<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

HAL
open science

# The Poet(h)ics of Unearthing in Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics and The Pain Tree

Alexandra Savard-Chambard

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

## To cite this version:

Alexandra Savard-Chambard. The Poet(h)ics of Unearthing in Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics and The Pain Tree. Literature. 2025. dumas-05323237

HAL Id: dumas-05323237

https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-05323237v1

Submitted on 21 Oct 2025

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# The Poet(h)ics of Unearthing
*in Olive Senior's *Gardening in the Tropics and The Pain Tree*.*

Alexandra Savard-Chambard

Mémoire de recherche de deuxième année de Master
Parcours études anglophones, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon
2024-2025

Sous la direction de Madame Fiona McCann,
Professeure en littérature britannique et irlandaise, Sorbonne Université

Soutenu le 25 juin 2025
Acknowledgements

I would first like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, Fiona McCann, who believed in this project from the start and through its countless metamorphoses. Her insightful comments, thorough proofreading, and unwavering enthusiasm kept me on track in times of doubt. My warmest thanks extend to Vanessa Guignery for accepting to be part of the jury of this dissertation as well as for her invaluable support and guidance over the past year.

This dissertation is the fruit of the enlightening discussions which I have been lucky to have with my professors at the ENS de Lyon and my former colleagues at the University of Oxford. I acknowledge the Bibliothèque Diderot in Lyon and the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, which provided me access to numerous sources and made my research possible.

I am indebted to my friends and family whose support made the twists and turns of the research process far more enjoyable.
Notes

The following abbreviations will be used to refer to the two collections of the primary corpus
throughout this dissertation:

- *GT : Gardening in the Tropics*

- *PT : The Pain Tree*

All translations of critical sources are mine unless otherwise indicated.
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. 3

Notes .................................................................................................................................................. 4

Table of Contents.................................................................................................................. 5

Introduction: Gardening Through History........................................................................ 7

1. The Caribbean: a ghost (hi)story .................................................................................. 8

2. Navigating phantom pains in a postcolonial world ........................................................ 9

3. Olive Senior: the writer as gardener ........................................................................ 12

4. Literature review and research question.................................................................... 15

5. Theoretical framework and outline ........................................................................ 18

Part One: An Archaeology of Place .................................................................................. 21

1. Anatomy of a garden ........................................................................................................ 22

1.1. *Delimiting the plot* .................................................................................................... 22

1.2. *From place to displacement* ............................................................................ 24

1.3. *The other side of paradise* .................................................................................. 28

2. Digging into the strata .................................................................................................... 31

2.1. *A literary archaeology* ........................................................................................ 31

2.2. *(*Post*)colonial hauntings* .................................................................................... 34

2.3. *The (Caribbean) body keeps the score* ................................................................ 37

3. Excavating the ghosts .................................................................................................... 41

3.1. *A quarrel with the archive* .................................................................................... 41

3.2. *Gardening to remember* ........................................................................................ 44

3.3. *The challenges of postcolonial representation* ........................................................ 47

Part Two: Cultivating the Roots .......................................................................................... 51

1. (Dis)anchored selves .................................................................................................... 52

1.1. *A legacy of exile* .................................................................................................... 52
<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>1.2.</td>
      <td>Journeys of (no) return?</td>
      <td>55</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>1.3.</td>
      <td>Rhizomic roots</td>
      <td>58</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.</td>
      <td>Tracing routes of resilience</td>
      <td>61</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.1.</td>
      <td>Creolised ances-trees</td>
      <td>61</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.2.</td>
      <td>(En)gendering transmission</td>
      <td>65</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.3.</td>
      <td>Rebirths and repottings</td>
      <td>69</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.</td>
      <td>From remembrance to creation</td>
      <td>72</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.1.</td>
      <td>The hybrid garden as creative matrix</td>
      <td>72</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.2.</td>
      <td>Storying the community</td>
      <td>76</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.3.</td>
      <td>Presencing the voice(s)</td>
      <td>80</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td colspan="2"><strong>Part Three: Remapping the Garden</strong></td>
      <td><strong>86</strong></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>1.</td>
      <td>Un/settling deep-rooted narratives</td>
      <td>87</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>1.1.</td>
      <td>Uprooting the myth of the single story</td>
      <td>87</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>1.2.</td>
      <td>A poetics of the in-between</td>
      <td>91</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>1.3.</td>
      <td>Making space for other plots</td>
      <td>95</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.</td>
      <td>Grounding the plot</td>
      <td>100</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.1.</td>
      <td>Unearthing 'discredited knowledge' (Toni Morrison)</td>
      <td>100</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.2.</td>
      <td>The ground as primary locus</td>
      <td>104</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>2.3.</td>
      <td>The writer as mapmaker</td>
      <td>109</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.</td>
      <td>Towards a praxis of relationality</td>
      <td>114</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.1.</td>
      <td>Worlding in relation</td>
      <td>114</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.2.</td>
      <td>Seeding an ethic of care</td>
      <td>118</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3.3.</td>
      <td>Leaving things underground</td>
      <td>123</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td colspan="2"><strong>Conclusion: Seeds for Thought</strong></td>
      <td><strong>128</strong></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td colspan="2"><strong>Appendix</strong></td>
      <td><strong>134</strong></td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td colspan="2"><strong>Works Cited</strong></td>
      <td><strong>135</strong></td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
</table>
## Introduction:
Gardening Through History

There are no people there in the true sense of the word,
with a character and purpose of their own [...]. Their
existence is a struggle to keep afloat, and one by one they
go under in the waves.

James A. Froude (1887)<fnref n="1" />

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

Derek Walcott (1979)<fnref n="2" />

The characterisation of the Caribbean as an ahistorical region is a deep-rooted topos in colonial discourse. In the account of his journey to the West Indies, British historian James Anthony Froude concluded that 'there [were] no people there', insisting on the lack of 'character and purpose' of these non-people living on remote islands. While Froude wrote these provocative words at the end of the nineteenth century, his dehumanising gaze points to one of the ideological pillars of colonialism in the New World – that is, the very construction of this world as new and without any 'character' to account for. By using such a rhetoric, colonial powers undermined the very possibility for their colonised subjects to sustain a sense of subjectivity, thereby legitimising their subjection. This ontological erasure left deep wounds for postcolonial Caribbean writers to grapple with, as is underscored by the Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott in his poetic formulation of the founding paradox of the postcolonial Caribbean: how can one recreate a sense of 'character and purpose', to quote Froude's phrasing, in a region whose 'battles', 'martyrs', and 'tribal memory' are irrevocably submerged in a silent 'vault'?

<footnote n="1">¹ Froude, James A. *The English in the West Indies; Or, The Bow of Ulysses*. Longmans, Green & Co., 1888, p. 347.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² Walcott, Derek. 'The Sea is History'. *Collected Poems 1948-1984*. 1986. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992, p. 364.
The poem first appeared in the collection *The Star-Apple Kingdom*, which was published in 1979.</footnote>
# 1. The Caribbean: a ghost (hi)story

When Christopher Columbus first set foot on Caribbean soil on 12th October 1492 along with his Spanish fleet, on an island which was then known as Guanahaní by the Indigenous Taíno inhabitants, the Genoese explorer had no knowledge of the existence of the Americas or even of the Pacific Ocean. Believing he had reached East Asia and thus achieved the initial goal of his 'Enterprise to the Indies', Columbus proceeded to plant the Spanish royal banner, to re-baptise the island as San Salvador in honour of Jesus Christ, and to create, through his accounts of his voyage<fnref n="3" />, the phantasm of the new, exotic 'Indies' in the late-fifteenth-century European imagination<fnref n="4" /> – an inaccurate, exogenous name which alienated the archipelago from its own history and identity. By asserting Spanish domination and naming the region according to a *priori* expectations shaped by his imperial gaze, Columbus enacted the discursive creation of a *terra nullius* full of promises, a clean slate of sorts which was therefore readily available for conquest. Symbolic though it may appear, this initial act of erasure and appropriation is nonetheless significant as it marked a point of no return in the history of the Caribbean.

Indeed, the Caribbean's rebirth as a desirable yet inferior New World through the eyes of the colonisers laid the groundwork for the centuries of colonial and imperialist domination which were to come, under the sway of multiple European colonial powers competing for sovereignty in the Caribbean Sea. On the one hand, the implantation of the Old World on the islands led to the decline of the Indigenous populations, descendants of the Arawakan-speaking peoples of South America, who had already discovered the region centuries before the Santa María flagship did. The Taínos, who represented the majority of the population in the Caribbean region before 1492⁵, quickly suffered the consequences of new epidemic diseases brought by the settlers, as well as the violent repression led by the Spaniards in the Greater Antilles<fnref n="6" />. The physical reality of the Taíno genocide was set in stone as a complete extinction by the settlers, who thereby effectively silenced, through official records, the *de facto* survival of a Taíno minority<fnref n="7" />. On the other hand, the early sixteenth century also marked the beginning of the slave trade: over the course of almost four hundred years, approximately 12.5 million Africans would

<footnote n="3">³ He referred to his discoveries as 'Indian islands' in his letters to the King and Queen of Spain. Columbus, Christopher. *Letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain*. 1493. The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC01427.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Higman, Barry W. *A Concise History of the Caribbean*. 2011. Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 55-57.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Higman estimates the number of Taíno inhabitants in 1492 to be above two million. *Ibid.*, pp. 49-50.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ *Ibid.*, pp. 70-74.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Baracutei Estevez, Jorge. 'Meet the Survivors of a "Paper Genocide"'. *National Geographic*, 14 Oct. 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/meet-survivors-taino-tribe-paper-genocide. Accessed 13 Apr. 2025.</footnote>
be bought into slavery by the Europeans and shipped to the New World, where they were to
work on plantations. The Middle Passage represents yet another form of erasure – of the links
between the enslaved African people and their motherland, but also of the oftentimes nameless
victims whose lives were lost in the ocean<fnref n="8" /> as well as the voices of the enslaved people
themselves, which were erased from colonial archives. The trope of a history-less Caribbean is
therefore both an ideological construct crafted by colonial powers to better assert their
sovereignty, and a paradoxically concrete reality of erased bloodlines, memories and identities.

## 2. Navigating phantom pains in a postcolonial world

Nonetheless, this seemingly buried history would eventually come back to the surface
during the decolonisation period of the mid-twentieth century. Upon the progressive
dismantlement of the French and British Empires after the Second World War, many French-
affiliated islands were assimilated into the former Imperial centre to become part of Overseas
France. The situation was different for the British territories, most of which were granted
independence: Jamaica became the first British colony in the Caribbean to break away from
colonial rule on 6 August 1962, and it was followed by other islands throughout the second half
of the century. Yet, as Derek Walcott underlines in 'The Sea is History', after centuries of
colonisation, these newly independent countries lacked the 'monuments', 'battles' and 'martyrs'
to story themselves not as peripheral, voiceless fragments of a dominant history but as the
authors of their own narratives. One could argue that the tension between the material
irretrievability of the archive and the need for a ground upon which to build a collective identity
was shared amongst all the former colonies; however, this identity crisis was particularly acute
in the Caribbean which, unlike most of these other territories, was recreated – instead of
'simply' appropriated – by colonisation. As the settlers brought in new peoples, languages and
traditions, they irreversibly transformed both the culture and the landscape of the archipelago
into what Martinican poet and essayist Édouard Glissant described as 'something unpredictable
and absolutely new, which is the Creole reality'<fnref n="9" />.

<footnote n="8">⁸ Approximately one in twelve did not make it to the Americas. The numbers I am quoting were used by the former U.S. Deputy Representative to the United Nations in the following speech: Mills, Richard. *Remarks at a UN General Assembly Commemorative Meeting for the Intl Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and Transatlantic Slave Trade*. United Nations, 25 Mar. 2021, https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-at-a-un-general-assembly-commemorative-meeting-for-the-intl-day-of-remembrance-of-the-victims-of-slavery-and-transatlantic-slave-trade/. Accessed 13 Apr. 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Glissant describes the Creolisation process as 'une rencontre d'éléments culturels venus d'horizons absolument divers et qui réellement se créolisent, qui réellement s'imbriquent et se confondent l'un dans l'autre pour donner</footnote>
In the face of this challenge, postcolonial Caribbean writers turned to their pens, for want of spears, to engage in what Jamaican scholar Edward Baugh called a ‘quarrel with History’<fnref n="10" />. Baugh’s combative metaphor is certainly telling, as starkly different points of view emerged and clashed in the literature of the region. Trinidadian-born novelist and essayist V. S. Naipaul, for instance, (in)famously wrote that ‘nothing was created in the West Indies’<fnref n="11" />, thereby painting a pessimistic portrait of the region’s past and subsequent ability to build a future. On the contrary, Derek Walcott asserted that ‘history is irrelevant’ in the Caribbean, and argued in favour of a new blank slate upon which writers could imagine something completely new<fnref n="12" />. Despite their blatantly diverging implications, Naipaul’s and Walcott’s arguments both rely on the same postulate: that of an irretrievable past, and of a fundamentally impossible sense of rootedness in the Caribbean. While Naipaul seems to conceive this as a crippling tragedy, Walcott foregrounds the role of literature as a tool to create the foundations of the future: by asserting that ‘the sea is History’, the poet indeed uses the creative transport of metaphor in order to relocate the Caribbean archive not in written records or in monuments, but in a new, embodied archive – that of the seascape. In keeping with Paul Gilroy’s view of Black identities as a ‘process of movement and mediation’<fnref n="13" /> in his seminal essay *The Black Atlantic*, conceptualising Caribbean heritage through the *topos* of the sea has enabled an entire generation of writers – including, among others, Jean Rhys and her obsession with the *Wide Sargasso Sea*<fnref n="14" /> separating her from her native Dominica, as well as Fred D’Aguiar, who rewrote Walcott’s line into ‘the sea is slavery’<fnref n="15" />, and Kamau Brathwaite, who coined the notion of a ‘submarine’ unity<fnref n="16" /> – to acknowledge the traumatising yet foundational experience of the Atlantic slave trade, all the while reclaiming maritime ebbs and flows as a shifting site of union for Caribbean people both within and across borders, since an increasing Caribbean diaspora was also emerging in the United Kingdom and North America. The ‘transoceanic imaginary’<fnref n="17" />, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey puts it, thus stands out as an appropriate framework in the post-

<footnote>quelque chose d'imprévisible, d'absolument nouveau et qui est la réalité créole.' Glissant, Édouard. *Introduction à une poétique du divers*. Gallimard, 1996, p. 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Baugh, Edward. 'The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History'. 1977. *Small Axe*, vol. 16, no. 2, July 2012, pp. 60–74.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Naipaul, V. S. *The Middle Passage: The Caribbean Revisited*. 1962. Vintage, 2000, p. 20.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Walcott, Derek. 'The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?' *Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs*, vol. 16, no. 1, 1974, p. 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Gilroy, Paul. *The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness*. Verso, 1993, p. 19.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Rhys, Jean. *Wide Sargasso Sea*. 1966. Penguin Classics, 2000.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ D'Aguiar, Fred. *Feeding the Ghosts*. The Ecco Press, 1997, p. 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. *Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean*. Savacou, 1974, p. 64.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. *Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures*. University of Hawai'i Press, 2007, p. 4.</footnote>
independence Caribbean context: by crystallising the possibility to find unity in disparity and anchoring in shiftiness, the sea *topos* represented a way for Walcott and his contemporaries to cope with the discontinuities intrinsic to the history, identity, and geography of the archipelago in a radically new world order which demanded of them to foster a sense of grounding.

