables her to instil a sense of equality within her own archive, which is a powerful political act since, as we have seen, archives usually hinge on a form of domiciliation which creates a politics of inequality between the voices which are included in the archives and those which are deemed insignificant.

Moreover, besides the historical dimension of Senior's work, the author's ambition to create an inclusive literary space also helps her unsettle the narrative of the Anthropocene. The notion was popularised at the turn of the twenty-first century by Dutch meteorologist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen, who used it to denote the 'human-dominated'<fnref n="267" /> geological epoch in which the action of Man (*Anthropos*) became the most influential force on the planet. While Crutzen proposed the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolutions as the starting point for this new planetary era<fnref n="268" />, other dates have been proposed by scientists – including the mid-twentieth century<fnref n="269" /> and 1945, the year of the first use of the nuclear bomb<fnref n="270" />. Even though the notion was eventually formally rejected in 2024 by the International Union of Geological Sciences because of the uncertainty surrounding the validity of the proposed starting date of this geological era, the Anthropocene has nonetheless remained a useful tool for climate activists and media platforms<fnref n="271" /> to lay emphasis on the influence of human action on the earth and raise awareness among the wider public about the urgent need to take responsibility for the climate crisis. In her ceremony of investiture as Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2021, Olive Senior displayed a similar willingness to raise awareness about the climate and the environmental impact of human activity through her poetry<fnref n="272" /> – but as it turns out, her poems and stories rather

<footnote n="266">²⁶⁶ ‘La créolisation suppose que les éléments culturels mis en présence soient équivalents en valeur. Si certains éléments sont infériorisés par rapport à d’autres, la créolisation se fait sur un mode bâtard et injuste’. Glissant, Édouard. *Introduction à une poétique du divers*. Op. cit., p. 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="267">²⁶⁷ Crutzen, Paul J. 'Geology of Mankind'. *Nature*, vol. 415, no. 6867, 2002, p. 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="268">²⁶⁸ *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="269">²⁶⁹ Hamilton, Clive, and Jacques Grinevald. 'Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?' *The Anthropocene Review*, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, pp. 59–72.</footnote>

<footnote n="270">²⁷⁰ Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. 'Defining the Anthropocene'. *Nature*, vol. 519, no. 7542, 2015, pp. 171–80.</footnote>

<footnote n="271">²⁷¹ See for instance Frank, Adam. 'Climate Change and the Astrobiology of the Anthropocene'. *NPR*, 1 Oct. 2016. *NPR*, https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/10/01/495437158/climate-change-and-the-astrobiology-of-the-anthropocene. Accessed 26 May 2025; as well as Macfarlane, Robert. 'Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet for Ever'. *The Guardian*, 1 Apr. 2016. *The Guardian*, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever. Accessed 26 May 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="272">²⁷² *Ceremony of Investiture for Olive Senior - Poet Laureate of Jamaica - 2021-2024*. 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfSioU8QZf4. Accessed 26 May 2025. See 5'20" for Senior's description of her use of ecopoetics in order to raise awareness about the land among her readership, and especially her younger readers.</footnote>
seem to be inscribed in critical approaches to the Anthropocene. Indeed, the notion has also
become subject to criticism because it implies that all humans, encompassed in a single,
transcendental, undifferentiated *Anthropos*, are equally responsible for geological changes –
once again, putting forward a single story of climate change and humanity. Other scholars have
thus proposed to replace it with the notions of Capitalocene<fnref n="273" />, Oliganthropocene<fnref n="274" />, or
Plantationocene<fnref n="275" />, among others, to better take into account the power relations which have
shaped the environment. Likewise, Senior consistently shows the different ways in which the
earth has been impacted by different demographics. This distinction is especially noticeable in
the poem 'Seeing the Light' and in the short story 'Boxed-In', which both contrast traditional
ways of living *with* the earth that are indigenous to the Caribbean with the more violent ways
to live *upon* the earth which have first been imposed by the European settlers, as is shown in
the poem, and later on by North American mining companies, as we can see in the short story.
On the one hand, the traditional method of small farming is described as a harmonious,
respectful lifestyle by the Taíno speaker:

We made the tiniest scratch
on Mother Earth (begging her pardon). When we moved
on, the jungle easily closed over that scar again.
We never took more than we needed. Always gave back
(to Earth) our thanks and our praises

(GT 95)

The isotopy of scarring ('scratch', 'scar') personifies the earth through a pathetic fallacy and accentuates the idea that the planet is seen as an equal. It also conveys an impression of circularity between the land and the people – the Taínos cultivate the earth, which then heal, while the soil yields resources, and is then thanked by humans. A similar rhythm is borne out by Mr. Everett in the short story, when he describes the fact that 'the soil had got thin and weak from so many generations of cultivation' and that he wishes the North American companies would 'assist people to make the soil rich again' (PT 109). However, as expected, the foreign companies have no intention of doing this and instead promote a purely one-sided, extractivist

<footnote n="273">²⁷³ See in particular Malm, Andreas. *Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming*. Verso Books, 2016, and Jason Moore (Moore, Jason W., editor. *Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism*. PM Press, 2016.</footnote>

<footnote n="274">²⁷⁴ The term was coined by Belgian geographer Erik Swyngedouw in a 2013 presentation given during the second meeting of the Human-Nature Platform in Lausanne. See Swyngedouw, Eric. *Trouble with Nature “Ecology as the New Opium for the Masses”*. https://wp.unil.ch/societenature/files/2013/07/Swyngedouw-July2013.pdf. The natures of natures in political ecology, 1 July 2013.</footnote>

<footnote n="275">²⁷⁵ The term first emerged during a discussion between Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing at Aarhus University in 2014. The written version was later published in Haraway, Donna, et al. ‘Anthropologists Are Talking – About The Anthropocene’. *Ethnos*, vol. 81, no. 3, 2016, pp. 535–64 (see pp. 556-57 in particular for Haraway and Tsing’s first mention of the Plantationocene).</footnote>
relationship to the soil which consists in ‘[r]ipping the soil up, tearing everything down, leaving nothing but a flattened red wasteland in their wake’ (Ibid.). The ternary rhythm, along with the increasing length of each clause, conveys the impression of an all-encompassing annihilation – a similar dynamic to the one attributed to the settlers in the poem, who ‘disemboweled’ the earth, ‘set it alight’ and ‘forcefully established marks of [their] presence all over it’ (GT 95). This time, no time or space is left for the earth to healthily regenerate itself given that the soil is ‘forcefully’ made to comply with the demands of the plantation system and of capitalism. What is interesting in these two depictions of agricultural methods is that they do not deny the fact that non-Western people have had an impact on the earth as well: the Indigenous people do leave a ‘scratch’ on the soil, tiny though it may be, just as the farmers in ‘Boxed-In’ have scarred the earth after centuries of cultivation. This exemplifies that Senior does not write the non-white *Anthropos* out of the Anthropocene narrative altogether – instead, she showcases the ways in which this narrative can and should encompass nuances, which is all the more important given that even though the climate crisis demands global action, not all countries and individuals have the same resources to cope with and fight against climate change. This corresponds to the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility and respective capabilities’ established by the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty signed in 1997 which laid the groundwork for the agenda that was to be followed by the Conference of the Parties in the following decades.

As a result, it appears that Senior uproots the myth of the single story in order to map out a new literary plot, the parts of which are divided between many different voices. Senior’s plot – including both her literary space and the narrative contents of the texts – is not univocal nor monolithic but opens out to welcome ‘those who have no part’<fnref n="276" /> without negating their specificities for all that. This ability to create a literary ground which can be shared by different voices corresponds to Jacques Rancière’s definition of the distribution of the sensible as the representation of both ‘the existence of a shared ground and the divisions which define the respective places and parts upon it’<fnref n="277" />, playing on the double meaning of *partage* in French. Nonetheless, by making space for these new parts, Olive Senior also foregrounds other ways of seeing the world and living in it. Unearthing, in this case, becomes a dual process which consists

<footnote n="276">²⁷⁶ Rancière, Jacques. *Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy*. 1995. Translated by Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press, 1998, p. 30.</footnote>

<footnote n="277">²⁷⁷ ‘J’appelle partage du sensible ce système d’évidences sensibles qui donne à voir en même temps l’existence d’un commun et les découpages qui y définissent les places et les parts respectives. Un partage du sensible fixe donc en même temps un commun partagé et des parts exclusives.’ Rancière, Jacques. ‘Du partage du sensible et des rapports qu’il établit entre politique et esthétique’. *Le partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique*, La Fabrique, 2000, p. 12.</footnote>
in uprooting deeply anchored, rigid worldviews, and bringing to light other ways of interacting
with and perceiving the world.

## 2. Grounding the plot

### 2.1. Unearthing 'discredited knowledge' (Toni Morrison)

As the speaker in the poem 'Seeing the Light' underscores, Western knowledge has been imposed, from the very beginning, as the one and only valid way to see 'the true light' (GT 96) of Christianity, but also of truth and reason, while traditional knowledges, associated to a form of primitivism by the settlers, were subsequently forced to remain in the shade. While the poem describes the process of 'subalternization of knowledge'<fnref n="278" /> in an Indigenous context, the same dynamic was at play between the white Western plantation owners and the African people who were brought to the colonies and enslaved by the settlers. The subjection of their bodies went hand in hand with the subjection of their ontologies and epistemologies, as Toni Morrison has explained: 'some of those things were “discredited knowledge” that Black people had; discredited only because Black people were discredited therefore what they knew was “discredited”'<fnref n="279" />. This initial discreditation of non-Western knowledge has had lasting consequences in the contemporary era since, Morrison continues, 'the press toward upward social mobility would mean to get as far away from that kind of knowledge as possible'<fnref n="280" />. Morrison here delineates one of the possible forms of the psychological ascendency imposed by white people on colonised subjects which was underlined by the French West Indian psychiatrist and political activist Frantz Fanon, who categorised colonised people as 'every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality'<fnref n="281" />. The internalisation of this inferiority complex by postcolonial subjects is depicted several times in the two collections, the most striking example being that of Mrs. Fennell in 'The Country Cousin' for whom upward mobility and economic stability essentially amounts to forcing herself to read *Pride and Prejudice* even though she does not even like reading (PT 123-24)<fnref n="282" />.