However, while the sea imagery sheds light on an integral part of Caribbean cultural identity, this focus also inevitably leaves aside another side of the Caribbean reality: the land itself. Even though the region is named after its sea, the thousands of islands<fnref n="18" /> and the continental territories which make it inhabitable are what defines its existence – '[w]ithout the islands there would be no sea'<fnref n="19" />, as Barry Higman reminds us. By highlighting Transatlantic crossings linked to the slave trade and the 'twice diasporized'<fnref n="20" /> reality of almost half of the Caribbean population in the contemporary period<fnref n="21" />, the maritime *topos* conversely obliterates other experiences: that of the Indigenous peoples who had dropped anchor in the region several centuries before Columbus and created strong spiritual and practical ties with the land, as well as that of the non-diasporic part of the population still living on the islands. Besides, the emergence of public debates about reparative history at the turn of the twenty-first century has further emphasised the conceptual limits of seeing history as unretrievable, shifting and submarine. Whether it be in the context of slavery, Indigenous genocides or stolen artefacts, unearthing silenced 'martyrs' and recovering lost 'monuments' and 'battles' from the 'grey vault' has become essential in order to shed light on the damage of colonisation and imperialism. No matter how distant they may seem, bringing these wounded roots to the surface appears more urgent than ever in a time when former colonial empires all too easily dismiss the issue of reparations as useless, 'very long endless discussions'<fnref n="22" />, conveniently sweeping

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ ‘At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the number of Caribbean islands – land units permanently above sea level that individually occupy at least 1 km² – is about 3,700, of which only 1,600 have names.’ Higman, Barry W. *A Concise History of the Caribbean. Op. cit.*, p. 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ *Ibid.*, p. 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Stuart Hall (‘Negotiating Caribbean Identities’. *New Caribbean Thought: A Reader*, edited by Brian Meeks and Folke Lindahl, The University of the West Indies Press, 2001, p. 28) used this expression to encompass both the initial uprooting of people who left their motherland, mostly India and the African continent, for the Caribbean, and the second uprooting of these people who migrated to other countries, here mostly referring to the Black British community. Hall does not include the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, who ‘very largely no longer exist’ according to him (*Ibid.*, p. 26).</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ This approximation corresponds to the numbers given in the 2024 report on Caribbean demographics issued by the ECLAC division of the United Nations; see Jones, Francis. *Population and Development in the Caribbean (2018–2023)*. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 2024, pp. 22-23.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² These words were pronounced by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer before the Commonwealth summit of October 2024, during which he was to meet the representatives of Caricom, the economic and political union of Caribbean countries. See Courea, Eleni, and Aamna Mohdin. ‘Starmer Says He Wants to “Look Forward” and Not Talk about Slavery Reparations’. *The Guardian*, 23 Oct. 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/23/keir-starmer-slavery-reparations-commonwealth-summit. Accessed 14 Apr. 2025.</footnote>
centuries of repression and millions of victims under the rug by the same stroke. Claiming that
‘the sea is History’ is thus deeply paradoxical: while the radical reclaiming of the archive it
enables denotes the key role of literature as a site of resistance where postcolonial subjects can
reclaim a sense of subjectivity, this statement also risks contributing, albeit indirectly, to the
perpetuation of the ‘conspiracy of silence around the colonial truth’ underlined by Homi
Bhabha<fnref n="23" />. This is why, instead of looking out to the sea, several Caribbean writers have started
looking back to the land itself so as to put forward new ways of grasping the Caribbean social
and natural landscape.

3. Olive Senior: the writer as gardener

Since the question of identity always involves the question of roots, as Stuart Hall has underscored<fnref n="24" />, several writers from the Caribbean region have strayed away from the sea in order to engage with their heritage by using another geographic and literary *topos* as their vantage point – the hinterland. Such is the case of Jamaican writer Olive Senior, who was born in 1941 in the rural region of Cockpit Country, Jamaica and now resides in Toronto. Despite her diasporic position, Olive Senior has constantly given centre stage to her native country across her prolific body of work, which includes six poetry collections, four short story collections, a novel, three books of children’s literature, as well as several works of non-fiction in which she studies the mechanisms of Caribbean society and history. Ever since the publication of her first short story collection, *Summer Lightning and Other Stories*<fnref n="25" />, for which she was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1987, Senior has established herself as a key voice in the contemporary Caribbean literary landscape, both within and beyond Caribbean borders: she was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica between 2021 and 2024, is a regular guest of honour in literary festivals such as the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago or the Calabash Literature Festival in Jamaica, and was recently elected as an International Writer of the Royal Society of Literature in 2024. Her work is characterised by an unwavering attention for the soil, both as a metaphor for heritage<fnref n="26" /> and as a concrete element. Most of her

<footnote n="23">23 Bhabha, Homi. *The Location of Culture*. Routledge, 1994, p. 123.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ '[...] the discourse of identity suggests that the culture of a people is at root — *and the question of roots is very much at issue* — a question of its essence, a question of the fundamentals of a culture' (my emphasis). Hall, Stuart. 'Negotiating Caribbean Identities'. *New Caribbean Thought, op. cit.*, p. 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Senior, Olive. *Summer Lightning and Other Stories*. 1986. Longman, 1989.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Senior's definition of heritage is linked to the metaphor of roots as it encompasses 'everything from the past (our inheritance) that shapes us and serves as pointers to who we are'. Senior, Olive. *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage*. Twin Guinep Publishers, 2003, p. ix.</footnote>
fiction in set in rural Jamaica and gives pride of place to the communities of small farmers similar to the one in which she was born<fnref n="27" />, and the theme of nature serves as a leitmotiv in her poetry – the title of her first collection, *Talking of Trees*<fnref n="28" />, set the tone in that regard. This theme also underpins her latest work of nonfiction, *Dying to Better Themselves*<fnref n="29" />, in which she examines the role of West Indians in the digging of the Panama Canal. Through this anchoring in the land, Senior directs her focus onto the islands in a centripetal perspective, as opposed to the centrifugal motion of the sea metaphor which implicitly posits the island as either a backdrop or a threshold. Senior is not the first Caribbean writer to use the land as her main setting – others such as Maryse Condé, Jamaica Kincaid, and Lorna Goodison have also chosen to use gardens and forests as their setting of choice. In fact, several critics have put forward the role of the soil as a trope in Caribbean women's literature: Olive Ferly has emphasised the significance of the mangrove in women's writing of the Francophone and Hispanophone Antilles<fnref n="30" />, while Pauline Amy de la Bretèque has highlighted the ecopoetic dimension of Creolisation in the works of female writers from the Anglophone Caribbean<fnref n="31" />.

Yet, what truly distinguishes Senior’s writing is not solely her focus on the earth, but rather how she engages with it: under her pen, the soil is no longer a mere frame but becomes something to work on and to work with. As her extensive non-fiction body of work demonstrates, the author’s concern with Jamaican heritage goes beyond surface level and takes on a sociological, historical, and almost anthropological dimension, which highlights her willingness to engage with all the layers of the physical and social landscape of her native country. The theme of labouring the land therefore becomes a metaphor for a tactile, dynamic engagement with the country – an active commitment which can be rephrased as both a poetics and an ethic of unearthing. The morphological root of ‘unearthing’, the ‘earth’, is first modified by the privative prefix ‘un-’ which endows it with the two meanings given by the Oxford English Dictionary: to ‘find in the ground by digging’, pointing to the downward motion of digging the soil and discovering something underneath, and to ‘drive [...] out of a hole or

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Olive Senior has described the influence of her rural childhood on her work in multiple interviews. See for instance this interview with Yvonne Chin at the National Library of Jamaica: *In Conversation with Olive Senior, Poet Laureate of Jamaica 2021-2024*. 2022. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjA9tYK_Bao.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Senior, Olive. *Talking of Trees*. Calabash, 1985.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Senior, Olive. *Dying To Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal*. University of the West Indies Press, 2014.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Ferly, Odile. *A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium*. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Amy De la Bretèque, Pauline. *Vers une poétique féminine de la créolisation*. 2020. Sorbonne Université, Doctoral dissertation.</footnote>
burrow', here connoting an upward dynamic of recovery<fnref n="32" />. The suffix '-ing' then sets the word in motion by giving it a processual aspect: from this perspective, unearthing therein denotes a true form of labour, which bears both poetic and ethical implications. On the one hand, this action demands a clear sense of craft on the writer's part, as the writing itself becomes the spade which uncovers the layers of hidden history; conversely, the poetics of unearthing can also denote the action of reading the text and deciphering what lies between the lines. On the other hand, unearthing, as an act of recovery, signals a clear ethical stance - that is, a commitment to engage with the traumas and enigmas of the past, in order to bring them to the surface and therefore attempt to palliate the alienating narrative of an ahistorical region.

This dynamic of unearthing recurs throughout Senior's entire body of fiction and non-fiction; yet, it is particularly epitomised, though in different ways, in the two works which constitute the primary corpus of this dissertation. First, the poetry collection *Gardening in the Tropics*<fnref n="33" />, published in 1994, relies on the extended metaphor of gardening in order to shed light on Jamaican fauna and flora, but also on the long history of colonisation and imperialism which has shaped the land and its people. Across the four sections of poems, respectively entitled 'Travellers' Tales', 'Nature Studies', 'Gardening in the Tropics' and 'Mystery', Senior paints a vivid portrait of Caribbean society, never hesitating to breach geographical and historical boundaries in order to represent the region in all its diversity. As the title of the collection suggests, Senior implicitly posits herself as the gardener tilling the soil, going back in time to allow multiple fossils to emerge through her writing, and unearthing several centuries of Caribbean history in the process. Likewise, nature stands out as a central theme in the title of Senior's 2015 short story collection, *The Pain Tree*<fnref n="34" />. This collection does not rely on the same poetic devices as *Gardening in the Tropics*, as the ten short stories it includes are set either in the contemporary period or in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, while the unearthing process may be more implicit at first glance, the author's concern with roots - both literal and figurative - remains a driving force throughout this collection as well. Stretching across diverse socio-economic and geographic strata of Jamaican society, the short stories tackle the themes of belonging, history and identity through a wide panorama of characters, ranging from orphaned children and old country women to urban socialites and diasporic voices.

<footnote n="32">³² Stevenson, Angus, and Maurice Waite, editors. 'Unearth'. *Concise Oxford English Dictionary*, 12th ed., Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 1575.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Senior, Olive. *Gardening in the Tropics*. 1994. Insomniac Press, 2005.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Senior, Olive. *The Pain Tree*. 2015. Peepal Tree, 2017.</footnote>
Despite their differences in terms of genre, poetic devices and scope, these two works resonate particularly well within Senior's extensive bibliography: not only do their titles point to a shared anchoring in the soil, but they also seem to echo one another by highlighting two different stages of the author's work. On the one hand, Senior wrote *Gardening in the Tropics* relatively early in her career; as a result, one may interpret the laborious recreation of voices which takes place within the collection as both a personal and a collective quest for the poet, tilling the soil to find her own voice as well as that of her community. On the other hand, *The Pain Tree* was published two decades later, at a time when Senior's reputation was already well established both at home and abroad. Moreover, unlike her previous short story collections, *The Pain Tree* was not written in a short period of time but consists in a compilation of stories which had already been published in various journals, and which were rearranged by the author: the book itself can therefore be considered as the ripened fruit rather than the seed of the writing process. While Senior's work in *Gardening in the Tropics* can be understood as the poet's endeavour to prepare the ground for her career, *The Pain Tree* thus represents the harvest of decades of labour as a writer. Consequently, through the contrapuntal perspectives they offer, the two collections both echo and enrich one another by illustrating different forms of unearthing – the process, and the product.

**4. Literature review and research question**

Olive Senior's fiction and poetry have primarily been analysed by critics in relation to their
strong attachment to place. Senior has repeatedly been praised for her ear and her eye for detail
as a writer, which allow her to map out a nuanced picture of the complexities of Jamaica on the
page. Most of the scholarship surrounding her short stories tackles the theme of voice,
highlighting the significance or Senior's 'oral poetics' in the context of the oral storytelling
tradition in Jamaica<fnref n="35" />, while other critics such as Alison Donnell<fnref n="36" /> and Velma Pollard<fnref n="37" /> have
focused on the realistic aspect of her work, underlining Senior's ability to capture the intricacies
of postcolonial Jamaican society. Nonetheless, despite allowing the author to win the 2016

<footnote n="35">³⁵ See for instance Simpson, Hyacinth. ""Voicing the Text": The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior's Short Fiction'. *Callaloo*, vol. 27, no. 3, June 2007, pp. 829-43; and Bailey, Carol. 'Performing "Difference": Gossip in Olive Senior's Short Stories'. *Constructing Vernacular Culture in the Trans-Caribbean*, edited by Holger Henke and Karl-Heinz Magister, Lexington Books, 2008, pp. 123-38.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Donnell, Alison. 'The Short Fiction of Olive Senior'. *Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English*, edited by Mary Condé and Thorunn Lonsdale, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1999, pp. 117–43.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Pollard, Velma. 'An Introduction to The Poetry and Fiction of Olive Senior'. *Callaloo*, no. 36, 1988, pp. 540–45.</footnote>
questions of *praxis* and agency – of active and productive unearthing, in other words. Even though the discussions surrounding reparations have borne out the need to actively recover the past in order to palliate the systemic silencing of marginalised communities, Derek Walcott’s emphasis on the importance of creation and imagination draws our attention to a potential downfall of unearthing, as both a poetics and an ethic – that is, falling for the lure of what Walcott called ‘the muse of History’<fnref n="45" />. By nurturing only the recuperative process, one could no doubt stumble into the retrospective loop of the nostalgic gaze which, by giving pride of place to the past, could obliterate the pressing issues of the present which also need to be dealt with – including neocolonial and imperialist policies, the climate crisis or the challenges brought about by an increasingly globalised world in which non-hegemonic cultures and traditions struggle to stay afloat<fnref n="46" />. Besides, given the traumatic colonial history of the Caribbean, one could also wonder whether reopening the wounds of genocide, displacement and slavery is truly needed given that it would inevitably stir up past traumas and perpetuate Naipaul’s idea of a region and people doomed by the past – a pessimistic outlook which is ultimately reminiscent of Afro-pessimism, a critical framework which several leading figures of contemporary postcolonial literatures have come to denounce as a sterile project<fnref n="47" />.

Therefore, this dissertation will examine the tension between excavation and creation which lies at the core of Olive Senior's writing. To what extent does the author rely on the dialectic motion of unearthing in order to bridge the gap between the seemingly opposite needs for retrospection and creation in a postcolonial world, by transforming the act of recovery into a healing, (re)generative process which can, in turn, become a practical pathway to rethink the future? Just as gardening involves both a careful tilling of the soil and the planting of new seeds, I shall analyse how the two-fold, downward and upward direction connoted by the term 'unearthing' sheds light on Senior's steady willingness to dig beneath 'crusty exterior[s]' (GT 7) and her ability to create *with*, and not *in spite of*, what she digs up. I will aim to demonstrate

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Walcott, Derek. 'The Muse of History'. *What the Twilight Says: Essays*, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998, pp. 36–64.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Elaine Savory Fido and Carole Boyce Davies write that '[t]he greatest threat to Caribbean life at this time comes from a denial of the spiritual/intuitive/emotional strengths which have developed to sustain the culture in the past' in the face of the growing cultural hegemony of the United States. Boyce Davies, Carole, and Elaine Savory Fido, editors. 'Introduction'. *Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature*, Africa World Press, 1990, p. 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ For instance, Nigerian writer and Booker Prize winner Ben Okri denounced the danger of what he calls a 'mental tyranny' in Black writing: see Okri, Ben. 'A Mental Tyranny Is Keeping Black Writers from Greatness'. *The Guardian*, 27 Dec. 2014. *The Guardian*, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/27/mental-tyranny-black-writers. Accessed 15 Apr. 2025.</footnote>
that unlike Charles Baudelaire, who aimed to transform mud into gold with his poetry<fnref n="48" />, Senior’s literary alchemy does not necessarily seek or need to go beyond the mud; instead, it is through a careful and caring engagement with Jamaican ‘grung’<fnref n="49" /> that the author opens the ‘door into enchantment’ (PT 168) in her writing.