<footnote n="278">²⁷⁸ Mignolo, Walter D. 'On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System'. *Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking*, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="279">²⁷⁹ Morrison, Toni. 'Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation'. *Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation*, edited by Mari Evans, Anchor Books, 1984, p. 342.</footnote>

<footnote n="280">²⁸⁰ *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="281">²⁸¹ Fanon, Frantz. *Black Skin, White Masks*. 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Pluto Press, 2008, p. 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="282">²⁸² In that regard, the ending of 'The Country Cousin' is more equivocal than it may seem. While one could read the story as a light-hearted rewriting of Cinderella, in which the evil mother-in-law prototype, Mrs. Fennell, is</footnote>
Nonetheless, as Olive Senior tills the soil and reveals the very much situated, subjective roots of the supposedly transcendental, universal narratives and worldviews imposed by the West, she also brings these discredited knowledges back to the surface. In *The Pain Tree*, ancestral knowledge is mostly embodied by selected figures, such as Tano and YaYa in ‘Flying’, who are the repositors of a magical gift allowing them to have an acute connection to the natural world – Tano was able to understand animals when she was alive, while YaYa has an in-depth knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants – or Mr. Everett in ‘Boxed-In’, who, despite being a devout Christian, regularly communicates with spirits (one of his many contradictions). However, those ancestor figures are often relatively marginalised: YaYa lives hidden in the countryside, while Mr. Everett lives in the bush and finds himself left behind as his community starts moving into Town. In order for them to be able to communicate their knowledge, they, too, need to be actively sought for, or unearthed – which happens to YaYa in ‘Flying’, as her grandson goes to live with her, but not to Mr. Everett in ‘Boxed-In’, whose body and beliefs are both literally and symbolically buried at the very beginning of the story by a community who no longer wants anything to do with tradition (PT 94). In contrast, the unearthing of traditional knowledge is more visible and pervasive in *Gardening in the Tropics*, in which multiple poems focus on Indigenous folklore while the entire ‘Mystery’ section is dedicated to the gods of Vodou, a religion which originally comes from Africa, as is underscored by the section’s subtitle, ‘African Gods in the New World’. Unlike the Christian religion imposed by the Spaniards during colonisation and slavery, Vodou is characterised by polytheism and animism, which means that it comprises multiple deities, who are each associated with a specific element of the natural world. The ‘Mystery’ poems each give voice to a specific deity of the Vodou pantheon, including Guédé, the surprisingly playful spirit ruling over the dead, but also Osanyin, the god of herbalism who also gave his name to an EU-funded project aiming to valorise traditional knowledge about medicinal plants in the Caribbean<fnref n="283" />, as well as Marassa, the divine twins who are both ‘children’ and ‘ancestors’ and embody the duality of all things (GT 117). The poems referring to Indigenous folklore, on the other hand, do not focus on

<footnote>punished for her flaws while the naïve, beautiful young woman finds her prince charming thanks to her interior and exterior beauty, there also seems to be a darker subtext as Rose's happy ending only reinforces Mrs. Fennell's anxiety to conform through Westernisation. The country cousin who just so happens to be an 'Edwardian beauty' (PT 129) ends up marrying a wealthy bachelor in Bali, leaving her rural roots behind for brighter horizons abroad. The seemingly clear-cut morality of the story thus becomes ambiguous as Senior shows that the 'earthy' (PT 128), arguably more indigenous lifestyle of the Jamaican countryside corresponds to a lower social stratum, whereas social climbing can only be achieved through acculturation to Western codes.</footnote>

<footnote n="283">²⁸³ See OSAIN | Interreg Caraïbes. https://interreg-caraibes.eu/osain. Accessed 28 May 2025. The project was part of the Interreg V Caribbean cooperation programme for the 2014-2020 period.</footnote>
specific deities as much – even though some are briefly mentioned<sup>284</sup> – but rather relate aetiological<sup>285</sup> myths which explain why certain elements in the natural world are the way they are according to Indigenous beliefs. For instance, in ‘The Colours of Birds’, we learn that the reason why Caribbean birds are so colourful is because they made the ‘Great Anaconda Monster’ laugh – probably referring to Yacumama, legendary snake and mother of water in the Indigenous folklore of the Amazon area –, pulled its tongue and killed it, subsequently releasing ‘all the colours of the sun’ which the snake had been keeping for itself into nature and allowing the birds to dip their feathers into the palette (GT 90). Moreover, the poem continues, the reason why parakeets are the only green birds is because they were so busy laughing at what had just happened that they arrived too late and that only green was left, as the other birds found it ‘too incredibly jejune’ (GT 91). Other aetiological stories of the sort are included in the poetry collection – in ‘Bamboo (In Five Variations)’, for instance, we learn that the reason why humans are mortal is because ‘Stone’ lost a debate against ‘Bamboo’ (GT 80). All these poems expand on the traditional knowledge borne by the aforementioned characters included in *The Pain Tree* and put forward a radically different worldview. The author does not impose these stories as the univocal truth for all that – and in that regard, it is significant that Senior should foreground *both* Indigenous and African traditions, as it undermines the possibility of delineating a singular counter-knowledge. Senior simply shows that other ways of seeing and understanding the world exist: while biologists may explain that the green colour of parrots comes from the birds’ ability to produce their own pigments named psittacofulvins, the Anaconda legend stands as another way to grasp this reality – perhaps less believable at first glance for a Western reader, but certainly more enchanting.

The main attribute which characterises the traditional African and Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies as they are portrayed in the two collections is the fact that they hinge on a similar sense of fluid porousness, in which the natural world seamlessly merges with the supernatural and blurs the very definition of what is considered natural or not. This porousness starkly contrasts with the rigid boundaries and binaries defining the Western *logos* which hinges upon definition itself – ‘definition’ being here understood in its first etymological meaning, *definitio*, as the act of setting boundaries. This aspect indeed lies at the core of Cartesian thought, based on radical doubt and the elimination of anything which has not been

<footnote n="284"><sup>284</sup> In ‘Meditation on Yellow’, for instance, the speaker refers to Yucahuna and Attabeira, two Taíno deities (GT 11).</footnote>

<footnote n="285"><sup>285</sup> The word is derived from the Greek root ‘αἰτία’, meaning ‘cause’. Aetiology thus means ‘to give the cause of something’.</footnote>
scientifically proven by the rational mind, whereas ancestral African and Indigenous ontologies
make room for uncertainty – as is epitomised by the constant reversals of binaries in the
‘Marassa’ poem, for instance. This contrast between rigidity and porousness is epitomised by
two opposite descriptions of boundaries in ‘Boxed-In’, as Mr. Everett, who has lived in the bush
his whole life and regularly communicates with the spirit world, is introduced to the world of
Town, where urban planning is heavily dominated by North American influences. On the one
hand, the protagonist’s ability to communicate with spirits and to transgress ontological
boundaries between the tangible and the intangible depends on specific places where boundaries
are not clearly established, ‘away from the light and under the canopy of trees, beneath the
screens of yam vines on poles, in the dark and gloomy cocoa walks, or inside the cave in which
he hid the implements of his practice’ (PT 111). The darkness of each of these places enhances
their liminality, since it symbolically opposes them to the light of rationality imposed by the
settlers which is described in the poem ‘Seeing the Light’: it is precisely because they are dark
that the (mind’s) eye cannot make out their contours, and that Mr. Everett can thus safely
undertake his ghost whispering activities. On the contrary, the Westernised Town in the story is
characterised by clear-cut linearity and rigidity and thus prevents such liminality:

> Even the houses themselves were boxlike, the white-painted concrete walls
> reflecting the daylight and electric lights so bright there was no room for secret
> fumbling. *Their lines were so straight and clean* there was nowhere to stash anything
> as one could under the thatch roof or in a hollow in the wattle-and-daub. The world
> to which they were moving, one which harboured no hiding places, was a place of
> intense danger for one such as he.

*(PT 111, my emphasis)*

The angular shape of the houses is perceived as a form of ‘intense danger’ by Mr. Everett, and this description seems to stand as a metaphor for the fact that the Western conception of *logos*, too, may be ‘straight and clean’ but also crystallises a form of symbolic violence, as it imposes its abstract linearity onto the natural world, in an attempt to define and classify objects and phenomena which may not intrinsically fit the mould of Cartesian rationality – and this obsession for fitting natural phenomena into the bounds of *logos* represents another symbolic form of epistemic domination of the white, Western subject upon the outside world, supplementing the more tangible forms of domination upon the environment and non-white bodies which are already enacted by the colonialist, imperialist and capitalistic systems of power<fnref n="286" />.

<footnote n="286">²⁸⁶ For instance, Mary Louise Pratt has analysed the way in which the taxonomy of plants created by the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, ‘designed to classify all the plants on the earth, known and unknown, according to the</footnote>
Therefore, the blurry boundaries which characterise the non-Western ontologies and epistemologies depicted in the two collections defy Western logic; and yet, Senior does not posit them as irrational either. In fact, their porousness is what endows the poems and stories with a form of ‘enchantment’ – a word explicitly used by Jonathan in ‘Flying’ (*PT* 178) – which clearly contrasts with the ‘disenchantment of the world’ which sociologist Max Weber saw as the defining feature of the secular, bureaucratic, modern Western society<fnref n="287" />. By shedding light on these historically discredited worldviews, Senior thus does not only counter the ‘subalternization of knowledge’<fnref n="288" /> enacted during colonialism and which still pervades Western thought, but she also shows that these other worldviews offer a perhaps more expansive way of living *with* the world, rather than above or beside it.

## 2.2. *The ground as primary locus*

Even though Senior takes care to unearth discredited knowledges, the blurriness of boundaries which is characteristic of these epistemologies draws our attention back to the ground – as a literal, palpable *locus* rather than a symbolic area of concealment and discreditation. Indeed, what is particularly striking about the traditional Indigenous and African belief systems depicted in the stories and poems is the fact that despite their supernatural dimension, they also give pride of place to the natural world – an (im)material duality which was also borne out by Toni Morrison:

> It is indicative of the cosmology, the way in which Black people looked at the world. We are very practical people, very down-to-earth, even shrewd people. But within that practicality we also accepted what I suppose could be called superstition and magic, which is another way of knowing things. But to blend those two worlds together at the same time was enhancing, not limiting.<fnref n="289" />

This duality, which Morrison here primarily locates within an African context, is highlighted by the fact that the Vodou gods represented in the ‘Mystery’ poems are portrayed as omnipresent

<footnote>characteristics of their reproductive parts’, served as a catalyst for ‘a European knowledge-building enterprise of unprecedented scale and appeal’ which developed across the globe with the cooperation of trading companies, such as the Swedish East India Company – a planetary approach to knowledge conveniently facilitated by the commercial networks developed thanks to European imperialism. Pratt, Mary Louise. *Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturization*. Routledge, 2003, pp. 24-25.</footnote>

<footnote n="287">²⁸⁷ Weber borrowed the word ‘Entzauberung’, literally ‘de-magic-ation’ and translated as ‘disenchantment’, from the German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller. Weber popularised the term by using it in his lecture ‘Science as Vocation’, which he gave in Munich in 1917. See Weber, Max. ‘Science as Vocation’. *The Vocation Lectures*, edited by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, translated by Rodney Livingstone, Hackett Books, 2004, pp. 1–31.</footnote>

<footnote n="288">²⁸⁸ Mignolo, Walter D. ‘On Gnosis and the Imaginary of the Modern/Colonial World System’. *Local Histories/Global Designs, op. cit.*, p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="289">²⁸⁹ Morrison, Toni. ‘Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation’. *Black Women Writers (1950-1980)*, op. cit., p. 342.</footnote>
in the natural world. For instance, Oya, the goddess of the wind, is always palpable through her breath (GT 129), and Yemoja, the mother of waters, makes her presence felt through all kinds of waters at different stages of the human life – whether it be ‘flood waters’, ‘orgasm’, ‘birth waters’ or those of ‘baptism’ (GT 133). Furthermore, as we have already seen with the example of Guédé, many of these gods are personified: Shango, the god of thunder, is described as an arrogant ‘womanizer’ (GT 123), whereas Ogun, the god of iron, is pictured as an ‘iron-hearted warrior’ (GT 122). Those examples demonstrate that the Vodou belief system is not confined to an ethereal world of abstraction and ideas but is very much anchored in the tangible ground – unlike Christianity, for instance, which establishes a clear dichotomy between the Word of God and the flesh of Christ, who was sent down to earth to spread the Word of his Father as a messenger of spirituality but eventually ascended back to Heaven, effectively putting an end to the possibility for Christians to retain a direct physical link with their God<sup>290</sup>. In Vodou religion, on the contrary, the divine is to be found within the palpable flesh of the natural world, as natural elements such as wind, water, or metals are conflated with their associated deity. Similarly, the deities of Indigenous folklore are associated with natural elements, such as Orehu, the spirit of water mentioned in ‘Gourd’ (GT 7), or Maquetaurie Guayaba, who is both spirit of the dead and lord of the guava in Taíno mythology (GT 74). Another example of the fact that Indigenous spirituality encompasses a similar link between ‘magic’ and ‘practicality’ as that underlined by Morrison can be found in the poem ‘Gourd’, as the dried fruit becomes the instrument with which spirits can be invoked (GT 7).