**5. Theoretical framework and outline**

Just as ‘crossroads, crosses, crossings’<fnref n="50" /> play a crucial part in *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain Tree*, this dissertation, too, finds itself at the intersection between several critical fields. My analysis is first and foremost indebted to postcolonial theory, an academic field which emerged in the later decades of the twentieth century along with the seminal works of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. These three thinkers highlighted the obliteration and subjection of the (ex-)colonial ‘other’ in and through hegemonic discourses, thereby shedding light on the fault lines of the ideologies and discursive concepts inherited from the colonial era. As ‘a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past’<fnref n="51" />, to borrow Leela Gandhi’s definition, postcolonial theory fully intersects with the paradox of a silent and silenced history which nonetheless urgently needs retrieving – a paradox which lies at the heart of Olive Senior’s poet(h)ics of unearthing. In particular, Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the voice of the subaltern will play a key part in my analysis, as the voices which Senior represents (or re-presents) on the page will lead me to question Spivak’s sweeping verdict, when she argues that ‘in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak’<fnref n="52" />. And since the work of postcolonial theorists often consists in subverting or outright rejecting the idea of essential and essentialising boundaries, this postcolonial framework will also be punctually supplemented with the theoretical tools of other fields, such as Judith Butler’s and Achille Mbembe’s theories

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ In a draft which was to be published in the epilogue for the second edition of *Les Fleurs du mal*, Baudelaire wrote: ‘Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or’. Baudelaire, Charles. *Œuvres posthumes et correspondances inédites*. Quantin, 1887, p. 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ ‘Grung’ is the patwa word for ‘ground’. See Senior, Olive. ‘The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-Su: Finding a Literary Voice: The Twelfth Annual Philip Sherlock Lecture’. *Journal of West Indian Literature*, vol. 14, no. 1/2, 2005, p. 36.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Dash, J. Michael. “‘Poetry with a Plot’”. *Art. cit.*, n/p.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Gandhi, Leela. *Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction*. 1998. 2nd ed., Columbia University Press, 2019, p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">⁵² Spivak, Gayatri. Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ *Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture*, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Macmillan, 1988, p. 287.</footnote>
on the differencing of vulnerability which will shed new light on the political dimension of Senior’s ethic of unearthing.

Nevertheless, beyond the (post)colonial superstructure which inevitably influences Senior’s work, the earth remains both the grammatical and thematic root of this dissertation, both as the local, bounded space of the Caribbean and as a universal element which we all inhabit and to which we will all return – earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, reads the *Book of Common Prayer*<fnref n="53" />. My analysis thus builds upon the work of Caribbean thinkers, such as Daniel Maximin, Derek Walcott, and most significantly Édouard Glissant, who drew on Deleuze and Guattari’s framework and coined the idea of a rhizomic identity defined by its openness<fnref n="54" />. Glissant’s reframing of identity as a relational process which necessarily encompasses otherness, rather than as the territory enclosed on itself suggested by its etymological root, *idem*, lays the groundwork for the oscillation between the local and the global in my dissertation. Given that the earth is indeed a shared habitat for all species, my reflection therefore draws upon theories of the Anthropocene, particularly with regards to critical revisionings of the concept, as well as geocriticism, in order to better apprehend the relationship between space, place, and literature.

This theoretical framework is not exhaustive, and my analysis of Senior’s works will, from time to time, lead me to borrow from other critical fields. Yet, the intersection between postcolonial theory and theories of the earth, in all its shapes, embodies the central tension borne out by the term ‘unearthing’: that is, the meeting point between grounded, tactile, familiar matter – the earth – and something more shifting, abstract, and *unfamiliar*. From a metaphorical perspective, what demands unearthing can therefore refer to multiple things, including what is hidden beneath the surface, whichever shape it may take, but also the invisible boundaries and superstructures which underlie and shape our world through less noticeable forms. Just as the word ‘unearthing’ denotes the semantic and physical threshold between the two areas, the methodology I use throughout this dissertation considers the interplay between the tactile and the intangible, the local and the universal, and literature and *praxis* – and as a matter of fact, I will aim to demonstrate that it is precisely the fruitful mingling of the two domains which Olive Senior manages to accomplish in *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain Tree*.

<footnote n="53">⁵³ ‘At the Burial of the Dead’. *The Church of England*, https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/burial-dead. Accessed 18 May 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Glissant, Édouard. *La cohée du lamentin*. Gallimard, 2005, p. 37.</footnote>
In the first part of my analysis, entitled ‘An Archaeology of Place’, I will analyse the way
in which unearthing the layers of postcolonial Jamaica enables Senior to flesh out a strong sense
of place in the two collections under study. By countering picturesque representations of the
tropics and reinscribing the island in a wider chronology, Senior fully tackles the task of the
postcolonial writer and manages to bring to light silenced voices and (hi)stories, revealing both
systemic and more concrete dynamics of violence in the process. Yet, in the second part entitled
‘Cultivating the Roots’, I will demonstrate that the retrospective dynamic of excavation does
not inhibit present nor future action; on the contrary, unearthing is only the first step of a process
which then paves the way for the (re)creation of life and identities from the soil itself. From a
metatextual point of view, this creative potential is encapsulated by Senior’s ability to recreate
characters’ voices on the page, as though the word truly became flesh within the collections –
and the almost tactile materiality of the texts is no doubt what gives them their impact. This is
why, in my third part entitled ‘Remapping the Garden’, I will attempt to show that Senior’s
writing stands at the threshold between poetics and *praxis*. Indeed, the various voices which
emerge out of the author’s pen jeopardise the very possibility for a single story to emerge and
ultimately undermine the discursive and epistemological Western constructs which have
confined these voices into the position of the colonial, subaltern ‘other’. Instead, the joyful
instability of the texts sheds light on other ways to live in the world, mapping out potential
futures in which the garden becomes a fully fleshed entity to live *with* rather than something to
tame and profit from.

* * *
Part One:
An Archaeology of Place

Throughout her literary career, Olive Senior has built up strong ties with her native Jamaica, in both a purely geographic and a more symbolic sense. Not only does she regularly visit the island and use it as the backdrop for most of her writing, but through her participation in literary festivals as well as the numerous awards, titles, and prizes which she has been attributed by various institutions around the world, she has also emerged as one of the representative literary voices of the country on an international scale. This distinction sheds light on the fact that the notion of place itself denotes more than just the sum of its concrete components. Indeed, its seemingly stable boundaries can open up to encompass more nebulous elements, such as the distinct faces which are associated with it, but also, more broadly, the narratives which are embedded in the landscape, endowing it with the impalpable yet powerful values, legends and customs which give it meaning: ‘one can only inhabit haunted places’<fnref n="55" />, as Michel de Certeau asserts.

Nonetheless, this two-fold definition of place proves problematic in the context of an island surrounded both ‘by water’ and ‘by a history of interruptions, of silence’<fnref n="56" />, to borrow the syllepsis used by M. NourbeSe Philip in an essay about Trinidad and Tobago; stricken by these discontinuities, Jamaica thus seems fundamentally deprived from these narratives. This is why it is all the more significant that Senior should continuously write (about) Jamaica, giving life and – perhaps more importantly – meaning to her homeland under her pen. In this first part of my analysis, I will focus on the ways in which Senior’s simultaneous construction and deconstruction of place in *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain Tree* correspond to a form of literary archaeology which, in turn, endows the place with newfound meaning. Unearthing, as a process of excavation, allows the author to portray Jamaica – and the Caribbean, more broadly speaking – as a full-fledged place with its own ‘monuments’ and ‘martyrs’, to quote Walcott, thereby undermining the myth of a history-less region and building a new archive of its ongoing forms of violence.

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ ‘On n’habite que des lieux hantés’. de Certeau, Michel. *L’invention du quotidien, I: Arts de faire*. 1980. Gallimard, 1990, p. 162.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ NourbeSe Philip, M. ‘A Piece of Land Surrounded’. *Writing It Down for James*, edited by Kurt Brown, Beacon Press, 1995, p. 31.</footnote>
# 1. Anatomy of a garden

## 1.1. Delimiting the plot

Before unearthing anything from the soil, one must first delimit the plot which will be worked on – and if there is one topos which emerges from Senior's literary works, it is clearly the Jamaican soil. Senior's unwavering attention for her native place is one of the trademarks of her writing, so much so that after *The Pain Tree* was published, critic Hyacinth Simpson titled her review of this collection 'Writing Jamaica, Once Again'<fnref n="57" />, thereby emphasising the repetitive, almost predictable nature of Senior's setting of choice. Accordingly, from their very first pages, both *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain Tree* establish the perimeter which will remain the focal point throughout most of the stories and poems – that is, Jamaica.

The opening poem and story of each collection both depict an entrance on Jamaican soil, which helps the author set the stage for the subsequent pages all the while immersing the readers in a specific, delineated setting. In *The Pain Tree*, Senior plays with the notion of thresholds by creating a mirror effect between the metatextual and the diegetic levels, as the readers' entrance into the collection echoes the movement of the narrator in the opening story, 'The Pain Tree', who has just 'arrived home' in Jamaica after living abroad for more than fifteen years (PT 7). The physical homecoming of the narrator is further mirrored by a metaphorical return to her childhood years, as she is simultaneously overcome by the memory of the maid who took care of her as a child, Larissa. While the sense of anchoring which emerges from the short story collection relies on diegetic elements which, one may argue, are specific to prose writing, Senior creates a similar sense of place at the beginning of *Gardening in the Tropics* through the tools of poetry, by playing with visual elements. Indeed, 'Gourd' (GT 7), which opens the collection, is a concrete poem shaped after its title<fnref n="58" />: the gourd, or calabash, is a fruit that is native to tropical America<fnref n="59" /> and which has become a recurring symbol in the literature of the region<fnref n="60" />, even giving its name to the biennial Calabash Literary Festival of Jamaica. The visual effect is striking and creates an immersive reading experience, as the representation of a symbol of the island on the page immediately ushers the readers into the Jamaican landscape. Moreover, the

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ Simpson, Hyacinth. 'Writing Jamaica, Once Again: Review of Olive Senior's *The Pain Tree* (2015)'. *Short Fiction in Theory & Practice*, vol. 6, no. 1, Apr. 2016, pp. 103–06.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ The poem is included in the Appendix (Fig. 1).</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ Senior, Olive. *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage*. Op. cit., p. 91.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ The calabash can be found under a variety of names – calabash, kumbla, or gourd, among others – in the works of Jamaican writers Erna Brodber (*Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home*. New Beacon, 1980, p. 130) and Lorna Goodison ('Inna Calabash'. *To Us, All Flowers Are Roses*. University of Illinois Press, 1995, pp. 35-37), for instance.</footnote>
stem of the gourd, created from the perpendicular intersection of two occurrences of the word ‘gourd’, takes on a cross-like shape which also resembles that of a compass, therefore reinforcing the impression that a geographical setting is being (re)created under our eyes within the pages: the poet has delimited the plot, and the readers must now navigate the collection accordingly.

Once those thresholds have been crossed, and once the setting has been established, both collections sustain this clear anchoring in the Jamaican – and Caribbean – landscape. From a strictly descriptive standpoint, most of the poems and short stories take place in Jamaica; and yet, it quickly appears that the place becomes more than a mere backdrop, as the poetic choices of the author actively emphasise its presence to the point that it seems to become the main character at times. In *Gardening in the Tropics*, the visual immersion in the land established by the first poem extends into a play with colours across the collection: ‘Meditation on Yellow’, the first poem of the ‘Travellers’ Tale’ section, fleshes out the various hues of yellow which can be found in the Caribbean, ranging from the blazing afternoon sun to the precious metal which first drew Columbus to the island (GT 11), while ‘Meditation on Red’, the second colour poem in the collection, is an homage to Jean Rhys who was known for contrasting the bright colours of her Caribbean childhood with the grey tones of the hostile English soil which welcomed her as a young adult<fnref n="61" />. These ‘Hot Tropical Colours’, as the speaker puts it in ‘My Father’s Blue Plantation’ (GT 86), make for a vivid, almost ekphrastic-like composition which inevitably draws the readers’ eye to the landscape. The short story collection, on the other hand, does not rely as much on visuals; however, it still clearly reminds the readers of the (mostly) Jamaican setting in which the stories take place not only through the diegesis itself, but also through sometimes minute lexical touches which take on a synecdochic dimension and colour the rest of the narrative with similar ‘Hot Tropical Colours’. For instance, the setting of ‘Moonlight’, the second short story, is never explicitly mentioned in the narration, and can therefore mostly be inferred through the clear echoes from ‘The Pain Tree’ which precedes it. Yet, the mere mention of the ‘veranda’ (PT 18) is evocative of a wider cultural landscape: indeed, as Nicole Ollier reminds us, the veranda is a ‘real Caribbean institution’<fnref n="62" /> which is part and parcel of the traditional architecture of the region. All this confirms, as Louis James has argued in regard to

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ The diasporic protagonist of *Voyage in the Dark* underscores the stark contrast between ‘heat, cold; light, darkness; purple, grey’ in the very first paragraph of the narration; see Rhys, Jean. *Voyage in the Dark*. 1934. Penguin Books, 2000, p. 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² ‘[...] la véranda, véritable institution caribéenne, lieu ouvert mais couvert, hybride et transitionnel d’échange avec l’extérieur’. Ollier, Nicole. ‘Voix jamaïcaines : Olive Senior, une révolution tranquille’. *Babel. Littératures plurielles*, no. 40, Dec. 2019, n/p.</footnote>
the short story form, that ‘detail is used to create significant space’<fnref n="63" />– and this statement also applies to Senior’s poems, in which simple brush strokes come together to create a vibrant picture of the Caribbean on the scale of the collection.

Yet, the sense of expansiveness which Senior creates through details is not merely poetic, as it is mirrored by an actual, almost encyclopaedic ambition in the two collections. *The Pain Tree* and *Gardening in the Tropics* present us with a variety of people, natural species, and even geographical places, thereby creating a sweeping picture of the social and natural landscape of the Caribbean. In that regard, it is significant to note that Senior did publish an *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage* in 2004, and that she used to work as a journalist before she turned to literature<fnref n="64" /> – and rather than establishing a clear distinction between the two domains, Senior seems to draw from her scientific skills in her literary work. Across the ten short stories gathered in *The Pain Tree*, the collection takes the readers on a journey across various sides of Jamaican society, going from well-off families in the first two stories to working-class realities in the next three, occasionally leaving the island for Canada in ‘Lollipop’ before coming back to rural Jamaica at the end of the collection. While the poetry collection is arguably comparatively less concerned with the display of the various socioeconomic situations which make up contemporary Jamaican life, the poems of its second section, entitled ‘Nature Studies’, each focus on a specific species of the Jamaican fauna and flora. Through the accumulation of textual fragments, *The Pain Tree* and *Gardening in the Tropics* therefore map out an extensive, sweeping view of Jamaica for the readers to grasp. Combined with Senior’s attention to detail, such a panorama of the Jamaican landscape seems to create a bird’s eye view, which, in turn, may convey an impression of safety to the readers – as though we had a ready-made map in our hands, allowing us to witness the entirety of the country in all its nooks and crannies.

## 1.2. *From place to displacement*

However, the impression of stability which emanates from this seemingly smooth, stable surface is constantly undermined, as both collections withhold any sense of complete certainty from the readers. While the clear geographic and cultural anchoring of the stories and poems

<footnote n="63">⁶³ James, Louis. 'The Other Side of the Mirror: The Short Stories of Jean Rhys and Olive Senior'. *Journal of Caribbean Literatures*, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, p. 193.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Velma Pollard describes Senior’s early career in more detail in ‘Olive Senior: Journalist, Researcher, Poet, Fiction Writer’. *Callaloo*, no. 36, 1988, pp. 478–79.</footnote>
seems to delimit clear-cut boundaries, these boundaries eventually prove blurrier than they may seem at first glance as anchoring quickly gives way to displacement. The ambiguity between place and displacement in the Jamaican and broader colonial context is similarly illustrated in the poem 'What the Mapmaker Ought to Know' by Jamaican writer Kei Miller, published just a year before *The Pain Tree* in the Forward-prize winning collection *The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion*. The poem is staged as a warning to a Western mapmaker trying to chart the Jamaican territory:

On this island things fidget.
Even history.
The landscape does not sit
willingly
as if behind an easel
holding pose
waiting on
someone
to pencil
its lines, compose
its best features
or unruly contours.<fnref n="65" />

The notion of a 'fidgeting' landscape resonates particularly well with Senior's two collections, as the impression of a familiar, stable, deictic setting which is established in the texts – a sense of 'here', in other words – is constantly destabilised by the lurking presence of an elusive, indeterminate 'there'. For instance, while the *incipit* of the short story 'The Pain Tree' explicitly anchors the collection in rural Jamaica through the centripetal movement of Lorraine, the diasporic protagonist, the feeling of homeliness which one may expect to emerge from this island laden with memories is unexpectedly jeopardised by an uncanny atmosphere from the very beginning. Indeed, as Lorraine returns to her childhood home, the memory of Larissa is so intense that it blurs the boundaries between past and present, as well as absence and presence: the narrator has 'a vision of her' which, she notes, 'seemed so real', because Larissa's presence felt 'so palpable' (PT 7). The ambiguity between the *de facto* absence of the childhood nanny, who left the house years before Lorraine's return, and the fact that the protagonist feels a tangible presence, a feeling emphasised through the repetition of the intensifier 'so', conveys the impression of an all-but-familiar landscape that is peopled with ghosts. This idea is epitomised by the word 'vision', which, through its association with sight (hallucinatory as it may be), evokes the word 'spectre' – another term which also connotes sight as it is

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Miller, Kei. 'What the Mapmaker Ought to Know'. *The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion*. Carcanet, 2014, p. 15.</footnote>
etymologically derived from the Latin verb specio ('to look at'). The question of the existence
of ghosts, raised by Larissa's simulacrum, then recurs in various shapes throughout the short
story collection: the child narrator in 'A Father Like That' mentions that 'everybody know the
wash-house haunted' (PT 39), while the protagonist in 'Boxed-In', Mr. Everett, believes in
'trafficking with the spirits' (PT 110) in order to gain more knowledge and power in the visible
world. The supernatural is even more blatantly present in *Gardening in the Tropics* – even
'Gourd', the opening poem, hinges on a dichotomy between a concrete, down-to-earth
dimension and a more abstract, mythical one, as the unassuming 'humble took-took' transforms
into a 'cosmic container' used to invoke the gods of Taíno mythology<fnref n="66" /> (GT 7). Moreover,
beside the tension between the visible and the invisible worlds, the boundaries of the Jamaican
setting also seem threatened by the sometimes-encroaching presence of an actual, tangible
elsewhere – that is, foreign countries. In that respect, it is significant that the first section of the
poetry collection should be 'Travellers' Tales', since it lays emphasis on movement, travel and
international relations before the next two sections, 'Nature Studies' and 'Gardening in the
Tropics', re-anchor the collection on Caribbean soil. As a result, just as the physical boundaries
of the Caribbean archipelago are naturally in-between two elements – land and sea –, so, too,
do the limits of the plot in Senior's poetry and fiction become uncannily liminal, making way
for otherness within the familiar territory of place. In geocritical terms, this tension is
reminiscent of the distinction between space and place, which Robert Tally summarises as
follows:

> Place can then be understood as a relatively fixed, stable, and thus familiar or at least
> recognizable point, whereas space partakes of the mobile, dynamic, or unfamiliar.
> Space is likewise associated with the freedom, but also the peril, that comes from
> being away from home or being on the move.<fnref n="67" />

The dichotomy between the stability and familiarity of place on the one hand, and the movement
and unfamiliarity of space on the other lies at the core of Senior’s worldbuilding, which
constantly juxtaposes ‘recognizable’ bearings with an undercurrent of ‘freedom’ and ‘peril’.

In fact, the author seems to instil this sense of peril on purpose through the choice of
fragmentary forms. While short fiction and poetry can create a strong sense of place in very few
words, this sense of place is ultimately destabilised by the alternation between different points
of view within the same collection, making for a heterogeneous, kaleidoscopic view rather than

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Orehu, the water spirit mentioned in the poem, is associated with the Indigenous folklore of Guyana. Senior, *Olive. Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage. Op. cit.*, p. 508.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Tally, Robert T. *Topophrenia: Place, Narrative, and the Spatial Imagination*. Indiana University Press, 2019, p. 18.</footnote>
an exhaustive, omniscient one. For instance, the juxtaposition of the short stories 'Lollipop' and
'Boxed-In' in *The Pain Tree* is a case in point of this defamiliarizing effect as they each
encapsulate strikingly different worldviews through the same use of internal focalisation. In
'Lollipop', the main focaliser is a young girl, Katie, who has just left her grandmother's house
in Jamaica to join her mother in Toronto. Yet, being unaccustomed to her new place, Katie
becomes extremely suspicious of her surroundings and endows the entire narrative with fear, as
everything around her seems to shapeshift and become frightening – including the vacuum
cleaner, the boys in her neighbourhood, the perspective of being the new student at school, but
also 'The Man', who looks after the building and its residents. On the contrary, the focaliser in
'Boxed-In', Mr. Bennett, is an older man who is accustomed to power in all its forms, as a
landowner, implied voyeur and rapist, and ghost whisperer. Consequently, his outlook on life is
completely different from that of Katie, as his perception of his surroundings smacks of distance
and control – that is, until he discovers the existence of television. A similar contrast can be
found in the poem 'Caribbean Basin Initiative', which opens on an extract from the travel
diaries of Mary Kingsley, a British explorer and staunch advocate of British imperialism on the
African continent, only to foreground the experience of a Haitian farmer trying to flee the
economic and political crisis of his own country in the rest of the poem, therefore giving us two
very different perspectives on the trope of the robinsonade (GT 29). The recurring juxtaposition
of contrasting gazes throughout the two collections thwarts the readers' horizon of expectation,
making it nearly impossible to find and keep stable bearings as we read the stories and poems.
The compass-shaped stem which opens *Gardening in the Tropics* is thus programmatic, as the
deictic, reassuring *hic et nunc* is constantly set in motion and in tension. By blurring the
boundaries of the very plot she establishes, the author creates a push and pull dynamic with the
readers, who need to engage in a specific hermeneutics and are continuously led to reevaluate
their surroundings upon reading the texts.

As the seemingly stable map of Jamaica crumbles in our hands, Senior implicitly sheds light
on the arbitrariness of the notion of place itself, which is, as Robert Tally argues, both
'profoundly subjective' – meaning that the stability and familiarity one associates with it are
not inherent – and 'a form of subjection'<fnref n="68" />. This second aspect is epitomised in Kei Miller's
poem, in which we witness the quiet resistance of the landscape, struggling against the gaze of
the painter-cartographer who, by trying to 'pencil its lines' on a map or a canvas, is imposing
an unnatural form of fixity onto it. Likewise, Senior's poetics of displacement implicitly sheds

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Tally, Robert T. *Topophrenia. Op. cit.*, p. 18.</footnote>
light on the readers' need to find easy bearings within the texts and calls into question broader issues of representation in the Caribbean, as a place which has historically been mapped out for colonial purposes.

### 1.3. The other side of paradise

By choosing to portray Jamaica not as a smooth, Cartesian space but as a multilayered, shifting – and sometimes ghostly – landscape, Olive Senior inscribes her work within a political agenda of counter-representation, against a long historical record of misrepresentations of the Caribbean as a picturesque, idyllic place. The *topos* of the Caribbean region as a paradise dates back to Columbus's first voyage to the New World in the late fifteenth century, as Supriya Nair explains:

> His itinerary from west to east was in part dictated by his conviction that the Garden of Eden lay in the southern hemisphere, and he believed he had found it as he wandered through the prolific wildlife and foliage and the cerulean seas of the West Indies and South America.<fnref n="69" />

Nair herein highlights the intrinsic link between the founding myths of Christianity and colonisation: for the European explorers, the uncharted waters of the New World encapsulated the possibility for Man to recover the prelapsarian Eden, lost during the Fall. By painting the Caribbean as the Garden of Eden, colonisers further legitimised their enterprise: since the Garden was theirs to begin with, then it was only natural for them to take possession of it again. In that sense, Columbus's renaming of the first Bahamian island that he discovered as San Salvador testifies to the Adamic gaze which the colonisers held towards these supposedly new lands. The interplay between religious and colonial narratives is borne out in the poem 'Seeing the Light' by the Taíno speaker, who puts the concepts of '[c]onquista', '[e]vangelismo' and '[c]ivilización' on the same ideological footing (GT 95, italics in the original). In addition, the ambition to recover paradise lost was supplemented by another kind of narrative, which posited the Caribbean as a utopian Eldorado full of riches: discovering the New World was therefore not a mere question of salvation, but also a matter of greed. Nonetheless, Columbus and his men were soon to discover that there was no gold to be found in Jamaica, as the speaker ironically notes in 'Meditation on Yellow':

> It's just that copper and gold hammered into guanin
> worn in the solar pendants favoured by our holy men

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Nair, Supriya M. *Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours*. University of Virginia Press, 2013, p. 6.</footnote>
fooled you into thinking we possessed the real thing
(you were not the last to be fooled by our
patina)

(GT 11)

The enjambment between the last two lines of this excerpt creates a delaying effect and lays
emphasis on ‘patina’, as though the speaker were quietly mocking the Spanish settlers who
were gullible enough to believe that this glossy sheen could be ‘the real thing’. Moreover, as
the word ‘patina’ gains visual and sonic weight by standing alone at the end of the stanza, it
also draws attention to the notion of discrepancy between appearances and reality which, to this
day, still plagues the Caribbean.

Just as the colonial fantasies of the Garden of Eden and Eldorado were forcefully imposed
onto the archipelago by foreign eyes, the region is indeed still beset by romanticising narratives
of an exotic tourist paradise. Senior points to this ongoing misrepresentation through the
mention of ‘Hot Tropical Colours’ (GT 86), the ‘Hot Tropical Sun’ (GT 86), and ‘Rare Tropical
Birds’ (GT 90) in the poetry collection. The repetition of the adjective ‘tropical’, as well as the
semantic blurriness of ‘hot’, which alternatively denotes physical heat and visual warmth,
underscore the shallowness of these commonplaces, while the adjective ‘rare’ connotes the
greed of the Western eye for anything exotic, echoing Columbus’s quest for rare metals back in
the fifteenth century. A similar nod to these clichés is included in the short story ‘Flying’, in
which Jonathan, a diasporic Jamaican man coming back to the island after several years spent
abroad, cannot help but feel disappointed to see that ‘[t]here were no forest-clad mountains
meeting the sea, as he had seen in the pictures of this tourist paradise’ upon his return (PT 160).
All this demonstrates that even though the Caribbean is ubiquitous in popular imagery, these
images do not necessarily help make the place visible – on the contrary, the tropical imagination
rather seems to contribute to the symbolic erasure of a region which has more to offer than
tourist resorts.

In the face of these stubborn clichés, several Caribbean writers and artists have endeavoured
to show that ‘[t]he Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives’<fnref n="70" />, as Derek Walcott put it in his
1992 Nobel Lecture. For instance, in her 1988 essay entitled *A Small Place*<fnref n="71" />, Jamaica Kincaid
develops a cutting satire of the tourist gaze in Antigua, while more recently, the exhibition *Joiri
Minaya: Unseeing the Tropics at the Museum*, displayed from January to May 2025 at the Art

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Walcott, Derek. 'The Antilles, Fragments of Epic Memory: The 1992 Nobel Lecture'. *World Literature Today*, vol. 67, no. 2, 1993, p. 266.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Kincaid, Jamaica. *A Small Place*. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988.</footnote>
Museum of Syracuse University, New York, invited the viewers to unpeel the layers of representation which have shaped the Western understanding of the tropics through a journey along the artwork of Dominican-United Statesian visual artist Joiri Minaya. Likewise, Senior's work displays a commitment to represent the Caribbean in all its complexities, rather than as the silky-smooth surface which may be expected by readers unfamiliar with the region. Her willingness to put forward 'a literature that is being written from the inside instead of the outside looking in'<fnref n="72" /> translates into a specific attention for what (or who) usually goes unnoticed, constantly looking beyond the surface to unearth the layers of the landscape – and interestingly enough, both *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain Tree* open onto an invitation to dig deeper in their first pages. In the poem 'Gourd', the poetic voice, gazing at the humble fruit, explicitly wonders 'what lies underneath that crusty exterior' (*GT 7*), therein announcing the unearthing of various voices which will occur in the rest of poems. In the short story 'The Pain Tree', this active confrontation with the place, especially in regard to what it does not show, takes on a more explicit dimension. Indeed, we witness Lorraine, the protagonist, ripping up the layers of pictures which were attached to the walls by the now-forgotten live-in maids, who came and went from her family's house throughout the years. The metaphorical analogy between the intangible layers of time and the concrete layers of the walls is crystallised in the phrase 'struggling with layers of centuries' (*PT 13*), which conveys a sense of materiality to the action of looking back in time and beyond appearances.

Through the staging of symbolic and physical forms of unearthing, Olive Senior therefore clearly defines her poet(h)ical stance as a postcolonial Caribbean writer: while readers may expect 'an “enjoyable” reading experience where one mentally vacations in the Caribbean through the text'<fnref n="73" />, to quote Supriya Nair, Senior rejects any form of passive vacationing in favour of an active, tactile engagement with her plot of choice. Consequently, it follows that the tension between anchoring and displacement, or familiarity and unfamiliarity, in Senior's worldbuilding does not undermine nor negate her attachment to place: on the contrary, it more so testifies to the writer's ambition to give depth to her plot by choosing to represent it in unconventional, yet more authentic ways – and this includes digging for its subterraneous, invisible strata.

<footnote n="72">⁷² Rowell, Charles H. 'An Interview with Olive Senior'. *Callaloo*, no. 36, 1988, p. 490.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Nair, Supriya M. *Pathologies of Paradise*. *Op. cit.*, p. 2.</footnote>
## 2. Digging into the strata

### 2.1. *A literary archaeology*

Olive Senior does not only encourage her readers to look beneath the surface: true to her word, the writer herself goes on to undertake what she defines as ‘a kind of literary archaeology’<fnref n="74" />. For want of a spade, it is with her pen that Senior delves into the history of her country, carefully unpeeling its historical and geological layers in order to uncover what has been lost and hidden over the course of time. As a result, the appearance of horizontality which is created by the juxtaposition of short stories and poems in each collection is completed by a vertical reading of the country, making for a multidimensional picture of Jamaica. This sense of verticality is epitomised by the title of the poetry collection, *Gardening in the Tropics*, as the term ‘gardening’ immediately evokes a downward gaze towards the soil – and indeed, gardening becomes the metaphor through which Senior analyses the landscape across the poems of the collection, simultaneously looking downward towards the ground and backward towards the past<fnref n="75" />. This choice of imagery is all the more significant as it connotes the Edenic myth which underlay the foundations of the colonial enterprise: in that sense, the metaphor truly becomes a vessel of transport<fnref n="76" /> as it substitutes the abstract, hollow patina of colonial fantasy for a more concrete, in-depth perception of the country.

Senior’s ‘literary archaeology’ is perhaps most explicit in her poetry. From a concrete perspective, the genre lends itself particularly well to this vertical motion, whereas prose can be read horizontally without interruption except for the line breaks often arbitrarily imposed by the medium. The poem in verse, on the other hand, is organised vertically on the page, with oftentimes dense networks of sounds and images which disrupt the linearity of the lines and demand a vertical reading. For instance, the very short lines in ‘Fern’ (GT 69) have been analysed by Chih-Chien Hsieh as a ‘staccato lineation pattern’ which mimics the ‘geological stratification’ of the earth<fnref n="77" />, from which the ‘spore’ transforms into a plant. Yet, one could also argue that this physical stratification mirrors that of history as well, just as the layers of pictures mirror those of time in the short story ‘The Pain Tree’. Indeed, the poem deploys a chronological

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Senior, Olive. 'Lessons from the Fruit Stand: Or, Writing for the Listener'. *Journal of Modern Literature*, vol. 20, no. 1, 1996, p. 43.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Senior describes her use of metaphor in *Olive Senior - On Gardens and Gardening, the Garden/Ing Metaphor*. Ryerson University, 2013, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/fr/AA00051950/00001/videos. Digital Library of the Caribbean.</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ The term ‘metaphor’ itself is derived from the Ancient Greek word μεταφορά / *metaphorá*, meaning ‘transport’.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Hsieh, Chih-Chien. 'Gardening in the Plantationocene: Plotting Multispecies Subsistence in Olive Senior's Decolonial Ecopoetics'. *ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment*, Oct. 2024, isae073, n/p.</footnote>
retrospective which departs from the deictic present indicated by the demonstrative pronoun
‘this spore’, and which then travels all the way to ‘Creation’ in the second stanza, spanning
across several centuries in a mere matter of centimetres on the page: the writer’s poetic digging
therefore enables her to go back in time as she pleases.