The emphasis placed on nature in African and Indigenous cosmologies translates into a particular lifestyle, as nature is not only linked to the sacred but becomes sacred *in itself*: human beings, in these cultures, are thus led to pay special attention to the world around them. This behaviour is exemplified by the Taínos in ‘Seeing the Light’, who, after reaping their crops, ‘[a]lways gave back (to Earth) [their] thanks and [their] praises, never failed to salute the gods of the rain, the wind, the sun, and the moon in her phases’ (GT 95). In a more contemporary setting, the survivance of African and Indigenous spirituality in the Caribbean often manifests itself as a traditional knowledge of the environment, passed on across the generations, which includes both spiritual beliefs and more practical know-how. The first side of this ancestral

<footnote n="290"><sup>290</sup> In the Bible, the bodily Ascension of Christ is marked by the sentence ‘touch me not’ (or *noli me tangere* in Latin), which Christ utters to Mary Magdalene when she first discovers him after his Resurrection. Symbolically, this means that the relationship between God and Christian believers was henceforth bound to be spiritual rather than tangible. This episode is related in ‘John 20:17’. *King James Bible*, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/John-Chapter-20/#17. Accessed 29 May 2025.</footnote>
knowledge is illustrated by nearly all the poems in the ‘Nature Studies’ section of *Gardening in the Tropics*, which each give centre stage to a specific plant and the beliefs associated to it in Caribbean folklore – the starapple, for instance, is seen as deceiving because of its two-coloured leaves<sup>291</sup> and thus ‘can’t be trusted as a guide’ (*GT* 65), while a guava tree which bears too much fruit may be the sign of an upcoming human death, as the poet suggests in ‘Guava/2’ (*GT* 74).

And yet, all those beliefs do not serve to distance the environment from the human realm by substituting tangible elements for spiritual abstractions; on the contrary, rather than detachment, this ancestral knowledge involves a tactile engagement with the land itself. This is illustrated by the gardener in the poem ‘Advice and Devices’, who boasts about the fact that her traditional gardening methods earn her more prizes at the agricultural fair than the ‘heap of sprays’ used by her rivals, which ‘fertilize out all the taste from the pumpkin and yam’ (*GT* 111). Symbolically, the use of fertilisers denotes a form of distance from the soil itself: not only are they literally sprayed from a distance, but they also denote a will to artificially quicken the natural pace of nature. However, the gardener encourages us to engage with the earth by feeling it directly beneath our fingers – we are, for instance, invited to bury a concoction of powdered hummingbird wings, dirt, and impatiens leaves at each corner of our plot of choice in order to repel trespassers – and, above all, by respecting its pace. When we plant a pumpkin, for instance, the speaker advises that we ‘plan nothing else for the day’, or else it will ‘grow worthless and run around with no time to settle down and bear’ (*GT* 113). While the gardener’s methods may seem to border on superstition with no apparent logic from a Western perspective – she does advise us to share a ‘sprinkling of rum’ with the soil, to ‘ask pardon to dig’ to Mother Earth<sup>292</sup> (*GT* 111) –, the quality of her crops lends credibility and authority to her advice, and to the traditional know-how that she represents by extension. A similar attitude towards nature is embodied by YaYa in the short story ‘Flying’, as the old woman displays similar animist beliefs – she associates the drought striking the land with the wrath of Rivermaid<sup>293</sup>, the now-neglected water spirit (*PT* 163) – and an intimate knowledge of nature which her grandson cannot help

<footnote n="291">291 See also Senior, Olive. *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage*. Op. cit., p. 357.</footnote>

<footnote n="292">292 While the almost theatrical mystery sustained by the speaker in the poem may initially lead us to read her advice through the prism of humour, the gardener here refers to a real practice which is spread in several regions of the Caribbean basin and its surroundings. For instance, in several countries of the Western region of Southern America, such as Columbia, Peru and Ecuador, a modern-day form of libation is performed through the pouring of a few drops of *chicha* (an alcoholic beverage) on the floor as an offering to Pachamama, the earth goddess in Inca mythology, before people drink the rest.</footnote>

<footnote n="293">293 Rivermaid is now the main water spirit in Jamaican folklore (see Senior, Olive. *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage*. Op. cit., pp. 508-09). Senior links her to Guabancex, the Taíno deity of storms and chaos (*Ibid*.), but her mermaid-like attributes are also reminiscent of Mami Wata, a Vodou water spirit who is often represented with reptilian or fish-like characteristics.</footnote>
but admire (PT 166). As a result, it appears that within this tradition, the land itself remains a privileged *locus* of knowledge, subsistence, and reconnection with ancestral spiritualities. The central ontological and epistemological role of the soil is epitomised by the saying ‘grung tell me wud’, which, as Olive Senior relates, is mostly used by elder people in rural Jamaica when they are asked for advice and which means that they found their answers by putting their ear to the ground<sup>294</sup>.

Interestingly, the author also displays this ability to listen to the ground as a writer by letting the contours of the Caribbean landscape resonate within her writing. Not only does she regularly turn to natural metaphors – such as that of gardening in the poetry collection, but also more punctual images in the short story collection – but she also seems to mirror the shapes of the landscape through her poetic choices, thereby presencing the land on the page through the tools of literature. In *Gardening in the Tropics*, Senior often relies on visual aspects – as we have already seen, the ‘Gourd’ poem is shaped like a gourd (GT 7), for instance, and the alternation between long and short lines in ‘Stowaway’ seems to mirror the ebb and flow of the waves upon which the ship is sailing (GT 45). In the short story collection, this visual aspect is less noticeable at first glance – and yet, in several descriptive passages, the syntax and the sounds sometimes contribute to the creation of a visual picture of the landscape for the readers. See, for instance, the following description of YaYa’s house in ‘Flying’, given from Jonathan’s perspective:

> Coming from a geometrically laid out city of high-rises, he was amazed to see how soft the edges were here, how nothing seemed to have been trained or groomed, how no one thing stood out. Everything — from the mountains to the country road and its high banks — wound in and out, twined on or enfolded something else. Even YaYa’s little house had long abandoned its vertical lines and settled comfortably into the soil, its foundations masked by the roots of peppermint and leaf of life, thyme and sinkle bible and croton, which she worked to keep alive.

(PT 166)

In this passage, the succession of the elements of the description follows the gaze of the focaliser as he lays his eyes on different things around him and gradually becomes aware of his environment – this is exemplified by the anaphoric use of the intensive ‘how’ in the first sentence, which creates a ternary rhythm and mimics the pace of Jonathan’s train of thoughts. What truly amazes him is the vast impression of entanglement which emanates from his surroundings, and a similarly entangled impression is created by the second sentence in which

<footnote n="294"><sup>294</sup> Senior, Olive. ‘The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su’. *Art. cit.*, p. 36.</footnote>
the clause ‘from the mountains [...] high banks’, inserted between the grammatical subject ‘[e]verything’ and its corresponding verb ‘wound’, disrupts the syntax and conveys the impression of two entangled sentences. In addition, the passage bears an almost musical quality which echoes the visual harmony of the landscape, where ‘no one thing stood out’: the noun phrase ‘the roots of peppermint and leaf of life, thyme and sinkle bible and croton’, for example, is saturated with /ɪ/, /iː/, and /aɪ/ sounds, but also with alliterations (such as in ‘peppermint’ or ‘leaf of life’) and consonances (between ‘sinkle’ and ‘bible’) which endow the text with an internal rhythm and make for a musical reading experience. All these devices exemplify how, in a few sentences, Olive Senior manages to create what Michael A. Bucknor has defined as a “‘grung” poetics’<fnref n="295" /> and allows the language to *become* the landscape itself.

This attention to the ground is all the more symbolic since, as Kathryn Yusoff reminds us, black bodies have historically been assimilated to geological matter in colonial epistemologies:

> Bodies become gold, emptied of the sign of the human, reinvested with the signification of units of energy and properties of extraction. Black is made as will-less matter, a commodity object of labor.<fnref n="296" />

The colonial association between minerals and black bodies is twofold; not only did the labour of enslaved individuals in the plantations physically associate them with the soil in the eyes of the colonisers, but black bodies were also symbolically seen as fungible goods precisely *because* they accomplished this labour, under the control of the white plantation owners. However, Senior here remaps – or deterritorialises, to borrow the term used by Deleuze and Guattari<fnref n="297" /> – this colonial plot, as the association between the soil and non-white bodies turns into something more powerful: instead of creating a sense of distance, Senior’s attention to the soil and to characters who actively engage with it leads readers to adopt a similarly grounded gaze. Using the soil as her main vantage point enables the author to co-opt displacement – something which was historically imposed upon African and Indigenous peoples by the white settlers – into a way of opening her readers’ eyes onto a new, unfamiliar map which does not

<footnote n="295">²⁹⁵ ‘[...] Senior’s ‘grung’ poetics self-consciously invests in the ‘language of nature’ as indicated by her use of the ‘calabash’ (empty gourd) illustration to conceptualize her creative expression. Throughout her writings, nature supplies ready metaphors and symbols, becomes subject matter and provides conceptualizing tools for discussing the writer’s art and creative process.’ Bucknor, Michael A. “‘Grung”/Ground(Ed) Poetics: “The Voice from the Bottom of the Well””. *The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, op. cit.*, p. 91.</footnote>

<footnote n="296">²⁹⁶ Yusoff, Kathryn. *A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None*. University of Minnesota Press, 2018, p. 83.</footnote>

<footnote n="297">²⁹⁷ In *A Thousand Plateaus*, the two authors define ‘deterritorialization’ as ‘the operation of the line of flight’, that is to say the process through which something leaves an established ‘territory’. In our case, this territory would correspond to the well-established, territorialised foundations of the gaze Western readers are used to laying upon a given place. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. *A Thousand Plateaus. Op. cit.*, p. 508.</footnote>
simply stand as a counter-representation of the Caribbean, but which asks us to question the
way in which we perceive the world around us to begin with.