While the layers of history are particularly concentrated in ‘Fern’, the entire poetry
collection can be seen as an attempt to unearth the different layers of Caribbean history. First,
the poet digs all the way back to the fifteenth century in ‘Meditation on Yellow’, which
foregrounds a Taíno speaker witnessing Columbus arrive in Jamaica. Then, ‘the yellow dawn
of our innocence’ (GT 11) gives way to the violent period of slavery: in ‘Gardening on the Run’,
for instance, the speaker is a maroon who is brought to Hispaniola in 1502 by Nicolás de
Ovando, the Spanish governor of Santo Domingo on the same island. The fugitive takes an
omniscient perspective and relates centuries of history at once, witnessing the European settlers
‘as they / established plantations and brought / millions like me across the sea, / in chains, to
these lands’ (GT 107). The collection also includes references to the twentieth century, such as
the four ‘Hurricane Story’ poems which each correspond to real hurricanes which struck
Jamaica – 1951, for example, marked the year of Hurricane Charlie, a cyclone which lashed the
island in August and caused over 150 fatalities<fnref n="78" />. Through the Hurricane Stories, once again,
Senior maps out an overview of the more recent evolutions of Jamaican society: for instance,
‘Hurricane Story, 1903’ and ‘Hurricane Story, 1951’ display very different ways in which two
Jamaican families cope with a natural disaster, thereby bespeaking wider societal evolutions.
On the one hand, the 1903 poem foregrounds the resilience of a rural family who is used to
‘[shore] up / their lives against improvidence’ (GT 19) and who makes it out of the cyclone
completely intact, so much so that the narration of the event itself is left out in an ellipsis: ‘[…]
in total darkness we passed through the eye / and out the other side, till all was still’ (GT 20).
Yet, the ideals of rural self-sufficiency and tight-knit family bonds are nowhere to be found in
‘Hurricane Story, 1951’, which portrays the transatlantic explosion of a family unit in which
both parents move abroad in search of better living conditions (GT 35-36). Their emigration
can be linked to the context of the 1948 British Nationality Act, which, by giving British
citizenship to the people living in the colonies, marked the starting point of several waves of
emigration and therefore permanently changed the face of Caribbean society into an
increasingly diasporic community. These examples demonstrate that the plasticity of the poetic

<footnote n="78">78 Paton, Diana, and Matthew J. Smith, editors. ‘Hurricane Charlie’. *The Jamaica Reader*, Duke University Press, 2021, pp. 262–63.</footnote>
voice allows Senior to go back in time and shed light on various stages of Caribbean history, merging imagination with fact in order to recreate a timeline of the region across the poems.

In *The Pain Tree*, however, Senior does not unearth history directly by resorting to historical fiction, as the stories are set in the contemporary period; instead, the author allows glimpses of historical events to peek through the surface of the present. Sometimes, the characters themselves dig into the past, as is the case with Mr. Everett in ‘Boxed-In’, who learns about history by reading the *Negro World*, the newspaper created by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey who famously claimed that ‘it was time for black men to free themselves from mental slavery’ (*PT* 105-106). A staunch advocate of Pan-Africanism and the Back-to-Africa movement, which encouraged the descendants of African slaves to go back to the continent, Garvey is a central figure of Jamaican history as his ideas led to the birth of the Rastafari movement on the island in the 1930s – a long-lasting influence which would also inspire Bob Marley, who is arguably reggae’s most influential figure, with the lyrics of his ‘Redemption Song’<fnref n="79" />. Reading about history in the *Negro World* is an enlightening experience for the protagonist of the story since, we learn, ‘[n]othing of the sort had ever been taught in school or at home’ (*PT* 105): it is only through the newspaper that Mr. Everett learns about ‘the six million Africans torn from their homes and brought to the New World as slaves’ (*PT* 105). In other short stories, the past can be accessed through the knowledge of the elders: for instance, in ‘Flying’, Jonathan’s grandmother briefly mentions the African origins of her ancestors – and it is only because Jonathan actively decides to seek knowledge from his grandmother that readers have access to this information. These two examples illustrate that Senior’s short fiction does not unearth history for us to see; instead, by portraying characters such as Mr. Everett, but also Lorraine in ‘The Pain Tree’ and Jonathan in ‘Flying’ who come to realise that they need to look backwards in order to understand their own present, the author foregrounds the *action* of unearthing itself. By doing so, Senior also actualises the potential of the short story as a genre which ‘invites participation’<fnref n="80" /> and implicitly encourages the readers to look for traces of the past in the collection themselves. For instance, it is significant that the name of the young protagonist’s absent father in ‘A Father Like That’ should be Mr. Canaan, as it directly echoes the Biblical

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Marley, Bob, and The Wailers. 'Redemption Song'. *Uprising*, Island; Tuff Gong, 1980. The lyrics 'Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds' are a direct nod to the speech 'The Work That Has Been Done' given by Garvey in October 1937 in Sydney, Canada, in which the latter said: 'We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because whilst others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind.' Garvey, Marcus. *The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. VII: November 1927-August 1940*. Edited by Robert A. Hill, University of California Press, 1991, p. 794.</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Senior, Olive. 'Lessons from the Fruit Stand'. *Art. cit.*, p. 39.</footnote>
trope of the Promised Land<sup>81</sup>. This trope was interpreted in very different ways over the course of time, alternatively turning into the founding myth of settler colonialism in North America, a symbol of freedom in African American spirituals and emancipation narratives, and the ideological pillar of Zionism. By relating the father's name to this historical backdrop, one can then infer that the shifting definition of the Promised Land, both in terms of geographical location and ideological values, encapsulates the mystery surrounding the identity of Reema's father which remains uncertain until the end of the story.

All these examples illustrate different ways in which Senior manages to excavate the past of her country on the page. It clearly appears that brevity is not an obstacle to the in-depth exploration of historical and geological strata: on the contrary, it is by using the literary potentialities offered by each genre that Senior puts forward a poetics of unearthing and brings to light several layers of meaning and history.

## 2.2. (*Post*)colonial hauntings

Whether Senior does the unearthing for us in the poems or lets her characters undertake it themselves in the short stories, inviting the readers to partake in the activity at the same time, digging into the strata of the soil becomes a tool of meaning-making. While the discovery of hidden layers can endow the texts with additional poetic meaning, as the onomastics does in 'A Father Like That', the postcolonial context in which the stories and poems are inscribed sheds a more political light upon these newfound connections. In an interview, Olive Senior has stated her belief that 'the present is always shaped by the past'<sup>82</sup>, and this statement itself becomes laden with additional meaning in the postcolonial era. While the prefix 'post' seems to denote a linear chronological separation from the colonial period, the layers of history which resurface in the stories and poems are evidence that there are clear continuities – rather than discontinuities – between the colonial past and the supposedly postcolonial present. This paradox has been underlined by several scholars of postcolonial theory, including the authors of the landmark essay *The Empire Writes Back* who assert, in their introduction, that their use of the term is meant 'to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment

<footnote n="81"><sup>81</sup> ‘And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.’ ‘Genesis 17:8’. *King James Bible*, https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Genesis-17-8/. Accessed 25 Apr. 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="82"><sup>82</sup> Montout, Marie-Annick. ‘Translating a Culture in Stories from the Caribbean: A Conversation with Olive Senior’. *Journal of the Short Story in English*, no. 52, June 2009. https://journals.openedition.org/jsse/978?lang=en. Accessed 25 Apr. 2025.</footnote>
of colonization to the present day'<fnref n="83" />. More metaphorically, Jamaican-born sociologist Stuart Hall has likened the pervasive presence of colonial dynamics to the uncanny return of 'strange demons from the deep [...] trailing all sorts of subterranean material'<fnref n="84" /> – and it is precisely this 'subterranean material' which Senior's poems and stories bring to the surface. A case in point of the haunting presence of the colonial past in the present can be delineated at the very beginning of 'The Pain Tree', when the narrator describes the house in which her white Creole family has lived for centuries:

> [My mother] also told people I'd chosen to study archaeology because I'd been born in a house with seventeenth-century foundations. Yes, I would say to myself, built of the finest cut stone, the mortar hard as iron because it was sweetened with molasses and slave blood.

(PT 7)

Inevitably, the physical 'foundations' of the house – the stone and the mortar – are the concrete reminders of the less tangible conditions which made its construction possible in the first place – that is, slave labour. The gruesome image created by the contrast between the adjective 'sweetened' and the 'slave blood' conveys a sour taste to the scene, as it clearly announces that even though slavery is no longer a concrete reality, its aftermath is still very much palpable.

In fact, several ongoing dynamics inherited from colonialism can be detected in the two collections: just as a ghost is defined by elusiveness, so, too, does the ghost of colonialism wear various masks, to the point of becoming hardly recognisable at times. 'Meditation on Yellow' is particularly relevant in that regard as it draws several parallels between the past and the present to highlight different forms of ongoing oppression in the Caribbean. The poem is divided into two stanzas: in the first one, we can hear the voice of an Indigenous Taíno inhabitant of Jamaica witnessing Columbus's so-called 'discovery' in the late fifteenth century, while in the second one, the speaker is a black person working in a hotel at the end of the twentieth century, still in Jamaica. As Jordan Stouck has pointed out, the grammatical continuity that is created across the lines by the absence of periods mirrors the symbolic continuity of oppression between the colonial and postcolonial eras<fnref n="85" />. The poem uses the colour yellow as a *leitmotiv* in order to shed light on the fact that the Caribbean was and is still conceptualised by

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Ashcroft, Bill, et al. *The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures*. 1989. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2002, p. 2. While subsequent developments in the field have underscored some of the limitations of this essay, *The Empire Writes Back* nonetheless remains extremely influential as it is generally perceived as the first major theoretical account in the field of postcolonial theory.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Hall, Stuart. 'When was "the Post-Colonial"? Thinking at the Limit'. *The Post-Colonial Question*, edited by Iain Chamber and Lidia Curti, Routledge, 1996, p. 242.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Stouck, Jordan. 'Gardening in the Diaspora'. *Art. cit.*, p. 108.</footnote>
foreigners – whether they be Spanish navigators or mere tourists – as an object of desire, bound
to be consumed. While Columbus was lured to Jamaica by the promise of precious metals,
ready to physically consume Jamaican soil by extracting '[t]he contents of our mines' (GT 12),
the twentieth-century tourists are seemingly less aggressive, waiting 'to lie bare-assed in the
sun / wanting gold on their bodies / cane-rows in their hair / with beads' (GT 15). The 'gold',
in this context, could refer to either jewellery or suntan; yet, in either case, the reason why these
foreign tourists are able to be so passive in their economic and cultural consumption of the
island is the invisible labour of the local inhabitants who sustain the industry, including the
speaker. The poem thus perfectly epitomises Mimi Sheller's thesis in *Consuming the
Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies*, in which she examines 'how contemporary consumer
cultures are directly connected not only to the wealth generated by slavery, but also to the
contemporary inequalities between the “underdeveloped” Caribbean and the “modern West”'<fnref n="86" />.
The consumption of the Caribbean, Sheller argues, includes 'edible plants', 'human bodies',
'cultural products', 'knowledge collection' and 'landscapes consumed as tropical paradise'<fnref n="87" />, a
wide-ranging feast which has allowed the consuming Western subject to uphold its symbolic
and economic domination over the object of consumption – the Caribbean – over time. The
intrinsic link between these different shapes of consumption is encapsulated in the mention of
the 'cane-rows' in the poem, which not only speak to contemporary debates about the cultural
appropriation of black hairstyles<fnref n="88" /> but also remind us, through the word 'cane', of the sugar
plantations in the Caribbean. Other parallels between the past and the present appear within the
collections: for instance, the ending of the short story 'Silent' is reminiscent of the marooning
motif as the main characters, a precarious family who has just been released from prison, are
seen driving away from town and into the mountains, adopting a 'vantage point' (PT 28) which
is strikingly similar to that of the fugitive slaves who escaped the plantations to live in the
mountainous regions of Jamaica during colonisation. This uncanny resemblance suggests that
the same dynamics of oppression have persisted across the centuries, forcing the most
vulnerable to escape society in order to survive.

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Sheller, Mimi. *Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies*. Routledge, 2003, p. 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ *Ibid*., p. 4.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Hair is a recurring concern in black women’s writing as it is often portrayed as a symbol of the double oppression of race and gender (an intersectional struggle which has also been called ‘misogynoir’ by American scholar Moya Bailey) which black women face in Westernised environments: see for instance the short story ‘Lollipop’ in *The Pain Tree*, in which Katie’s hair is described as too ‘picky-picky and countryish’ for Canada (PT 83) by her own mother. Senior has also recently published a children’s book, illustrated by Laura James, which deals with this topic: see Senior, Olive, and Laura James. *Boonoonoonous Hair!* Tradewind Books, 2019.</footnote>
While Derek Walcott claimed in his Nobel Lecture that ‘in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts’<fnref n="89" />, Senior’s unearthing of history demonstrates that the ruins of colonialism are much more pervasive than what first meets the eye. In doing so, the author simultaneously refutes the myth of a history-less Caribbean and replaces the region within broader historical dynamics of oppression.

### 2.3. *The (Caribbean) body keeps the score*

The constant effort of contextualisation underlying Senior's poetry and fiction reveals a central tension in the Caribbean: the transmission of discontinuities. Although the various historical strata which emerge across the collections highlight a sense of historical continuity by anchoring the contemporary Caribbean in deep-rooted phenomena, it paradoxically appears that these historical roots have perpetuated various kinds of fractures which plague the region in various forms. Senior herself has pinpointed that '[t]he fragmentation of the Caribbean was historically determined by European penetration and conquest – and we have never managed to transcend these boundaries'<fnref n="90" />. In that sense, the 'fragmentation' which manifests itself in the present can be interpreted as the logical product of a history which 'came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation, and explosive forces', to quote Édouard Glissant<fnref n="91" />. That the collections themselves should be composed of textual fragments – short stories and poems – thus encapsulates the history of the Caribbean, itself consisting in an accumulation of traumas, including the initial settlement of the Spaniards, the slave trade, and the continuous cultural and material phagocytosis of the islands by the West. Since trauma is an intrinsically cyclical structure, as Cathy Caruth has underlined<fnref n="92" />, it comes as no surprise that these past wounds should leave deep cuts in the present as well. The traumas of Caribbean history therefore exemplify the structure of postmemory, defined by Marianne Hirsch as the way in which 'the multiple ruptures and radical breaks introduced by trauma and catastrophe inflect intra-, inter-

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Walcott, Derek. 'The Antilles, Fragments of Epic Memory'. *Art. cit.*, p. 262.</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Rowell, Charles H. 'An Interview with Olive Senior'. *Art. cit.*, p. 487.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ Glissant, Édouard. *Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays*. 1981. Translated by J. Michael Dash, University Press of Virginia, 1989, pp. 61-62.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² She explains that ‘the wound of the mind [...] is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that [...] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor.’ Caruth, Cathy. *Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History*. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p. 4.</footnote>
and transgenerational inheritance<fnref n="93" />. By drawing a paradoxical link between the notion of
'inheritance', which connotes smooth linearity, and the fragmented imagery of 'ruptures and
radical breaks', Hirsch shows that the traumas of the past inevitably resurface to inform the
present.