2.3. *The writer as mapmaker*

By choosing the ground – or the ‘grung’ – as her *locus* of choice, Senior subverts a long tradition of mapmaking and posits her literary work as an anticolonial map of sorts. Through this new map, we are allowed to see the world that she portrays from a completely different perspective compared to the one which Western readers may be used to seeing and using. Indeed, colonial discourse often relies on the projection of an omniscient gaze which symbolically and geographically dominates, and thereby possesses, the land and the people which it sees and depicts. This is exemplified, very literally, by the numerous maps of the colonies which were produced by the settlers and by European explorers throughout the colonial era: maps are, after all, projections of a chosen place drawn from above which create an illusory bird’s eye view for the onlooker who can then grasp the place in its (apparent) entirety simply by looking at a piece of paper. This bird’s eye view fully contributes to the function of the map as an instrument of knowledge and power. Whether they be used for orientation purposes, or to assess the economic potential and the difficulties posed by a landscape, maps symbolically endow those who read them with power since they give the impression that all the nooks and crannies of a place are exposed and near at hand. Moreover, Mary Louise Pratt has demonstrated that this promontory perspective, characteristic of the colonial and imperial gaze, is also visible in the travel writing of the colonial era and is thus part and parcel of the colonial ideology since it pervades all forms of colonial discourse. Pratt has conceptualised this specific point of view as the ‘monarch of all I survey’ trope<fnref n="298" />, predicated upon ‘a relation of mastery [...] between the seer and the seen’<fnref n="299" />. The narrative of discovery becomes ‘a particular meaning-making task’, aiming at making the landscape meaningful for European readers<fnref n="300" /> through a promontory perspective which, in a sense, posits that the landscape acquires significance only through the eyes of the Western observer. However, as an act of meaning-making, colonial

<footnote n="298">²⁹⁸ Pratt, Mary Louise. *Imperial Eyes*. Op. cit., pp. 201–08. The phrase originally comes from a 1782 poem by William Cowper, ‘Verses, Supposed to be Written by Alexander Selkirk’, in which the English poet imagines the thoughts of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who was marooned on an island in the Pacific Ocean for four years. Pratt mainly takes the example of Richard Burton’s *Lake Regions of Central Africa* (1860) for her analysis, but as Claire Lindsay as pointed out, the trope ‘has since passed into the theoretical lexicon to describe a familiar scene in many travel narratives’ (Lindsay, Claire. ‘Monarch-of-All-I-Survey’. *Keywords for Travel Writing Studies: A Critical Glossary*, edited by Charles Forsdick et al., Anthem Press, 2019, p. 157).</footnote>

<footnote n="299">²⁹⁹ *Ibid.*, pp. 204–05.</footnote>

<footnote n="300">³⁰⁰ *Ibid.*, p. 202.</footnote>
mapping – whether it be in maps or in texts – also involves a form of subjective selection of elements, as only those deemed significant for the targeted audience will be represented. Therefore, the fact that Senior should choose an opposite perspective to that of the ‘monarch of all I survey’ trope sheds light on completely different elements from those we might expect. As the author turns to marginalised, sometimes invisible voices, places, species and objects, her stories and poems remap the Caribbean from a new, grounded perspective which implicitly sheds light on the arbitrary nature of the value which is usually attributed to each element by the mapmaker’s gaze.

Within the texts, this remapping endeavour manifests itself as a play with scales: the small becomes big, and conversely. In the poetry collection, this multiscalar dimension is made all the more striking by the fact that the form of the poems sometimes takes brevity to an extreme level, but the scope of meaning extends far beyond the restrictive visual boundaries created by the lines on the page. The poem ‘Snail’ is a case in point of this tension:

O snail
so slow
so low
we can hardly
stoop
far enough
to see
outlined
behind
what might be
the cosmic
trail.

(GT 72)

Just like the poem ‘Sun and Moon’, this poem is extremely brief, as the lines never comprise more than three words. The visual verticality and shortness of the poem seem to mirror its subject matter – that is, the snail itself, whose body and trail of slime have a similar elongated oval shape to that created by the words on the page. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the numerous enjambments disrupt the linearity of the single sentence which forms the poem and thus formally interrupt the reading experience, forcing readers to slow down as they read and take on the slow pace of the snail. Sonically, this sense of slowness is rendered through the accumulation of closing diphthongs in the first three lines – /əʊ/ in ‘slow’ and ‘low’, and /eɪ/ in ‘snail’ – which echo, with their elongated sounds, the wavelike motion of the snail crawling on the ground. Moreover, the speaker themselves insists on the small and slow nature of the gastropod, with the repetition of the intensive adverb ‘so slow / so low’ as well as the
hyperbolic phrasing ‘we can hardly / stoop / far enough’, which all emphasise the minuscule aspect of the object of study. However, the hyperterrestrial level of the snail gives way to celestial grandeur at the very end of the poem, as the slime trail unexpectedly becomes ‘cosmic’ and therefore associates the unassuming slug with something larger than life itself. The metaphor hinges on a very visual aspect, as we might assume that what leads the speaker to speak of the trail as ‘cosmic’ is the iridescence of the slime. And yet, beyond mere poetic transport, this unexpected shift in scales symbolically shows that what usually goes unnoticed – like the snail, ‘so low’ that humans regularly step on it – is important, too.

The same aspect can be found in *The Pain Tree*, though in less visual ways, as several seemingly small details end up playing a major role in the diegeses. This is the case, for instance, with the family dog in ‘Moonlight’, which is first mentioned in passing by the narrator who says that ‘he only barked at strangers’ (hence why he doesn’t bark when she wanders in the yard at night) (*PT* 18) but which ends up being the key element which will reveal the father’s affair with Dorleen at the end. Conversely, some elements or voices which we might expect to take considerable space are downplayed or left aside at times – for instance, the stories ‘A Father Like That’ and ‘Lollipop’ are dominated by the perspective of children, whereas the adults in their life, powerful as they may be in the real world, are given less importance. From a narratological perspective, the fact that the adults’ voices only appear through direct speech, whereas the children are the main focalisers, conveys the impression that the children are those who can allow, or not, their voices to appear in the narration, as we only have access to what the adults are saying through the children’s perception. Senior’s play with scales is thus both literal and symbolic, as small voices, elements and beings come to dominate her literary space, and this objective domination of space also points to a reversal of power dynamics.

Yet, once again, Senior’s emphasis on what (or who) is usually unnoticed does not merely serve the creation of a counter-discourse by small voices; instead, it helps the author question the place which is usually attributed – or not – to these voices in literature and other dominant discourses. In that regard, it is particularly ironic that the storyteller in ‘Amazon Women’ should assert that ‘there’s no gain in telling stories / about ordinary men and women’ (*GT* 99), since this is exactly what Senior does in her two collections – and in fact, even in the poem ‘Amazon Women’, the real centre of attention seems to be the ‘ordinary’ storyteller who gives life to the story with her antics, rather than the mythical Amazons themselves. Indeed, while the storyteller explicitly announces that she is ‘not into sensationalism’ and that she merely wishes to ‘set the record / straight’ (*GT* 97) about the story of the Amazons by reestablishing the role of men in
the foundation of these mythical matriarchies, the pervasive comments she adds to her own
story – see for instance her ironic ‘(you know how men stay!)’ (Ibid.) – make her presence as a
narrator extremely visible to the readers and endow the story with a new kind of sensationalism.
This sensationalism no longer corresponds to the fantasising undertone which could be found
in Raleigh’s and Brett’s accounts of the legendary Amazonian matriarchies; instead, the
performance of storytelling itself is depicted as sensational, as the numerous touches of humour
and unexpected digressions of the storyteller rendered on the page make for a very entertaining
text. As a result, it appears that Senior goes beyond the creation of a mere counter-narrative to
sensationalist colonial accounts and rather deconstructs the idea that sensationalism can only
be found in some selected discourses: as the poem shows, the everyday, too, can be sensational.
The same idea recurs in the next poem in the collection, ‘Tropic Love’, as the speaker remarks
that ‘you hear poetry in some unexpected places’ (GT 100), thus going against the idea that a
supposedly noble literary genre can only flourish amongst a select few – and the poem indeed
shows that regular, anonymous people, too, can create beautiful verse. As a matter of fact, the
people who take centre stage in the poems and stories are, for the great majority, common
people – and in that regard, Senior’s first published short story collection, *Summer Lightning*<fnref n="301" />,
went even further in that direction as most of the protagonists were young children<fnref n="302" />. This also
applies to the plants in the ‘Plants’ and ‘Nature Studies’ sections, most of which are such an
integral part of the Jamaican landscape that they often go unnoticed as well – like fern, so
pervasive that it is almost invisible, or anatto and guinep, which were sacred for the Taínos but
which ‘[n]o one today regards [...] / as anything special’ (GT 76).

This specific attention to the ordinary components of Jamaican and Caribbean life
corresponds to a true political and ethical agenda on the part of the author, who, in her interview
with Charles H. Rowell, has underscored her wish to show her people that “‘literature” can be
created out of the fabric of [their] everyday lives, that [their] stories are as worth telling as those
of Shakespeare – or the creators of Dallas’<fnref n="303" />. This comparison with Shakespeare hints at a
nexus of tension that has already been addressed by several postcolonial Caribbean writers<fnref n="304" />,

<footnote n="301">³⁰¹ Senior, Olive. *Summer Lighting and Other Stories*. Op. cit.</footnote>

<footnote n="302">³⁰² The etymology of ‘infant’, ‘infans’ in Latin, means ‘unable to speak’. While this originally denotes the fact that very young children have not yet acquired the capacity to use language, this can also metaphorically point to the imbalanced power relationship between children and adults. Senior herself has commented upon ‘the powerlessness, frustrations and lack of understanding by the adult world, the alienation [she herself] felt as a child’ and which inform her writing and her recurring choice to focus on children (Rowell, Charles H. ‘An Interview with Olive Senior’. *Art. cit.*, p. 484).</footnote>

<footnote n="303">³⁰³ Rowell, Charles H. ‘An Interview with Olive Senior’. *Art. cit.*, p. 484.</footnote>

<footnote n="304">³⁰⁴ See for instance Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. *History of the Voice*. Op. cit., pp. 8–10.</footnote>
relationship in the story ‘Boxed-In’, as the main character, Mr. Everett, is said to have gained
his worldly power through his communication with otherworldly forces. This ‘superior
knowledge of the world’ which encompasses the invisible realm of spirits, he believes, is what
grants him immunity, which is why he takes care to keep ‘the spirit messengers fed and happy
with daily offerings of their favourite food’ and to ‘carefully read the signs from that other
world’ (PT 104) in order to reestablish the balance when needed and retain his secure position
in the tangible world. Yet, the idea of interdependence between the human and the nonhuman
can also extend to include the relationship between humans and nature in other poems and
stories. This is exemplified by the gift Jonathan receives from his grandmother’s side in
‘Flying’, which allows him to communicate with animals. This communication is represented
literally through direct speech in the narration; the bird perched on the guava tree at the end is
portrayed with the voice of ‘a cranky old woman’, telling Jonathan: “‘Hurry up. Rain is coming.
Let’s go.’” (PT 181) This verbal interaction contributes to the magical realism which underpins
the story<fnref n="311" />, as the fact that the bird’s warning is included in English on the page blurs the
boundary between human and animal and endows the passage with a supernatural aura, even
though the text does not specify whether the bird actually speaks a human language or whether
it is understood as such by Jonathan, who then transcribes this translation within the narration.
In the story, interspecies communication is also represented as a powerful source of knowledge.
Indeed, as a child, it was thanks to his understanding of animals that Jonathan was able to
predict the death of individuals in the community, and this is why he would (seemingly
randomly) try to prevent accidents from happening: he tried to deter Thomas, the sawyer’s
assistant, from going to the forest because a bird warned him that a tree would fall (PT 178),
but since Jonathan was just a child at the time, people did not take his warning seriously and
Thomas still left, which led to the accident. Therefore, through the prism of magical realism,
the story illustrates the strength which can be drawn from interspecies subsistence: listening to
the sounds (or signs) of nature becomes a matter of life and death. The same idea recurs
elsewhere in the two collections – for instance, in ‘The Immovable Tenant’, it is ‘with the help
of the termites, the ants, the wood lice, and the worms’ that the old lady can reclaim her plot

<footnote n="311">³¹¹ Olive Senior herself has claimed the label ‘magical realism’ to describe a facet of her work (in Charles H. Rowell. ‘An Interview with Olive Senior’. *Art cit.*, p. 484). This choice is justified by her belief that ‘it is a form well suited to our societies as it enables us artistically to fuse the mundane with the other world which lurks not too far beyond our everyday existence—the magical, spiritual, whatever you choose to call it. For me, writing, literature, is inextricably fused with magic’ (*Ibid*.). Moreover, Senior has claimed several times her indebtedness to the work of Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Márquez, whose 1967 novel *One Hundred Years of Solitude* is often regarded as one of the most canonical models of magical realism (*Ibid.*; see also ‘Author of the Month: Olive Senior’. *Diaspora Dialogues*, 7 Aug. 2013, https://diasporadialogues.com/author-month-olive-senior/. Accessed 5 June 2025).</footnote>
(GT 106). The blurred lines between humans and the nonhuman foreground an ode to community and ‘companionship’ (PT 178), as they show that it is from the understanding that no man is an island, and that there is always someone or something else to listen to, that one can draw strength and knowledge.

Consequently, the domination of the other through assimilation or erasure is portrayed as an unsustainable and counterproductive way of living. Instead, within her stories, Olive Senior highlights all the benefits of a relational, non-judgemental engagement with otherness, especially when the other is seemingly small and powerless – if the community had listened to young Jonathan’s warning, for example, Thomas would still be alive, while the minuscule termites metaphorically erode the foundations of the landlord’s plan to completely appropriate the plot in ‘The Immovable Tenant’. All these elements equally contribute to the making of a functional, healthy ecosystem – just as the stories and poems, no matter how brief or seemingly unimportant they may be, all play an important role in their respective collections. This holistic conception of the world corresponds to Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘sympoiesis’, a neologism composed of the Greek roots *syn* and *poiesis* which literally means ‘making together’ or ‘making with’. Haraway indeed argues that ‘[n]othing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing’ and that, as a result, ‘earthlings are *never alone*’<fnref n="312" />. This is why, she reminds us,

> We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Critters – human and not – become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.<fnref n="313" />

By subverting two popular, well-established notions, the ‘posthuman’ and the ‘humanities’, into neologisms which replace the human within a wider biological ecumene, Haraway challenges us to rethink the way in which we place ourselves, as human subjects, within our world. Indeed, the humanities, as an academic field which remains very much dominated by (mostly Continental) Western thought to this day, are the inheritors of European Enlightenment and the cult of reason and culture, which symbolically posited nature as inferior to the human. This can also be seen in the way scholars constantly look for new conceptual frameworks in order to apprehend the human world, seeking refuge in an ivory tower made of concepts<fnref n="314" />. Haraway

<footnote n="312">³¹² Haraway, Donna. *Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene*. Duke University Press, 2016, p. 58, emphasis in the original.</footnote>

<footnote n="313">³¹³ *Ibid.*, p. 97.</footnote>

<footnote n="314">³¹⁴ This is one of the major criticisms which has been addressed to postcolonial scholars, by critics such as Arif Dirlik and Aijaz Ahmad, for instance (see Gandhi, Leela. *Postcolonial Theory. Op. cit.*, p. 96), but also David Punter (see Punter, David. *Postcolonial Imaginings*. Op. cit., pp. 9-10 in particular).</footnote>
herein points to the fact that Western thought, and the ontology which derives from it, is very
much built upon the distancing of the natural world. However, throughout her essay *Staying
with the Trouble*, Haraway stresses the fact that such an approach to the world is no longer
sustainable in the context of ‘intense, systemic urgencies’<fnref n="315" /> – namely, among others, the
capitalistic and imperialist systems which keep destroying both peoples and the environment –
which we must address by what she calls ‘making kin’<fnref n="316" />: that is, a radical choice to engage
with others around us, both human and critters, in a modern society which glorifies
individualism and competition. Interestingly, Glissant already formulated a similar idea in his
*Poetics of Relation*, arguing that '[j]ust as Relation is not a pure abstraction to replace the old
concept of the universal, it also neither implies nor authorizes any ecumenical detachment'<fnref n="317" />:
in other words, relation is not just an abstract metaphor but implies a concrete *praxis* of
relationality with others.

In fact, it is precisely the art of making kin – or the art of Relation, in Glissant’s terms – which Senior depicts in her poems and short stories, in contrast with Western capitalism and (neo)colonialism as well as the ideology supplanting these dynamics, which destroy rather than enhance kinship. The gardener in ‘Advice and Devices’, the small rural family in ‘Hurricane Story, 1903’, the storyteller in ‘Amazon Women’, as well as Lorraine in ‘The Pain Tree’, Jonathan in ‘Flying’, or Mrs. Bailiff in ‘The Goodness of my Heart’ are indeed all trying to make kin, whether it be with other characters in the diegesis, with nature, with the supernatural world, or with the readers themselves in the case of the storyteller who directly addresses us in the text. Yet, what is particularly striking is that Senior does not conceal the potential difficulties which come along with this sympoietic effort to *make with* the other: the family in ‘Hurricane Story, 1903’ does have to cope with the whims of nature; Mrs. Bailiff becomes a mother figure at the expense of her own will and ends up betrayed by her husband and her confidante; Lorraine is faced with the consequences of her own ignorance when she realises that she will never get to say goodbye to Larissa… and all those stories thus highlight the fact that relationality, or making kin, is not always easy nor natural, and that this *praxis* demands real effort and willingness. For instance, Lorraine could have just chosen to remain indifferent to the fate of women like Larissa, as her mother does, but she actively chooses to go out of her way to reconnect with all the invisible maids who have come and gone from the house. This emphasis

<footnote n="315">³¹⁵ Haraway, Donna. *Staying with the Trouble*. *Op. cit.*, p. 102.</footnote>

<footnote n="316">³¹⁶ Haraway does not define kinship in its usual, genealogical sense, but as a common ground which includes ‘the more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus’ (*Ibid*., p. 101).</footnote>

<footnote n="317">³¹⁷ Glissant, Édouard. *Poetics of Relation*. *Op. cit.*, p. 33.</footnote>
of the *action* of sympoiesis, regardless of its results, sheds light on the ethical implications of
such an act. Indeed, ideally, one should not solely go towards the other in the hope of gaining
something from this kinship. This is why the purely transactional relationship between Mr.
Everett and the spirits in ‘Boxed-In’ is problematic and does eventually fail, since the
protagonist is so unsettled by the changes happening all about him that he ends up forgetting to
feed the spirits and dies completely secluded in his home. On the contrary, Senior suggests that
for it to be truly productive and sympoietic, kinship must stem from a genuine sentiment of
care, based on an awareness of the interconnection as well as the intrinsic precariousness<fnref n="318" /> of
all things, and the subsequent need to act with the precariousness of oneself and of others in
mind.

## 3.2. *Seeding an ethic of care*

By bringing connection and relation to the fore of her work, Senior invites us to rethink the
way in which we relate to otherness: relationality, in the stories and poems, is indeed often
depicted as a form of responsibility intrinsic to human nature, rather than a mere choice one can
choose not to make. This idea is exemplified by the fact that the action of unearthing, as we
have already seen, mirrors Senior's own endeavour to bring buried, ghostly voices back to the
surface of history in order to palliate the systemic voicelessness imposed by neocolonial
systems of power onto the most precarious – an action which highlights the ethical dimension
of actively reaching for and listening to the other. Unearthing, as the movement of reaching for
something beneath the surface, thus denotes the action of bridging the gap between the self and
the other and choosing to create an encounter – an active will to think *with* the other which
encapsulates the ethic of care, as it was first theorised by feminist scholar and psychologist
Carol Gilligan in the 1980s. In her landmark work *In a Different Voice*, Gilligan conceptualised
a gendered approach to morality: according to her, while men were more likely to think in terms
of abstract notions such as justice and logics, women would more often think and act while
taking their relationships with their peers into account:

> Women's construction of the moral problem as a problem of care and responsibility in relationships rather than as one of rights and rules ties the development of their moral thinking to changes in their understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as justice ties development to the logic of equality

<footnote n="318">³¹⁸ I am here expanding the scope of ‘precariousness’, a notion used by Judith Butler to denote the ontological vulnerability of human life (Butler, Judith. *Frames of War. Op. cit.*, pp. 2-3), to encompass the vulnerability of the nonhuman as well, including the environment and other living species.</footnote>
and reciprocity. Thus the logic underlying an ethic of care is a psychological logic of relationships, which contrasts with the formal logic of fairness that informs the justice approach.<fnref n="319" />

Gilligan was criticised for her binary approach to gender, which, according to some<fnref n="320" />, verged on a form of essentialism – and the author herself came back on her initial thesis of a specifically feminine voice, publishing a revised version under the title *In a Human Voice* in 2023³²¹. Nonetheless, her essay remains extremely impactful as it brought forward new ways of thinking about the notions of ethics and morality which, as Joan Tronto has noted, ‘seem to evoke big questions, impossible dilemmas, or conformity to pre-determined codes of behavior’<fnref n="322" />, in order to encompass even the most commonplace<fnref n="323" />, everyday acts of care – acts which, according to Gilligan, are often performed by women, since they have been socialised to perform the role of the caregiver. Likewise, as we have seen, the caretaking role is often assumed by women in Senior’s poems and short stories, with the grandmother often emerging as the main caring figure. As gardeners, child raisers, storytellers and mediators, many of these female characters come to embody the ethic of care: the gardener in ‘Advice and Devices’ cares about her crops, Katie’s grandmother in ‘Lollipop’ cared for her until she was old enough to join her mother in Canada, the storyteller in ‘Amazon Women’ cares about the Amazons, with whom she empathises, as well as the readers, to whom she tells the story as didactically as possible… However, one ought to note that men are not completely excluded from this role either: for instance, at the end of ‘Coal’, Boy/Vincent can be seen as performing an act of care when he goes back to Sarah’s house to reintroduce himself as the new Coal, honouring the memory of his grandfather and reconnecting with the women who raised him by the same stroke. In doing so, the character actively decides to prioritise his relationships, even though nothing forced him to do so, and thus adopts a paradigm of care by acknowledging his responsibility towards his kin, both adoptive and biological.