From a concrete perspective, the traces of past trauma can be found in the Caribbean
landscape itself, which was first ‘disemboweled’ by the settlers (GT 96) to develop the
plantation and mining industries, only to be further disfigured by the tourist industry and the
unnatural farming methods that are used to satisfy the international demand for Jamaican-grown
crops, as the speaker points out in the poem ‘The Tree of Life’ (GT 94). Moreover, the landscape
has been rendered even more vulnerable by global warming over the last few decades. However
universal the climate crisis might be, the Caribbean nonetheless remains at the front line of this
globally increasing environmental vulnerability: due to its insular nature, researcher Claudia
Marín Súarez explains, the archipelago is indeed particularly exposed to hurricanes and rising
sea levels<fnref n="94" />, which in turn increases the economic vulnerability of the region since tourism and
agriculture, two of its most important economic sectors, are particularly likely to be impacted
by natural disasters<fnref n="95" />. These environmental wounds are briefly mentioned in the short story
‘Flying’ when the protagonist finds his island ‘bare and scarred from bush fires’ (PT 160) upon
his return, resembling a Modernist valley of ashes rather than a lush tropical region. Given the
fact that Global North countries are widely responsible for the rapid acceleration of climate
change, representing 92% of global carbon emissions according to a report published in 2020⁹⁶,
while the Global South<fnref n="97" /> suffers the most from its impacts, several scholars and organisations
have begun to stress that ‘the environmental emergency is the legacy of colonialism’<fnref n="98" />, to quote
a 2022 Greenpeace report. The brutal history of the Caribbean is therefore ubiquitous as it is

<footnote n="93">⁹³ Hirsch, Marianne. *The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust*. Columbia University Press, 2012, p. 33.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Lopez, Gabriel Vera. "'Climate Change Is an Existential Issue for Caribbean Countries,'" Says Expert'. *Brasil de Fato*, 23 May 2024, https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2024/05/23/climate-change-is-an-existential-issue-for-caribbean-countries-says-expert/. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ See for instance the following report on the impact of climate change on the tourism industry: Simpson, Murray, et al. *Climate Change's Impact on the Caribbean's Ability to Sustain Tourism, Natural Assets and Livelihoods*. Inter-American Development Bank, Mar. 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Hickel, Jason. 'Quantifying National Responsibility for Climate Breakdown: An Equality-Based Attribution Approach for Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Excess of the Planetary Boundary'. *The Lancet Planetary Health*, vol. 4, no. 9, Sept. 2020, pp. 399–404.</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ I am here using the distinction between the Global North and the Global South because it is used in the report. However, the name 'Global South' itself is controversial as it glosses over the peculiarities of the regions it includes, which is why I shall refrain from using it elsewhere in this dissertation.</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ *Racism and the Environmental Emergency: Confronting Injustice.* Greenpeace UK and Runnymede Trust, July 2022, p. 23.</footnote>
embodied in the landscape itself, which stands as a physical reminder of this long history of oppression.

Yet, the landscape cannot be separated from the people who inhabit it, and who also experience the ongoing legacy of colonial wounds. In keeping with her ambition to represent her homeland ‘from the inside’<fnref n="99" />, Senior does not shy away from representing the different fault lines which divide Jamaican society. For instance, the poem ‘The Knot Garden’ dramatises the tension between a corrupt government leader and his people, who are ‘dying’ in the bush because of his political decisions (GT 89). The disconnect between the two spheres is epitomised by the lines describing the politician flying ‘in the presidential jet high / above this dense tropical jungle’ (GT 89), as the enjambment crystallises the symbolic and concrete opposition between the politician who is completely out of touch from the realities of his country and the Jamaicans themselves, who are directly confronted to the concrete consequences of ‘poisoned flour’ and ‘tenement fires’ (GT 88). These two elements refer to real events which happened in 1976 in Jamaica: in January of that year, dozens of Jamaicans were poisoned after consuming pesticide-contaminated flour<fnref n="100" />, while in May, a violent tenement fire broke out in Kingston and left hundreds of people homeless<fnref n="101" />. All this occurred in a context of rampant gang wars which instilled a pervasive atmosphere of terror in the Jamaican capital. The competition between the warring gangs was supported by rival political parties, the left-wing People’s National Party and the right-wing Jamaica Labour Party, which, in turn, received financial support from the United States and communist countries such as the Soviet Union and Cuba<fnref n="102" />. In the poem, the international influence on post-Independence Jamaica is encapsulated by the multiple meetings which the political leader attends with the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., thereby seemingly confirming Senior’s statement that ‘a new center-periphery system is evolving which is based in Washington’<fnref n="103" />. As a result, even though the title of ‘The Knot Garden’ evokes an image of indistinct mingling, the poem actually hints at multiscalar levels of fracture and clear-cut hierarchies. In keeping with Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, it appears that the structure of the ‘center-periphery system’, which was first

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ Rowell, Charles H. 'An Interview with Olive Senior'. Art. cit., p. 490.</footnote>

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ Blumenthal, Ralph. '17 Jamaicans Dead Of Flour Poisoning; 78 Others Left Ill'. *The New York Times*, 30 Jan. 1976. https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/30/archives/17-jamaicans-dead-of-flour-poisoning-78-others-left-ill.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ Lesser, Beth. 'The Sound and the Fury'. *The New Inquiry*, 9 Oct. 2012, https://thenewinquiry.com/the-sound-and-the-fury/. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² Jordison, Sam. '*A Brief History of Seven Killings Is Shocking but Not Gratuitous*. The Guardian, 13 Oct. 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/13/a-brief-history-of-seven-killings-is-shocking-but-not-gratuitous-marlon-james. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ Rowell, Charles H. 'An Interview with Olive Senior'. Art. cit., p. 487.</footnote>
established in 1492 between the Old and the New Worlds through colonial settlement, and later
sustained through the slave trade, is so deeply ingrained in the Caribbean that it is now re-
membered as a new form of cultural and economic subjection to the United States, gang
violence being but one of the symptoms of the Caribbean's new status as part of America's
backyard. Yet, while the subterraneous links between intra- and inter-national fractures may
tempt us to analyse the situation in terms of abstract power dynamics, it is significant that Senior
should choose to depict what goes on underneath the 'dense tropical jungle' (GT 89) in order to
highlight the very real wounds inflicted on the people by these wider dynamics. This intention
to disclose dreary realities is a recurring theme in the two collections and allows the author to
shed light on other forms of fractures within the population: for instance, the short story 'The
Country Cousin' focuses on the socioeconomic and cultural gap between rural Jamaica and a
community of Westernised socialites, while 'The Pain Tree' clearly portrays the ongoing
disparity between white Creoles and black Jamaicans – a complex dynamic which was already
addressed by Jean Rhys in *Wide Sargasso Sea* fifty years before<fnref n="104" />.

By resorting to several vantage points to showcase the diversity of Jamaican society, Senior
sheds light on the very different realities which coexist on the same island, unveiling both the
privilege of some and the precarity of others. Precarity, in Judith Butler's words, corresponds
to 'that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and
economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and
death'<fnref n="105" /> – and indeed, the notion of differentiality proves essential to understand the fault lines
striating the Caribbean region, inherited from centuries of oppression and manifesting as stark
inequalities in the present. Senior's unearthing of the strata of the past therefore adds a
necessary context to the social reality of the modern-day Caribbean, but it does not conceal nor
overtake the depiction of the most vulnerable and the implicit denunciation of the systemic
circumstances which have led to such radical disparities. By doing so, the author adds nuance
and complexity to the picture of a supposedly ahistorical region: the Caribbean, in Senior's
works, is anchored in a history that is far from forgotten or irrelevant, unlike what Walcott might
have argued, since this history is still very much alive in various forms and entails devastating
consequences for the land as well as for the underprivileged strata of the population.

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ The ambiguous dynamic between Antoinette, the white Creole protagonist, and Tia, her black childhood best friend, is often quoted by critics as a prime example of the relation between black and white people in the Caribbean, oscillating between resemblance and resentment. See notably the scene of the mirror in Rhys, Jean. *Wide Sargasso Sea*. *Op. cit.*, p. 34.</footnote>

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵ Butler, Judith. *Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?* Verso, 2009, p. 25.</footnote>
As a result, it appears that the retrospective gaze which highlights ongoing dynamics of oppression in *Gardening in the Tropics* and *The Pain Tree* is also a gaze that is concerned with the issues of the present moment. Indeed, *discovery* is but a necessary step towards *recovery*: as Senior excavates the fossils of the past and sheds light on the multiple legacies of violence pervading her homeland, she actively re-members an alternative history in the face of erasure.

# 3. Excavating the ghosts

## 3.1. *A quarrel with the archive*

Olive Senior's attention to what lies 'beneath [the] crusty exterior' (GT7) of what is usually visible – be it the shell of a gourd, the surface of the soil or the picturesque representations of the Caribbean – sheds light on the notion of invisibility itself. Indeed, whether it be through the example of Lorraine in 'The Pain Tree', painstakingly scratching the walls in Larissa's room, or through the sense of craft which emerges from the collections and testifies to the writer's active efforts to represent her homeland and people, unearthing is depicted as a laborious enterprise – which, consequently, implicitly points to the existence of an antagonistic force, responsible for the burial and silencing of the subterraneous fossils in the first place: that is, the power of the archive, as an authoritative historical record which defines what and who is allowed to enter in the great narrative of history. Michel Foucault has defined the archive as 'the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events'<fnref n="106" /> in his *Archaeology of Knowledge*, meaning that the archive becomes a tool of epistemic power which endows certain statements with a form of authority, imposing them as hegemonic, unquestionable knowledge. Yet, Foucault's unearthing of the invisible threads which make up this supposedly transcendental discourse shows that the archive is not a static monument but the shifting, ideological product of its time. A similar idea can be found, though more implicitly, at the beginning of Jacques Derrida's *Archive Fever*, when he reminds us that the meaning of the word 'archive' 'comes to it from the Greek *arkheion*: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the *archons*, those who commanded'<fnref n="107" />. With this etymological point, Derrida underlines the link between the archive and power, or *arkhé* in Ancient Greek, and he proceeds to define the specific power of the

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ Foucault, Michel. *The Archaeology of Knowledge*. 1969. Translated by Alan M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, 1972, p. 145.</footnote>

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ Derrida, Jacques. *Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression*. 1995. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 2.</footnote>
archive as an ‘archic, in truth patriarchic’ function of ‘domiciliation’<fnref n="108" /> allowing certain events
to enter a symbolic place of privilege. While Derrida goes on to focus on the ambivalent nature
of the archive, which simultaneously ensures the eternal preservation of its contents while
confining them to a death-like, fossilised state, he does not initially expand on the shadow side
of domiciliation: since a house, or more generally a sense of home, comes into being *in
opposition to* something else, just as a ‘here’ can only be determined against a ‘there’, it follows
that domiciliation entails a form of exclusion. This aspect proves particularly significant in the
context of colonial history given that colonial subjects were and remain very often excluded
from these historical records: for instance, the website of the British National Archives warns
us that ‘the majority of records of the slave trade are written from the viewpoint of those
generally controlling the trade, and very little information is available about enslaved Africans
themselves’ in the ‘Slavery and the British transatlantic slave trade’ category<fnref n="109" />. Moreover,
besides the already well-documented archival erasure of the massacres linked to the slave
trade<fnref n="110" />, the notion of a ‘paper genocide’ has arisen in recent years to denote the way in which
‘a people can be made to disappear on paper’<fnref n="111" /> through censuses and official reports, amongst
other documents which would later be categorised as primary sources in historical records. This
symbolic erasure affected Indigenous populations in various places, including the Caribbean
but also in Northern America, and further exemplifies the function of the archive as a tool of
power and erasure.

Therefore, while Edward Baugh pinpointed the omnipresence of a ‘quarrel with History’<fnref n="112" />
in West Indian writing, one could rather argue that Senior’s endeavour to uncover the invisible
strata of the Caribbean corresponds to a quarrel with the archive – that is to say, as a struggle
against the way history is recorded rather than the events themselves. Many passages in the
stories and poems indeed suggest an acute awareness of the cracks in the archive and of the risk
of letting certain events sink into oblivion as a consequence of these blank spaces interspersed
in the dominant historical narrative. This tension is perhaps best illustrated in the short story

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ *Ibid.*, p. 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ ‘Slavery and the British Transatlantic Slave Trade’. *The National Archives*, https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/british-transatlantic-slave-trade-records/. Accessed 27 Apr. 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ In the Caribbean, for instance, several authors such as M. NourbeSe Philip, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar have written about the Zong massacre, which occurred in 1781. This tragedy led to the death of 133 enslaved African people, who were thrown overboard into the ocean by the crew of the British slave ship Zong, bound for Jamaica. The names of the victims were never recorded, and the event came to crystallise the historical and ontological erasure of enslaved people in colonial discourse.</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ Baracutei Estevez, Jorge. ‘Meet the Survivors of a “Paper Genocide”’. *Art. cit.*, n/p.</footnote>

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Baugh, Edward. ‘The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History’. *Art. cit.*.</footnote>
‘The Pain Tree’, as the white Creole family of the protagonist represents the epitome of archival
violence, conveniently erasing the victims of history in order to preserve its own stability. While
their ‘great house’ (PT 8) is built on ‘slave blood’ (PT 7), as Lorraine remarks, she also notes
that ‘[her] mother would have been extremely mortified if she’d heard [her] say that aloud’
(Ibid.), pointing to the feeling of shame which underlies the historical consciousness of the
former colonisers. This is why her mother would rather consider the past as ‘a condensed
version’ (Ibid.), which omits the blood to better focus on the glory of those who did not bleed.
A few pages later, Lorraine summarises this thwarted, partial view of history as follows:
‘[p]eople who mattered, we believed, resided in the great house. It was we who made history’
(PT 12). The verb ‘mattered’, juxtaposed to the interpolated clause ‘we believed’, epitomises
the subjective relativity of ‘history’ as a discourse that is ‘made’ rather than found. Incidentally,
the association between the ‘people who mattered’ and the ‘great house’ is reminiscent of the
domiciliating function of the archive underlined by Derrida. Therefore, it is significant that this
*arkheion* should be located near ‘slave barracks hidden behind the trees’ (PT 8) in the story, as
the presence of this other building signals the existence of a relation of exclusion from, rather
than inclusion to, the archive: that of the former slaves and of the black housemaids like Larissa
who occupied the vacant rooms after slavery was abolished. Through the figure of Larissa,
whom Lorraine remembers but who is permanently gone at the time of the narration, Senior
sheds light on the invisibility of those who did exist but who were excluded from the ‘great
house’ of history and silenced by the ‘people who mattered’. When the narrator remembers that
Larissa did not even cry when she learnt that one of her sons had died at war, she explains that
‘[w]omen like Larissa, pulled far from their homes and families by the promise of work, were
not expected to grieve; their sorrow, like their true selves, remaining muted and hidden’ (PT
12). The passive construction ‘were not expected to grieve’ is laden with meaning, as it denotes
both the *active silencing of* (rather than a silence intrinsic to) these women, as well as the
indeterminacy of the agent of the action, since the white owners of the house are but pawns
enforcing the systemic erasure of subaltern voices such as that of Larissa in public spaces and
dominant discourses. As we witness Lorraine gradually realising the finality of Larissa’s
departure from the house, a palpable sense of absence, tinged with pathos, takes over the
narrative and allows the readers to feel her disappearance as well.

By confronting both her characters and her readers with the violence of the archive, which
erases as much as it immortalises, Olive Senior sheds light on the systemic silencing of various
individuals throughout history, thereby highlighting the more insidious mechanisms of
colonialism and illustrating Gayatri Spivak’s assertion that ‘[t]he subaltern cannot speak’<fnref n="113" /> in
the third world due to the legacy of these very mechanisms. While Larissa is a case in point of
this dynamic, the themes of silence and erasure recur elsewhere throughout the collections: in
‘Boxed-In’, for instance, Mr. Bennett feels helpless as he tries to spread the truth about slavery
amongst his community, who thinks of the past as a ‘sleeping forest monster best left
undisturbed’ (PT 106) – and yet, remembering the past seems more urgent than ever in a context
of increasing foreign presence through the implantation of mining companies. In light of this
context, unearthing can become a way to palliate the systemic voicelessness of the subaltern
and to re-member the subterraneous histories which have been left out from the archives.