The ethic behind those seemingly unassuming acts of care proves unexpectedly powerful, as it bears much wider implications beyond the private sphere. Several critics, such as Joan

<footnote n="319">³¹⁹ Gilligan, Carol. *In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development*. 1982. Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 73.</footnote>

<footnote n="320">³²⁰ See for instance Wesstein, Naomi. 'Power Resistance and Science: A Call for a Revitalized Feminist Psychology'. *Feminism & Psychology*, vol. 3, no. 2, 1993, pp. 239–45. Joan Tronto (see below) was also critical of Gilligan's gendered approach to morality.</footnote>

<footnote n="321">³²¹ Gilligan, Carol. *In a Human Voice*. Polity Press, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="322">³²² Tronto, Joan C. 'An Ethic of Care'. *Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging*, vol. 22, no. 3, 1998, p. 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="323">³²³ Just because they may be seen as commonplace does not mean that they do not imply true emotional labour and reflection. Joan Tronto has indeed underline that acts of care must take four questions into account: attentiveness to the other’s needs, responsibility, competence and responsiveness (*Ibid*., p. 18).</footnote>
Tronto<sup>324</sup> and Lynne Segal<sup>325</sup>, have advocated for the need to radically rethink our current neoliberal and capitalist systems, which are not sustainable by any means as they encourage the cult of the individual and alienate not only the most vulnerable, who do not have access to proper care, but also humanity as a whole since any form of vulnerability is seen as a sign of weakness<sup>326</sup>. These thinkers urge us to reform our political and economic systems by using care as an ethical and political framework in which interdependence, vulnerability, and nonviolence are no longer seen as weaknesses needing to be hidden but can become pillars for the construction of a fairer world. All forms of care thus seed the ground for a more ethical future. Unearthing the other, as in, actively bridging the gap between self and other by recognising the needs of the other and choosing to bear the responsibility to attend to those needs, enables us to gesture towards a more sustainable, nonviolent way of living. Therefore, even though most of Senior's poems and stories do not explicitly focus on politics, often choosing nature or the private sphere as their setting of choice, the multiple and varied acts of care that are interspersed in the texts nonetheless hint at the underlying presence of an agenda of care. This agenda does not take the shape of an authoritative voice or a unique message, but rather of interspersed seeds pointing to sustainable pathways for the future.

On the one hand, the devastating consequences of a lack of care can be observed in several poems: in 'The Knot Garden', readers can witness the deadly consequences of the choices of a politician who does not care about the needs of his people, while in 'Caribbean Basin Initiative', the author denounces the trade initiative of the same name, created by the United States in 1983 to facilitate trade between the United States and the Caribbean region but which evidently took no account whatsoever of the specific needs and circumstances of the Caribbean countries. One of the features of this policy aimed at liberalising the Haitian economy and redirecting a part of its agricultural production (mostly rice) towards export; however, this also meant that cheap rice imported from the United States entered the market. Haitian farmers could not compete with this cheap imported crop, and many of them eventually lost their source of income – as seems to be the case with the speaker in the poem, whose 'seed / failed to yield / fell on stony ground' (GT 29) and who thus had no choice but to leave the country. On the other hand,

<footnote n="324">324 Tronto, Joan C. *Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care*. Routledge, 1993.</footnote>

<footnote n="325">325 Segal, Lynne. *Lean on Me: A Politics of Radical Care*. Verso Books, 2023.</footnote>

<footnote n="326">326 For instance, Joan Tronto notes that in our current system, those who need care and those who provide it are both subjected to a form of contempt: on the one hand, the former are seen as dependent objects rather than fully-fledged human beings, whereas the latter are also considered as 'other' by those who receive their help in order to create a symbolic distance between the carer and the receiver and thereby maintain a sense of autonomy. See Tronto, Joan C. *Moral Boundaries*. *Op. cit.*, pp. 123-24.</footnote>
however, Senior also foregrounds the healing power of care, which can be a means of overcoming multiple kinds of fractures. This is epitomised by the short story 'Silent', in which Joel and his family, who are used to dire living conditions and daily violence in the suburbs, receive the help of multiple people after the tragic murder of the father. Even though Joel is initially afraid of the police whom he considers as 'dangerous bad men' (PT 23), he is surprised to find out the kindness with which the police officers treat him and his siblings at the police station: a policewoman helps the children use the restroom, a policeman bottle-feeds the baby, and another officer buys them food (PT 26), briefly taking on a parental role while their mother is away. Later on, it is thanks to the help of Miss Simms, the 'young and pretty and rich' employer of the mother, that the family is able to leave the police station (PT 27). Of course, the fact that a wealthy woman should intervene to get the family out of trouble in the first place and that Joel should be conditioned to fear the police points to the intrinsic flaws and inequalities of the contemporary socioeconomic and political system in Jamaica; and yet, Senior seems to show that socioeconomic and political divides can be bridged through small acts of kindness and care towards those who are most vulnerable. Likewise, a similar agenda underpins the story 'The Pain Tree', as the white Creole narrator, Lorraine, is eventually able to find a symbolic reconnection with the black maid, Larissa, through the titular pain tree:

> Before I went back to the house, I spent a long time searching the ground for a nail.
> When I found one, I picked up a stone. I went and stood close to the tree and
> whispered to it, and then I carefully positioned the nail and pounded it with the stone.
> It went straight in.

(PT 17)

This scene is all the more striking as the pain tree had been a topic of incomprehension between the two when Lorraine was a child. Indeed, she had tried hammering a nail into the trunk of the tree several times but failed, which led Larissa to wonder aloud: '[m]aybe people like you don't need the pain tree' (PT 16). The narrator recalls feeling uncomfortable with this remark, probably because Larissa had just shed light on the many differences between them, linked to skin colour but also socioeconomic status. However, the fact that Lorraine should, at last, be able to use the pain tree, just as Larissa did, suggests that she has earned this right through an active effort of retrospection and introspection, which has allowed her to understand her own privileges as well as the systemic inequalities between black and white Creoles. As a consequence, one might understand Lorraine's ability to use the tree as the sign that, for the first time, she has approached Larissa from a genuine place of care, aware of her own circumstances and willing to understand those of the other. Such a conclusion can be read as
naïve: for instance, in an interview with Olive Senior, Claire Westall argued that Lorraine's final act 'works to equalize the two figures, to unite them in an emotional or empathetic fashion that bypasses the structural inequality that the story has worked hard to expose', to which the author replied that she was 'writing not from an ideological posture but out of [her] knowledge of human nature and the interactions that are possible'<fnref n="327" />. In accordance with Senior's answer, I would argue that the ending does not so much undermine the denunciation of the long-lasting fractures between black and white Creoles as it shows that one of the possible ways to durably heal these wounds is by taking a genuine interest in the other. Similarly, the numerous stories and poems depicting traditional farming methods, such as 'Seeing the Light', 'Advice and Devices', or 'Boxed-In', can be read as the sign that the seemingly irremediable wounds imposed by the ever-increasing pace of capitalism onto the earth can be remediated by similar acts of care – even if it means lying down in one's yard for an entire day after planting a pumpkin seed.

Consequently, the ethic of care underlying Senior's work asks us to rethink the way in which we perceive otherness since, as Tronto argues, ""[o]therness" arises out of a failure to recognize care'<fnref n="328" /> in several ways, 'otherness' being here understood as the creation of the 'other' as someone (or something) distant and fundamentally different. However, the poems and stories under analysis demonstrate that through the acknowledgement of a shared vulnerability as well as the specificities of each being, a more sustainable form of kinship can be established – one which radically reshapes the unequal relations which have historically been imposed between coloniser and colonised, between developed and underdeveloped countries, but also between mankind and the earth<fnref n="329" />. Unearthing thus corresponds to an ethical willingness to understand the other, which is precisely what Senior does as she treats all her subjects – both human and nonhuman – with respect, depicting both their flaws and their qualities to allow readers to empathise with them, and avoiding an alienating portrait of complete otherness.

<footnote n="327">³²⁷ Westall, Claire. 'An Interview with Olive Senior'. *The Journal of Commonwealth Literature*, vol. 54, no. 3, Aug. 2017, p. 483.</footnote>

<footnote n="328">³²⁸ *Ibid.*, p. 123.</footnote>

<footnote n="329">³²⁹ In that regard, the ethic of care overlaps with Malcom Ferdinand's theory of a decolonial ecology, which hinges on the questioning of fractures inherited from colonialism and which asks us to consider both humans and the nonhuman: 'En tout premier lieu, il s'agit de reconnaître que la relation coloniale ne se réduit pas à un rapport entre groupes d'humains. Elle comprend aussi des rapports spécifiques aux non-humains, aux paysages, et aux terres à travers l'habiter colonial de la Terre. Cela signifie que l'émancipation de la domination coloniale ne peut se penser uniquement comme un changement du rapport d'humains à humains. Elle implique aussi une transformation du rapport colonial aux paysages et aux non-humains, y compris dans ses formes esclavagistes. L'écologie décoloniale est donc un prolongement écologique des critiques existantes de la fracture coloniale.'
Ferdinand, Malcom. *Une écologie décoloniale : Penser l'écologie dans le monde caribéen*. Éditions du Seuil, 2019, p. 294.</footnote>
In doing so, Senior co-opts the motif of the encounter, a pervasive topos in colonial
narratives which has historically served the purpose of alienating the strange colonial other, and
she reframes it as an ethical necessity to go towards the other and create an encounter –
something which can be done through unearthing, for instance. This caring encounter with the
other is predicated upon both a recognition of a shared vulnerability and an acknowledgement
of differences. Nonetheless, in order to be qualified as what Sara Ahmed calls an ‘ethical
encounter’<fnref n="330" />, this encounter must also symbolically preserve and respect the ungraspability of
the other – ‘the other’ itself being a notion which, as Ahmed reminds us, is first and foremost
created<fnref n="331" /> rather than truly intrinsic to the strangers we meet. This is why Ahmed advocates for
‘a way of working with that which fails to be contained within ontology (being), but also the
figures of “the stranger” or “the other”’<fnref n="332" /> – that is to say, a mode of encountering strangers
(whichever shape they may take) which does not symbolically grasp otherness by precisely
assuming the otherness of the opposite side. In the context of Senior’s collections, in which
unearthing takes centre stage both as a poetics and an ethic, one of the ways of ensuring the
ethical integrity of the encounter might be to leave some things underground, paradoxical as it
may sound.

3.3. *Leaving things underground*

Unearthing silent voices as well as cultural roots in the postcolonial Caribbean context
proves necessary in many ways since, as I have pointed out in the introduction, coloniality and
its aftermath hinge on (physical and symbolic) erasure – which is why, as Glissant has put it,
the writer must ‘dig deep’<fnref n="333" /> into the collective memory in order to recreate a narrative which
can both serve as a counter-archive and as the basis for the (re)creation of a collective identity.
Nonetheless, wanting to reveal what or who is hidden can also become a form of violence
depending on the agenda behind the unearthing process. In the case of extractivism, for
instance, the terrestrial matter which is physically unearthed from the soil is only brought to the
surface to be consumed – this is demonstrated in ‘Boxed-In’, as Mr. Everett worries that the
‘bones of their ancestors’, buried in the red soil which has been bought by mining companies,

<footnote n="330">³³⁰ Ahmed, Sara. ‘Ethical Encounters: The Other, Others and Strangers’. *Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality*, Routledge, 2000, pp. 137–60.</footnote>

<footnote n="331">³³¹ ‘The signifier, “the other”, which is assumed to contain otherness as a character of its “entire being”, hence operates to conceal the particularity of others, who may be other than this alien being.’ *Ibid.*, p. 143.</footnote>

<footnote n="332">³³² *Ibid.*, p. 141.</footnote>

<footnote n="333">³³³ Glissant, Édouard. *Caribbean Discourse. Op. cit.*, p. 64.</footnote>
will be ‘ground up in the red dirt, shipped off to another country to be immortalised in shiny
aluminium saucepans and flying aeroplanes’ (*PT* 110), effectively leaving sacred ground to
become part of consumer society overseas. More generally, wanting to have complete access to
the other can represent a form of voyeurism, an attempt to grasp otherness in its entirety and to
appropriate it. The action of grasping the stranger through the *a priori* construction of otherness
underscored by Sara Ahmed corresponds, to a certain extent, to what Jacques Derrida called the
‘demand for narrative’, which is, according to him, an ‘instrument of torture’<fnref n="334" /> – in other
words, the construction of ‘the other’ as a notion and its *a priori* imposition onto the strangers
we meet also symbolically confines those strangers to a pre-made narrative of difference,
through which we may feel like we know precisely *who* the stranger is. It is significant, in that
regard, that Derrida should mention archaeology and eschatology right before warning the
readers about the dangers of narrative as it enables us to expand Ahmed’s notion of ‘the
stranger’ to include what (and who) is not embodied as well in our analysis – in fact, any attempt
to bring something to light, to put words on something, to make the ungraspable tangible, can
become a form of torture as it symbolically transgresses the integrity of what (and who) was
initially out of reach.

Likewise, despite her clear awareness of the need to make the margins of society heard and
visible, Senior also displays the potential dangers of unearthing. The tension between the need
to unearth the invisible and the violence intrinsic to this same act is epitomised in the story
‘Boxed-In’, which, as early as its title, conveys an idea of uncomfortable restriction and
confinement which may lead us, as readers, to feel the need to free whatever is supposedly
violently ‘boxed in’ – and yet, the diegesis quickly shows that this conclusion is not as obvious
as it may seem. As it turns out, the main character, Mr. Everett, is everything but ‘boxed’ into
clear-cut categories and rather embodies numerous contradictions – he is both a devout deacon
in the Church and a believer in occult forces, a model father and a ‘despoiler of little girls’ (*PT*
100), an extremely wealthy landowner who does not hesitate to lend money with interest to his
peers (thus embodying the principles of capitalism and settler colonialism) and a staunch
defender of his ancestral land… and his awareness of his ‘shadow side’ (*Ibid.* ) accounts for his
distress at the sight of the invasion of Northern American companies and of television on the
island, which completely shatter the world he has worked so hard to protect. In his mind, both
the mining companies and the television represent a form of violent, forced exposure, an

<footnote n="334">³³⁴ Derrida, Jacques. ‘Living On’. *Deconstruction and Criticism*, edited by Harold Bloom et al., translated by James Hulbert, Continuum, 1979, p. 94.</footnote>
unwanted visibility imposed upon the bush, which suddenly becomes visible and open for
foreign companies to seize. The protagonist is said to feel 'his walls [...] crumbling around him'
(*PT* 110) – an image which denotes the literal state of the walls of his thatched house, which no
one cares enough to repair as all the thatchers quit their jobs to work in bauxite companies, but
which can also be understood more metaphorically, since Bennett's entire world – including its
people, its sacred places and its ancestral traditions – is being completely trampled by the
invasion of new cultural and economic hegemonies. In this sense, unearthing the other and
actively seeking contact is clearly a form of ontological violence, as it prevents the other from
'being' and existing as *the other*. A similar idea appears at the end of the poem 'My Father's
Blue Plantation', as the speaker remarks: 'My father's house (I'm told) / is visible from all
directions now / (some crops grow only in young gardens)' (*GT* 86). Seemingly hinting at the
decline of small farming due to the gradual imposition of monoculture and the environmental
decline linked to the climate crisis, this scene also visually denotes a form of excessive
consumption of the island by foreign powers, which thereby deprive small farmers such as the
speaker's father of any form of protection. The vulnerability of the father is made all the more
striking by the geographic and metaphorical distance instilled by the speaker, who has left the
Caribbean and whose use of parentheses signals the fact that she now only hears about her
father through hearsay – as if to protect herself from her father's situation by instilling a form
of emotional distance. However, two elements in 'Boxed-In' also underscore situations in which
unearthing becomes an ethical necessity. On the one hand, this is exemplified by the
community's past of enslavement, which Mr. Bennett tries to bring up to his peers only to be
dismissed, even though, as Bennett points out, the enthusiasm of the mountain people at the
prospect of being bought out by foreign companies represents 'a kind of bondage worse, in one
way, than that of their ancestors' (*PT* 113). On the other hand, Mr. Bennett's paedophilic
activities, which are mentioned at several points in the story without being expanded upon,
create a deeply unsettling subtext. Even though the protagonist's anxiety to protect his rural
community may lead readers to feel for him, it is hardly possible for us to completely
sympathise with a character who is so evidently aware of 'his mastery of words' (*PT* 99) as well
as his status of power in the community as a wealthy man and representative of the Church that
he knows that all his victims, 'down to his own daughters' (*PT* 99), will never be able to make
their voices heard against his own. The story thus epitomises the fact that unearthing is a double-
edged sword, for both its absence and its undertaking can become problematic: the former can
correspond to a form of erasure, while the latter can be understood as a form of trespassing.
This is why, in order not to replicate these forms of violence, the poet(h)ics of unearthing must also leave room for a certain degree of opacity within relationality. Likewise, Glissant stressed the ‘right to opacity’ belonging to all, not *despite* but *within* Relation:

> Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.<fnref n="335" />

Opacity, in this sense, no longer amounts to erasure nor assimilation but involves a recognition, from all parties involved in the encounter, that some things can exist without needing to be grasped, unearthed, or boxed into a narrative for all that. Accordingly, even though Senior's poems and stories are dedicated, in many ways, to the visibility of what is usually invisible and to the presencing of what is usually absent, one might also pinpoint several manifestations of this 'right to opacity' which works to protect the various incarnations of the ""little" tradition'<fnref n="336" /> Senior writes about. This concern lies at the heart of 'Brief Lives' (GT 85), a poem written in *memoriam* of the multiple skeletons the speaker unearths in her garden, but in which the speaker also decides to bury the bones of a dead man back into the earth 'so he can carry on / growing'. While this imagery contributes to the idea of an entanglement between life and death, the action of leaving the skeleton beneath the surface is also highly symbolic, as it foregrounds a form of respect for the dead body. Indeed, while the bones of the man which the speaker unearths first arrived in her yard in violent circumstances, as we learn that he had 'crossed the invisible / boundary into rival political territory' and was probably shot dead by a rival gang, the speaker's choice to bury him again offers the body a chance to be laid to rest for good this time – and the fact that the speaker still relates his story, even after his death, demonstrates that it is possible to honour the memory of someone without needing to have direct access to them. In another poem, 'Advice and Device', the 'right to opacity' takes another shape as the gardener, asked to deliver her secrets, does give the readers a few pieces of advice but always comes back to the same enigmatic sentence, 'Live Right and Do Good' (GT 111). In a sense, this allows the speaker to preserve a form of secrecy around the ancestral gardening traditions which have been passed on to her, keeping them away from greedy eyes which may appropriate and spread those secrets as though they were theirs. Moreover, on a more structural level, the generic characteristics of the two collections help contribute to this opacity, given that neither poems nor short stories can give access to 'the complete picture', as Senior has underlined<fnref n="337" />. While

<footnote n="335">³³⁵ Glissant, Édouard. *Poetics of Relation*. Op. cit., p. 190.</footnote>

<footnote n="336">³³⁶ Senior, Olive. 'The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su'. Art. cit., p. 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="337">³³⁷ Senior, Olive. 'Lessons From the Fruit Stand'. Art. cit., p. 39.</footnote>
we have already seen that brevity and ambiguity help Senior unsettle the myth of a single, authoritative story, they also allow her to preserve a form of dignity for her characters by only giving us glimpses of their lives – glimpses which are layered enough for readers to understand the complexity of the characters, but too brief for us to assume we can truly know everything about them. The ending of ‘Silent’ is a case in point, as it depicts Joel’s family driving away into the mountains with Miss Simms. The closing image of the story is ambiguous, tinged with both hope and pathos as the ‘shimmering’ light of the ‘stars’ which Joel makes out in the night sky is metaphorically associated with the ‘pulsing’ sound of ‘gunshots’ (*PT 28*), thus preventing us from guessing whether Joel’s family will actually be able to heal from the trauma they have undergone. And yet, beyond poetic undecidability, that the story should be brought to a close *in medias res* also helps protect the family from inquisitive eyes and from future violence, as it symbolically restores a form of privacy onto their story and their whereabouts at the same time.

All this exemplifies the different ways in which Olive Senior carefully remaps the boundaries of her plot in order to be both inclusive and respectful of difference, allowing various others – rather than a monolithic, essentialised ‘other’ – to coexist within her literary scape. The *praxis* of relationality which lies at the core of her work allows her to put forward an ethical mode of writing which depicts *and* enacts encounters in which all parties have their place, whether they be human or nonhuman, tangible or intangible. Unlike the European botanical garden, which aims at exhibiting national grandeur through the display of multiple species, Senior’s literary garden is thus closer to the ‘knot garden’ depicted in the poem of the same name (*GT 88*), for it contains multiple nooks and crannies where the most vulnerable can shield themselves from voracious, imperial eyes. Unearthing, as a result, comes to symbolise the ethical movement towards otherness rather than the unilateral appropriation of what lies beneath the ground.