3.2. *Gardening to remember*

In the face of erasure, the literary medium allows Senior to recover the silent fossils buried
deep into the ground by centuries of colonial and imperialist oppression. Her work can thus be
characterised as a neo-archive, defined by Erica L. Johnson as 'fiction that creates history in
the face of its absence'<fnref n="114" />. As paradoxical as it may sound, creating history through the
imaginative tools of fiction seems to be the only way to fill the gaps of the archive in the face
of the traumatic 'nonhistory'<fnref n="115" /> of the Caribbean, as Glissant has called it. Senior herself has
emphasised this aspect of her writing:

I personally see writing stories as not so much an exercise in imagination as a re-
imagining of realities that have existed in the past, that exist in the present and will
exist into the future, because as a modern (as opposed to a colonized writer), I am
concerned with meaning; I too would like to crack open the events which give rise
to stories in order to answer the question, “What does it mean?” or “What did it
mean?” That is the most critical question for any intellectual or creative artist in the
post-colonial world.<fnref n="116" />

Through the prefix ‘re-’, connoting a motion of return, the act of ‘re-imagining’ past realities
denotes both a retrospective gaze towards the past and a form of active labour. While we have
already seen that the laborious nature of unearthing points to the presence of contradictory

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ In Spivak’s framework, the figure of the subaltern corresponds to the female colonial subject, whose subjectivity has been consistently denied by the epistemic foundations of colonial and capitalist discourses, so that even when she does speak, she still cannot be heard. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ *Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, op. cit.*, p. 308.</footnote>

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ Johnson, Erica L. ‘Building the Neo-Archive: Dionne Brand’s *A Map to the Door of No Return*. *Meridians*, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, p. 157.</footnote>

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ Glissant, Édouard. *Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Op. cit.*, p. 62. By 'nonhistory', Glissant does not mean that the Caribbean has no history; instead, he refers to the fact that the West has produced a 'totalitarian philosophy of history' (Ibid.) based on a European conception of history, marked by continuity.</footnote>

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ Senior, Olive. ‘Lessons from the Fruit Stand’. *Art. cit.*, p. 42.</footnote>
forces, it also highlights the author's commitment to the recovery of lost bodies and voices in order to endow them with the meaning that the dominant historical narrative has denied them. In the poetry collection, the metaphor of gardening encapsulates the idea of re-imagination as a constant return, to the soil but also to the past, which gives way to imaginative recovery: indeed, all the poems in the section 'Gardening in the Tropics' open on this same titular phrase, as if the beginning of each poem encapsulated one of the author's new attempts to engage with the roots of her country, while the rest of the poems can be considered as the unpredictable growth which stems from the initial return.

Re-imagination thus corresponds to the meeting point between memory work and the realm of fiction, where buried fossils can be excavated and given new life on the page. As Senior unearths the strata of history, several ghostly voices come up to the surface, such as that of the Taíno inhabitant in 'Meditation on Yellow' for instance, or that of a fugitive slave in the poem 'Gardening on the Run' – the very voices which could neither speak nor be heard in historical records<fnref n="117" />. The latter poem is particularly striking as it explicitly dramatizes an acousmatic voice, speaking from beyond the grave to haunt the archives. The maroon recounts his arrival in Hispaniola in 1502, his three attempts to run away from the white settlers who had brought him to the island to Spain, and his subsequent death at their hands. Yet, through the literary medium, the corpse transcends the finality of biological life and reaches a form of eternity, as he asserts: 'Forever I'll walk all / over the pages of your history' (GT 109, my emphasis). This menacing statement crystallises the role of the poetry collection as a neo, or counter-archive, in which the buried fossils are given a form of subjectivity through the pronoun 'I' offered by the poetic voice, which allows them to tell their story in their own name through the re-imagination of the author.

Nonetheless, it would be incorrect to categorise the entirety of Senior's collections as an act of remembrance, as it appears that the erased ghosts of history are not always those we expect – in fact, the poems and stories show that our contemporary society, too, has created its own ghosts. Invisibility, in Senior's works, comes to encompass the broader notion of social and economic marginality. The short story 'Silent' is a case in point, as it is the first in the short story collection to give us a glimpse of the lives of underprivileged Jamaicans, unlike 'The Pain Tree' and 'Moonlight' which precede it. As the title indicates, the theme of silence is central to the story. In the diegesis, it is explicitly linked to the traumatic shock which the protagonist, a

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷ Even though some formerly enslaved people managed to publish slave narratives, such as Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs in the United States, these remained exceptional cases.</footnote>
young boy named Joel, undergoes after he witnesses his father getting shot by a rival gang in his own house. Silence is indeed a common symptom of trauma since, as Roger Luckhurst has argued, '[i]n its shock impact trauma is anti-narrative'<fnref n="118" />: in other words, the traumatic event is so shocking that it cannot be immediately comprehended by the human mind, or logos, and it is only when the initial event can be reorganised (or voiced) into a coherent narrative that it can be processed. However, silence also seems to be a wider metaphor for the socioeconomic status of the protagonist and his family, who live in dire conditions and for whom extreme violence is an everyday occurrence, as is evidenced by the simile between 'the scatter of gunshots' and 'the barking of the mangy dogs', making for an uncanny background noise (PT 24). In fact, the silence which takes over Joel during the murder scene turns into a defence mechanism when the police come to check up on the family after hearing the gunshots: '[...] he knows he needs to be quiet for police are dangerous bad men' (PT 23). Yet, while silence can be a necessary refuge for precarious individuals like Joel who are particularly vulnerable to police brutality, his refusal to speak also confines him to a ghost-like status, a half-presence of sorts which betrays the invisibility of marginal people in society from a broader perspective<fnref n="119" />.

Other spectral presences of the present appear throughout the collections, such as a stowaway in the poem of the same name, hidden in a ship (GT 45). Once again, silence and invisibility appear both as conditions of survival and as signs of the vulnerability of the speaker, for whom 'discovery' no longer means a triumphant arrival such as that of Columbus, but the impending risk of losing all hopes to ever find shelter. These two examples testify to the increased exposure to death of precarious individuals underlined by Judith Butler, since both Joel and the stowaway are confined to a position of silence due to the extreme violence of their respective situations – to be seen, or to be heard, would entail concrete risks for their lives. From a metaphorical perspective, Joel and the stowaway can thus be characterised as ghosts, or living-dead presences: not only are they silenced because of their socioeconomic status, but their vulnerability also confronts them to death on a daily basis. This is precisely what Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe has defined as necropolitics, or 'the capacity [of sovereign powers] to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is

<footnote n="118">¹¹⁸ Luckhurst, Roger. *The Trauma Question*. Routledge, 2008, p. 79.</footnote>

<footnote n="119">¹¹⁹ Michel Foucault coined the notion of ‘heterotopias of deviation’ to denote the places where society relegates its members whom it considers to be deviant from the norm. This includes psychiatric hospitals for the mentally ill, prisons for criminals, but also retirement homes for the elderly; see Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’. *Diacritics*, translated by Jay Miskowiec, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, p. 25. This definition can be extended to include the question of urban planning and the way it can be used to hide poverty, as the short story under analysis also points to the clear segregation between the posh areas, made of ‘gardens and trees and houses as big as churches’ (PT 27), and the working-class neighbourhoods.</footnote>
not'<fnref n="120" />. Necropower, according to Mbembe, is rooted in colonialism: in other words, just as plantation owners had a power of life and death over the slaves, but also over the Indigenous peoples whom they did not hesitate to kill as well, modern forms of sovereignty still exert a similar power through 'policing and discipline'<fnref n="121" /> over specific, often racialised bodies.

All this shows that Senior’s excavation of ghosts does not solely help her broaden the archives of the subterraneous past; instead, she draws our attention to the fact that these ghosts still exist, in the flesh, in our current times. Beyond the excavation of fossils, unearthing can then also denote a commitment to broaden the spectrum of representation to include its margins. The representation of these ghosts, both from the past and the present, allows the author to domiciliate the discontinuous history as well as the socioeconomic fragmentation of the Caribbean into a new, literary *arkheion*, the boundaries of which can expand to accommodate the invisible and the unheard.

### 3.3. *The challenges of postcolonial representation*

By re-creating meaning and making space for the fossils of the past and the ghosts of the present, Senior’s neo-archive stands in line with the ethos of postcolonial theory and writing. Several founding figures of this field, such as Homi Bhabha and Salman Rushdie, have conceptualised postcoloniality as a form of quarrel which no longer takes place on the battlefields but within the literary sphere, making for ‘a textual contest, or a bibliographic battle, between oppressive and subversive books’<fnref n="122" />, according to Leela Gandhi. This militant dimension is epitomised by Rushdie’s now famous catchphrase, ‘the Empire writes back with a vengeance’<fnref n="123" />, which subverts the title of the second movie of the *Star Wars* franchise, *The Empire Strikes Back*<fnref n="124" />, in order to lay emphasis on the critical importance on writing – rather than physically striking the enemy – as a form of resistance in the postcolonial world. This idea is also suggested by Senior herself when she asserts that re-imagining realities to create meaning

<footnote n="120">¹²⁰ Mbembe, Joseph-Achille. ‘Necropolitics’. *Public Culture*, translated by Libby Meintjes, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, p. 27.</footnote>

<footnote n="121">¹²¹ *Ibid.*, p. 34.</footnote>

<footnote n="122">¹²² Gandhi, Leela. *Postcolonial Theory. Op. cit.*, p. 141.</footnote>

<footnote n="123">¹²³ Rushdie, Salman. ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’. *The Times*, 3 July 1982, p. 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="124">¹²⁴ *The Empire Strikes Back*. Directed by Irvin Kershner, Lucasfilm Ltd., 1980. Several prequels to the movie were released in the 1990s and the 2000s, making it the fifth episode of the Skywalker saga.</footnote>
is ‘the most critical question for any intellectual or creative artist in the post-colonial world’<fnref n="125" />.

Indeed, the author continues,

> ... what has been handed down to us in written form as the work of colonial administrators, cultural anthropologists, historians, missionaries, or travel writers, are descriptions of cultures by observers in the superior position-even the missionaries - with virtually no sense of what it means to be participants of the events being described; in other words, what has been recorded is what has been meaningful to the observer, not the observed.<fnref n="126" />

The distinction between ‘the observer’ and ‘the observed’, emphasised through a polyptoton, epitomises the postcolonial act of writing *back* instead of being written *about* – in the active rather than passive voice. And indeed, Senior’s literary archive recentres our perspective on the Caribbean as the subject, rather than object, of representation. As Edward Said has demonstrated in his landmark essay *Orientalism*, colonial and imperialist discourse indeed hinges on a clear dichotomy between ‘the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”)’ in opposition to the Self, considered as ‘the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”)’<fnref n="127" />. The oppositional stance of postcolonial writers, including Senior, thus consists in reversing this dichotomy in order to endow formerly colonised peoples with a sense of subjectivity through literature. This endeavour is clearly exemplified in the two collections under analysis: in *Gardening in the Tropics*, several poems such as ‘Meditation on Yellow’ or ‘Gardening on the Run’ hinge on a dichotomy between the poetic ‘I’ of the colonial subjects, and the ‘you’ which they address, denoting the white settlers who become the unfamiliar strangers from a grammatical perspective. In *The Pain Tree*, too, the shift from subjection to subjectivity is illustrated by the transition from ‘The Pain Tree’ in which Senior sheds light on the silencing of the black maid in a white Creole family, to stories such as ‘Silent’ or ‘A Father Like That’ which foreground the experiences of precarious black individuals in Jamaica. In doing so, Senior actively writes back against the long colonial history which confined the Caribbean and its people to a state of invisibility and subjection.

Nonetheless, it seems unsatisfactory to reduce this endeavour to recreate a sense of subjectivity to a mere battle. Powerful as it sounds, the act of ‘writing back’ implies that the focus remains on the former colonial powers, thereby perpetuating a symbolic hierarchy between the imperial centre and the margins. The task of the postcolonial writer is thus two-fold, as it implies both writing *back* to the former imperial centre and writing *for* the

<footnote n="125">¹²⁵ Senior, Olive. 'Lessons from the Fruit Stand'. *Art. cit.*, p. 42.</footnote>

<footnote n="126">¹²⁶ *Ibid.*, pp. 42-43.</footnote>

<footnote n="127">¹²⁷ Said, Edward. *Orientalism*. Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 43.</footnote>
postcolonial subjects themselves. Indeed, as Homi Bhabha underlines, the interrogation of the colonial past is psychologically necessary for the victims of this past, who still face its consequences:

> Remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present.<fnref n="128" />

This definition highlights another powerful dimension of writing, which is its ability to ‘make sense’ of supposedly disjointed events. This is reminiscent of the tenets of trauma theory, which posits narrativity as the decisive step towards the healing of trauma; and since time, in a postcolonial context, is necessarily out of joint, postcolonial literature stands out as a way to re-member the fragments of this history and, perhaps more importantly, to create a narrative out of it. Storying peoples and places which have historically been excluded from the archives and the literary canon is thus both a political and an ethical matter, since it is through stories of all kinds that human beings navigate the world and their own existence within this world. On an individual scale, the human mind functions with logos, or the organisation of events within the frame of language to create a logical narrative out of a disjointed reality, while on the collective level, this meaning-making endeavour manifests itself in myths, legends and literary works, which can then serve as the shared cultural ground of the community. Given the significance of stories from a psychological and cultural point of view, Senior’s endeavour to re-member the long lost strata of history becomes all the more necessary and sheds light on the conceptual limits of Derek Walcott’s assertion that ‘the sea is History’<fnref n="129" />. In the face of colonial archives and narratives which have historically posited the Caribbean as a blank slate without any ‘character and purpose’<fnref n="130" />, to quote James Froude’s phrasing, grounding the region in its own story seems more urgent than ever.

However, paradoxically enough, re-membering such a traumatic past in an attempt to palliate the historical alienation of the Caribbean may paradoxically lead to another form of alienation. Indeed, the picture which emerges from this dynamic of unearthing is inevitably dreary, as it confronts us with the sight of a region stricken by inequalities and struggling to rebuild itself from the fragments of its discontinuous history. This tension is epitomised in the short story ‘Boxed-In’, in which the protagonist, Mr. Everett, tries to teach the history of slavery to the people around him:

<footnote n="128">¹²⁸ Bhabha, Homi. *The Location of Culture*. Op. cit., p. 63.</footnote>

<footnote n="129">¹²⁹ Walcott, Derek. 'The Sea is History'. *Collected Poems 1948-1984*. Op. cit., p. 364.</footnote>

<footnote n="130">¹³⁰ Froude, James A. *The English in the West Indies*. Op. cit., p. 347.</footnote>
At first, in his excitement, he genuinely tried to share this knowledge with Bailey and other people around. But no one wanted to know about the six million Africans torn from their homes and brought to the New World as slaves, or of the slave past of their forebears, or indeed that it was time for black men to free themselves from mental slavery. Nobody liked being described as "Negro," "African," or "Black." They saw none of it as relevant to their lives.

(PT 105-106)

In this passage, the powerful injunction to ‘free [oneself] from mental slavery’ through active re-membering, in keeping with Bhabha’s definition of the term, is pitted against a more concrete reality: the trauma is so alienating that forgetting, or trying to forget, appears to be the preferable option. The rest of the short story demonstrates the dangers of forgetting, as history is inevitably bound to repeat itself. Nevertheless, this passage remains significant as it echoes a criticism which has been formulated by several writers against the tendency to dwell on the wounds of the past in postcolonial writing. In an opinion piece published in *The Guardian*, the Nigerian writer Ben Okri argued that ‘[t]he greatest literature comes not from the heaviest subjects but from freedom of thought’<fnref n="131" />. Within the Caribbean literary landscape, the dichotomy between the heaviness of the past and the creative potential of the future resonates with the conflicting views of V. S. Naipaul, who conceptualised the Caribbean as irredeemably chained to its past, and Derek Walcott, who saw no point in trying to recover meaning in the face of amnesia and advocated for creation instead of retrospection<fnref n="132" />.