* * *
Conclusion:
Seeds for Thought

While the contemporary period can generally be characterised by a constant redefinition
of cultural and national boundaries on a global scale, this aspect is perhaps epitomised by the
postcolonial, archipelagic region of the Caribbean basin. Shaped by multiple, shifting
thresholds between sea and land, but also by ongoing cultural interactions taking place both
within and beyond the archipelago, as well as the simultaneous needs to cope with a colonial
past and to tackle topical issues such as climate change in order to ensure a viable future, the
Caribbean may appear fundamentally confined to a liminal, shifting state of diffraction. In the
English-speaking Caribbean, as in many other Commonwealth nations, this call for redefinition
was highlighted by the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, as several Caribbean individuals
took this transition period as an opportunity to question their ties with the former Imperial
centre<fnref n="338" />. However, the dynamic lying at the core of Olive Senior's literary output stands against
the impression of a Caribbean defined by intrinsic rootlessness. Throughout her career, the
author has kept unearthing the layers of her native land, bringing to light its history, its cultures
and its idiosyncrasies. This is why this dissertation aimed at exploring whether the dynamic of
unearthing as it is displayed in two of Senior's works, *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain
Tree*, could provide a sense of historical and cultural grounding for the region, without impeding
change and transformation for all that – in other words, whether unearthing could both help
tend to past wounds all the while contributing to the fertile dynamic of endless (re)creation
which characterises the Caribbean, as has been argued by thinkers such as Édouard Glissant
and Daniel Maximin.

In the first part of this analysis, it has been demonstrated that despite the generic brevity
of the two collections, Senior uses her poems and short stories as a literary ground for the
investigation and the re-evaluation of Caribbean history, thereby merging retrospection with the
creation of a neo-archive. Standing against the systemic erasure of colonial violences and their
victims from hegemonic Western archives, Senior's neo-archive excavates, through the tools of

<footnote n="338">³³⁸ In an interview for the NPR, Jamaican MP Lisa Hanna (a member of the People's National Party) claimed that Jamaicans 'certainly want to be architects of their own destiny'. Summers, Juana. 'Jamaica Is Reevaluating Its Relationship with the British Monarchy'. *NPR*, 19 Sept. 2022. *NPR*, https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123926811/jamaica-is-reevaluating-its-relationship-with-the-british-monarchy. Accessed 8 June 2025.</footnote>
literature, erased voices, bodies, places and facets of the Caribbean reality – both past and present. In doing so, the author thus fulfils the political need to re(-)member which has been claimed by many other postcolonial thinkers and writers. However, as we have seen, such an emphasis on memory work risks privileging the political injunction to write *back* to the centre over the need to write *for* the postcolonial Caribbean subjects themselves. This is why the second part of this dissertation explored how Senior's in-depth depiction of her native Caribbean also contributes to the reaffirmation of specific cultural roots, all the while foregrounding the vitality and resilience of her community and simultaneously deconstructing the pessimistic idea of the Caribbean as a postcolony alienated from itself and doomed to sail adrift. This shows that unearthing, as a dynamic of recovery but also a tool of revelation and insistence upon something, can become an empowering motion which both mirrors the resilience of the peoples of the Caribbean and helps the author assert their existence as an inalienable fact. Yet, by foregrounding the presence of historically othered postcolonial subjects, Senior inevitably calls into question the very ideological and epistemological roots which have led to the othering of those subjects. Therefore, the third part of this demonstration focused on the ways in which unearthing can become synonymous with uprooting, as the author sheds light on the arbitrary nature of (neo)colonial ideology, which has imposed specific discourses as hegemonic and transcendental at the expense of other discourses, thereby allowing Senior to unsettle the very foundations of this ideology. Nonetheless, unhealthy weeds, in Senior's texts, are only uprooted in order to prepare the ground for a more viable garden. The author indeed brings other ontologies and epistemologies to the fore which offer other, potentially more sustainable ways of apprehending the world around us – and more specifically, everything and everyone we consider as 'other', as the author invites her readers to engage in an active *praxis* of relationality which stands in sharp contrast with the ideology of exclusion which has shaped colonial ontology, discourses and practices.

This dissertation has thus demonstrated that while the notions of introspection and
retrospection connoted by the term ‘unearthing’ might first lead us to categorise it as a
politically necessary yet sterile activity in a postcolonial context, since a backward gaze cannot
effectively change anything about what has already been done, the dynamic of unearthing as it
is enacted and portrayed by Olive Senior sheds light on the poetic and ethical power of such an
act, which is, in fact, far from sterile. Unearthing, in Senior’s works, turns into a poet(h)ics of
*motion* which consists in tilling seemingly dried-out soil and unsettling unhealthy roots, deep
as they may be, in order to plant healthier seeds. As a result, it appears that Senior fully makes
use of the dissensual and regenerative potential of the plot – as diegesis, literary space, and as
the traditional farming method used by the first peoples of the Caribbean and the maroons –
against the sterile, violent plantation model which was first imposed by the settlers but which
still manifests itself through the perpetuation of the capitalistic, alienating ideologies which it
encompasses. The power of the (literary and physical) plot as a mode of resistance against the
plantation was first theorised by Sylvia Wynter<fnref n="339" />, who nonetheless only included the novel in
her definition of the plot. Olive Senior goes even further as she deploys a kaleidoscope of plots,
in the plural form, across her poetry and short fiction. As it turns out, it is well and truly through
the multiplicity of voices and stories which she unearths in the two collections that the author
questions what Wynter called ‘the myth of history’<fnref n="340" /> underpinning colonial violence. In doing
so, Senior uproots the binary opposition between plot and plantation itself and foregrounds
relational (rather than dichotomous) thinking on both a metatextual and a political level. It is
thus with all her unseeming yet powerful plots that Senior manages to assert the existence and
the vitality of her people, thereby undermining James Froude’s dehumanising assumption that
‘there are no people’<fnref n="341" /> in the West Indies, and that she offers a new perspective on the
possibility of rootedness and transmission in the Caribbean which ultimately qualifies Walcott’s
eloquent, yet reductive assessment of a buried, submarine history in the region.

The reflection on the productivity of unearthing which was developed in this dissertation
finds political resonance within the debates about reparations in a postcolonial context. While
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has recently expressed his reluctance to pay cash
reparations to Caribbean countries in order to compensate for the responsibility of the British
Empire in the slave trade<fnref n="342" />, arguing that he wanted to look towards the future instead, this
dissertation has shown that acknowledging the past and privileging resilience and creation were
not mutually exclusive: on the contrary, they are but two pieces of the same puzzle and are both
necessary to truly '[forge] a common future based on equity'<fnref n="343" />. From an environmental
standpoint, Senior's unearthing and valorisation of traditional farming methods in the
Caribbean resonates with topical worries about the future of the Cavendish banana, which is
one of the main export crops in several regions of the Caribbean basin. Not only has this cultivar
mostly been planted in monocultures since the 1950s to fulfil the ever-increasing demand of the

<footnote n="339">³³⁹ Wynter, Sylvia. 'Novel and History, Plot and Plantation'. *Savacou*, vol. 5, 1971, pp. 95–102.</footnote>

<footnote n="340">³⁴⁰ *Ibid.*, p. 101.</footnote>

<footnote n="341">³⁴¹ Froude, James A. *The English in the West Indies. Op. cit.*, p. 347.</footnote>

<footnote n="342">³⁴² Courea, Eleni, and Aamna Mohdin. ‘Starmer Says He Wants to “Look Forward” and Not Talk about Slavery Reparations’. *Art. cit.*</footnote>

<footnote n="343">³⁴³ *Ibid.*, n/p.</footnote>
international market, but it is also unable to reproduce naturally because it can only be cloned,
and the subsequent poor genetic diversity of the species makes it extremely vulnerable to
diseases. A recent study<fnref n="344" /> has indeed warned about the near extinction of the Cavendish banana
because of the spread of a deadly fungus, and several climate change activists and scholars have
emphasised the need to prioritise social fairness and genetic diversity when it comes to banana
cultivation<fnref n="345" /> – the exact same principles Senior advocates for in her writing. The example of
the banana is but one of many signs of the failings of the current neoliberal, capitalistic system
which has long been regarded as the defining mark of modernity and progress<fnref n="346" />, but which
unavoidably threatens planetary resources – both human and nonhuman – precisely because of
its unrealistic reliance on growth in order to prioritise short-term economic profit. This is why
Senior’s unearthing of traditional cultures and traditions is significant as it foregrounds a
radically different vision of progress, which does not hinge on endless economic growth at the
expense of the planet and its inhabitants, but which privileges the health of all beings and
ocumenical harmony. Furthermore, from a more cultural perspective, Olive Senior’s
valorisation of Caribbean traditions within her writing, such as oral storytelling or Taíno and
African cosmologies, echoes a growing tendency for artists to emphasise their local roots in
their art in the face of a globalised cultural world which remains largely dominated by a few
hegemonic forces. For instance, still within the Caribbean context but beyond the literary
medium, Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny released his sixth studio album entitled
*DeBÍ TiRAR Más FOTOS*<fnref n="347" /> in early 2025, a record in which he incorporates traditional Puerto
Rican genres such as jíbaro, plena, and salsa within his usual reggaeton productions and samples
several influential songs from the musical history of the Puerto Rican archipelago. Through this
blend of tradition and modernity, the artist not only pays homage to his roots but he also spreads
a clear political message, standing against the political and cultural United Statesian influence
over Puerto Rico<fnref n="348" />. This example illustrates how Olive Senior’s unearthing of tradition can
translate across different media genres, and it also testifies to the political power of art as a non-

<footnote n="344">³⁴⁴ Zhang, Yong, et al. ‘Virulence of Banana Wilt-Causing Fungal Pathogen Fusarium Oxysporum Tropical Race 4 Is Mediated by Nitric Oxide Biosynthesis and Accessory Genes’. *Nature Microbiology*, vol. 9, no. 9, Sept. 2024, pp. 2232–43.</footnote>

<footnote n="345">³⁴⁵ This is the case, for instance, of Prof. Dan Bebber and of filmmaker Jackie Turner. See Gray, Louise. ‘The “Banana Pandemic” Destroying the World’s Favourite Fruit’. *BBC, https://www.bbc.com/future/bespoke/follow-the-food/the-pandemic-threatening-bananas.html*. Accessed 10 June 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="346">³⁴⁶ Such a teleological reading of history lay at the core of whig history, and it is also exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s *The End of History* (Free Press, 1992), in which the author posits that ‘the end of history’ has been reached with the symbolic victory of Western liberal democracy after the Cold War.</footnote>

<footnote n="347">³⁴⁷ Bad Bunny. *DeBÍ TiRAR Más FOTOS*. Rimas, 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="348">³⁴⁸ The archipelago is an unincorporated territory of the United States, meaning that it is not a sovereign nation.</footnote>