Therefore, while unearthing the layers of place proves a necessary task for the postcolonial writer, such a strong focus on the traumas of the past and their legacies may result in a new form of impasse: rather than being beset by silence, as M. NourbeSe Philip puts it, the Caribbean region would now become beset by its own history. We may thus wonder how recovery, in Senior’s collections, can turn into a more fertile dynamic which not only picks up the fragments of history, but which allows for (re)creation from these fragments. Just as tilling the soil is meant to prepare the ground for new seeds in gardening, labouring the historical roots of the region can also represent a way to nurture the place and the community and, in order to cultivate a sense of culture and identity.

* * *

<footnote n="131">131 Okri, Ben. ‘A Mental Tyranny Is Keeping Black Writers from Greatness’. *Art. cit.*, n/p.</footnote>

<footnote n="132">132 See in particular Walcott, Derek. ‘The Muse of History’. *What the Twilight Says. Op. cit.*, p. 39 and p. 64.</footnote>
## Part Two:
### Cultivating the Roots

In a postcolonial world marked by the redefinition of national and cultural boundaries, the political need for counter-narratives overlaps with the ethical necessity for postcolonial writers to write *for* the postcolonial subjects themselves, in order to create narratives which can help foster a sense of identity and community – an imperative made all the more acute by an increasingly globalised context, in which local communities and territories are constantly at risk of being absorbed into hegemonic cultural and economic powers. As Benedict Anderson has pointed out in *Imagined Communities*, the notion of ‘community’ is usually predicated upon shared cultural roots, which allow individuals to imagine themselves as part of a group through these narratives of a common heritage<fnref n="133" />. And yet, considering that history, in the Caribbean, has been shaped by violent tectonics rather than gradual sedimentation, it is difficult to imagine how a shared legacy of fragmentation can provide Caribbean individuals with any form of grounding. Richard Patteson has thus summarised the situation as follows:

> Everywhere in the Caribbean, colonialism has superimposed a European past on other possible pasts (African, Amerindian, and, to a lesser extent, Asian), submerging and concealing them, replacing the historical continuity necessary for cultural identity with ruptures and gaps.<fnref n="134" />

In light of this context, the second part of my analysis will focus on the way in which Olive Senior's active engagement with her native soil allows her to map out a distinct sense of identity for the Caribbean. As Senior unearths the layers of cultural exchanges in the archipelago, she indeed delineates the contours of an identity that is anchored in movement and diversity rather than in a homogeneous, sedimented ground, and that is defined not only by its roots but also by its ability to constantly regenerate itself. Remembrance and recovery, then, give way to creation – and it is this very creative potential, lying at the core of Senior's poetry and fiction, which can strengthen the bonds of the community and reassert its presence through the literary medium.

<footnote n="133">133 ‘... [the nation] is an imagined political community - and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’ Anderson, Benedict. *Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism*. 1986. Verso, 2006, p. 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="134">134 Patteson, Richard F. ‘Introduction: The Third Wave’. *Caribbean Passages*, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998, p. 10.</footnote>
# 1. (Dis)anchored selves

## 1.1. *A legacy of exile*

The question of identity formation usually requires a sense of linearity and continuity in time, which corresponds to the etymological root of the term ‘identity’ itself, *idem*, meaning ‘the same’. On a collective scale, historical continuity allows for the stable constitution of an inheritance which can then saturate the landscapes, through the form of monuments of all kinds which stand as concrete reminders of a shared historical narrative. This is especially the case in the Old World of European nations, as well as in the United States, a country moulded by European settlement, which bask in a pervasive material heritage – and these tangible cultural symbols are often reminiscent of the past colonial and imperial glory of those countries, as has been demonstrated by the numerous protests over statues of racist figures in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020¹³⁵. However, such an ability to find bearings on every street corner through monuments which metaphorically spell out the narrative of the community’s past is inevitably thwarted in the Caribbean, where such monuments are nowhere to be found, as Walcott points out in ‘The Sea is History’. This does not mean that material heritage is non-existent in the region, but in many cases, historical monuments are often visual reminders of the traumas of colonialism and slavery<fnref n="136" />, which can only alienate Caribbean people rather than provide any sense of anchoring onto which to build an identity, let alone strengthen the ties of the community. Walcott’s assessment signals that the Indigenous genocide, the importation of enslaved people from Africa, and the exploitation of the land by foreign powers has impeded any kind of continuous identity formation for the Caribbean people themselves. In similar fashion, Stuart Hall has argued that ‘if the search for identity always involves a search for origins, it is impossible to locate in the Caribbean an origin for its people’<fnref n="137" />. While Hall here refers to the genocide of the first peoples of the islands, which effectively undermined the possibility of smooth filiation and rootedness for their descendants, this initial uprooting has also become a recurring motif throughout the history of the Caribbean:

<footnote n="135">135 The Black Lives Matter movement arose after George Floyd, an African American man, was murdered by a white police officer on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis, MN. In the months following the event, several statues of racist figures were toppled around the world: for instance, in Bristol, UK, the statue of a seventeenth-century slave trader, Edward Colston, was thrown into Bristol Harbor by protesters on 7 June 2020.</footnote>

<footnote n="136">136 In Jamaica, many of the National Heritage sites are former plantation houses, such as Halse House in Clarendon or Tryall Great House in Hanover. In fact, even the headquarters of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust were initially built in 1755 by Thomas Hibbert, a wealthy British merchant and planter, to serve as his residence. The pervasive nature of the colonial heritage in the Caribbean landscape testifies to the superimposition of an exogenous past onto the Caribbean by colonial powers underscored by Richard Patteson ('Introduction: The Third Wave'. *Caribbean Passages, op. cit.*, p. 10).</footnote>

<footnote n="137">137 Hall, Stuart. 'Negotiating Caribbean Identities'. *New Caribbean Thought, op. cit.*, p. 26.</footnote>
not only were enslaved Africans forcefully uprooted from their homeland by European slave
traders and made to cross a ‘door of no return’<fnref n="138" /> to the New World, to borrow the name used
by Dionne Brand, but the mass emigration of Caribbean-born individuals towards other parts
of the globe nowadays corresponds to another form of diasporic uprooting. This legacy of exile
thus seems to jeopardise any possibility of finding a common centre of origin to look back to
and build upon for the peoples of the Caribbean.

As a result, unearthing cultural roots for the communities in the archipelago seems irrelevant
at best, and impossible at worst, given that linear genealogies, spatial anchorings and cultural
continuities have been irredeemably fractured throughout history. This may be why the theme
of rootlessness emerged as one of the *topoi* of postcolonial Caribbean literature in the middle
of the twentieth century<fnref n="139" />, and this theme also accounts for the prevalence of the sea metaphor
in the literary output and critical theory of the region; indeed, through the images of ebbs and
flows and fluidity that it connotes, the sea imagery crystallises the impossibility of dropping
anchor anywhere. In that regard, it is significant that *Gardening in the Tropics* should open on
a section entitled ‘Travellers’ Tales’, as the emphasis on travel immediately hints at the long
history of displacement which has shaped the Caribbean – so much so, in fact, that Stewart
Brown and John Wickham have defined migration as ‘the defining experience of Caribbean
“being”’<fnref n="140" />. At first glance, the title, ‘Travellers’ Tales’, may evoke the travelogues of great
European explorers such as Sir Francis Drake or Christopher Columbus, or literary travel
narratives such as Daniel Defoe’s *Robinson Crusoe*<fnref n="141" />; and yet, the section portrays a wide
range of traveller figures and therefore demonstrates that travel, in the Caribbean, is a very
common experience. For instance, poems such as ‘All Clear, 1928’ and ‘Hurricane Story, 1951’
depict diasporic middle-class characters who leave their homeland in search of better living
conditions abroad, while the refugees in ‘Caribbean Basin Initiative’, ‘Stowaway’ and ‘Illegal
Immigrant’ are evidence that migration is sometimes the only option in the face of economic
and political crises at home. In addition, the poem ‘Meditation on Red’ sheds light on the fact
that Olive Senior herself is a traveller: not only does the poet explicitly portray herself travelling

<footnote n="138">138 Brand, Dionne. *A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging*. Vintage Canada, 2002.</footnote>

<footnote n="139">139 This theme is indeed ubiquitous in the works of many renowned authors from the region. The novels and short stories of Jean Rhys, for instance, as well as *The Lonely Londoners* (1956) by Samuel Selvon from Trinidad and *In the Castle of My Skin* (1953) by George Lamming from Barbados, all portray diasporic Caribbean characters who struggle with feelings of homesickness and alienation.</footnote>

<footnote n="140">140 Brown, Stewart, and John Wickham, editors. ‘Introduction’. *The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories*, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. xv.</footnote>

<footnote n="141">141 Defoe, Daniel. *Robinson Crusoe*. 1719. Edited by Michael Shinagel, 2nd Norton Critical Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.</footnote>
to Devon to visit Rhys's grave, but the mirror image between the two writers also sheds light on the fact that Senior, just like Rhys, lives outside of her native Caribbean. Consequently, the emphasis on movement and travel in the poetry collection conveys the impression of a disunited community, in which the structure of postmemory as it is defined by Marianne Hirsch manifests itself as an endless repetition of exiles, mirroring the initial uprooting of the Indigenous inhabitants and the enslaved African people.

In the short stories of *The Pain Tree*, however, the diegesis is more clearly anchored in the Jamaican soil; only one story, ‘Lollipop’, is set outside of the island. And yet, it seems that the structural rootlessness of the Caribbean still manifests itself through the prism of family dynamics rather than physical migrations. Indeed, nearly all the stories dramatise the tensions which arise from dysfunctional or broken family bonds, blurring the ties of filiation and jeopardising the search for origins on an individual level. This motif is particularly noticeable in ‘A Father Like That’, a story which relates the endeavours of a young girl, Reema, who lives in an orphanage, to find the identity of her father. As a young child, the protagonist thought that her father was Uncle Nelson, who used to live with her and her mother and effectively fulfilled the role of a father figure until he moved abroad. However, Miss Richards, who looks after her in the orphanage, tells her that her father is actually Mister Canaan, a wealthy store chain owner. This revelation is made all the more believable by the fact that Reema starts pinpointing resemblances between herself and her new alleged father (PT 33), and these suspicions lead the girl to sneak out of the orphanage to attend Mister Canaan’s funeral in the hope of reconnecting with her lost family. Nonetheless, as Reema realises the blatant socioeconomic divide separating her from the Canaans, she quickly dismisses these hypothetical family ties and wishes she could tell Miss Richards that ‘if she did see those people at the funeral, she would never think I [Reema] could be family to them’ (PT 40). As we reach the denouement of the story, the question of the protagonist’s paternity remains unanswered, and the young girl is left daydreaming about all the kinds of heroic fathers that she could have. From a metaphorical perspective, Reema’s never-ending genealogical quest bespeaks the impossibility of tracing continuous filiations and finding a sense of stability within bloodlines in a region stricken by historical and geographical discontinuities.

Given all this, we may understand why Walcott should have argued in favour of considering history as irrelevant in the Caribbean, since this perspective alleviates the emotional and psychological burden of trying to look for a singular point of origin that simply does not exist. Moreover, the appeal of making a clean break with the past was further reinforced by the wave
of Independences in the twentieth century, during which Caribbean countries had to reinvent
their entire identity and symbolically cut ties with centuries of colonisation. National identity
could then be fostered with new national symbols: Jamaica, for instance, changed its motto
from ‘Indus Uterque Serviet Uni’ to ‘Out of Many, One People’ in 1962, and adopted the
Jamaican dollar as its new currency in 1968, leaving the Jamaican pound out of use. However,
the creation of a new identity from scratch is also what made the islands more vulnerable to the
growing influence of the United States, which corresponds to ‘a new form of cultural
imperialism that is not only inhibiting the possibility of developing our own natural cultures but
of developing a pan-Caribbean culture’ according to Olive Senior <fnref n="142" /> – in other words, instead
of developing a strong, independent identity, the Caribbean region was absorbed into America’s
backyard throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. A tension thus arises: the idea of
rootedness, in the Caribbean, seems fundamentally impossible yet urgently necessary, both for
the region in its entirety and the individual countries which compose it, in order to fully rebuild
themselves after a long history of uprootings.

## 1.2. *Journeys of (no) return?*

As a matter of fact, the question of origins remains a driving motif throughout the two
collections: the roots may be remote or uncertain, but their call remains tangible nonetheless.
The paradoxical pervasiveness of subterraneous roots in the collections indicates that the
possibility of forgetting the past to create something completely new is but an illusion. Senior’s
belief that ‘the present is always shaped by the past’<fnref n="143" /> thus goes beyond political and economic
superstructures and applies to human lives as well, suggesting that identity formation
necessarily implies a backward glance.

This tension is especially noticeable in the short story collection, in which several characters
who have seemingly made a clean break with their past are eventually haunted by their origins,
thus displaying their identity as a complex interplay between different layers. In fact, the first
short story of the collection explicitly compares identity to an accumulation of strata, as
Lorraine’s mother is described by the narrator as ‘[c]arefully layered’ and ‘polished’ (PT 8) –
and just as Lorraine undertakes to peel off the layers of history in Larissa’s room, the readers,

<footnote n="142">142 Rowell, Charles H. 'An Interview with Olive Senior'. Art. cit., p. 487.</footnote>

<footnote n="143">143 Montout, Marie-Annick. 'Translating a Culture in Stories from the Caribbean: A Conversation with Olive Senior'. Art. cit., n/p.</footnote>
too, are invited to explore the layers of the characters' identities in the collection. The haunting return of one's roots is perhaps most explicit in 'The Country Cousin', which does not give centre stage to the titular 'cousin' but to her aunt, Mrs. Fennell, who is more often called 'Mrs. F' in the narration. The protagonist comes from a poor, rural background, which she managed to escape by marrying into the wealthy Fennell family. Deeply ashamed of her roots, Mrs. Fennell does everything she can to hide her upbringing and tells her adoptive, chosen family that '[s]he came with no past, except one respectable great-aunt, whom she introduced as her only family, hinting sadly at early orphanhood and vague third cousins in the country' (PT 125). However, as the story unfolds, the use of internal focalisation gives readers access to several elements which hint at the unexpected omnipresence of this hidden past in the life of Mrs. Fennell. For instance, even though she does not tell her family the reason behind her seemingly random fainting spells and anger outbursts, we learn that the 'dark shadows' of her past are the source of her constant anxiety (PT 126). The choice of the word 'shadow' to describe her roots is quite telling, as its it laden with psychoanalytic undertones – and the physical return of the titular 'country cousin', Rose, to Mrs. Fennell's life, seems to stand as a metaphorical return of the repressed, suggesting that despite her best efforts, her shameful id<fnref n="144" /> remains an intrinsic part of her and cannot be erased. In that regard, that the protagonist should be referred to as 'Mrs. F' rather than as her full name crystallises the incompleteness of her identity as she wishes to project it, because it deprives her of a full family name and defines her as a wife, who exists only through her relationship with her husband, rather than as a full-fledged individual. The dangers of forgetting one's past are similarly dramatised in the short story 'Flying' through the more concrete metaphor of Jonathan's illness, which seems to stem from his deep feeling of rootlessness. Indeed, while Jonathan comes back to Jamaica thinking that he is going to die, he is brought back to health when he finally remembers where he comes from. The sudden shift between disconnection and reconnection is crystallised in the gradation '[e]ach capillary, each vein, each artery awakens' (PT 176), which mirrors, through the ternary rhythm, the blood pulsing through Jonathan's body, endowing both the text and the character with newfound dynamism. These two stories exemplify that forgetting one's roots, willingly or not, leads to a dangerous, unhealthy form of self-alienation, whereas an active effort to reconnect with – or to

<footnote n="144">¹⁴⁴ The Freudian psychoanalytic model of the human psyche posits the existence of three interacting agents, the *ego* ('the I'), the *id* ('the it'), and the *superego* ('the Over-I'). The *id* generally describes the repressed part of our psychic life; Freud conceived it as primarily libidinal force accounting for the life and death drives behind the actions of human beings (Freud, Sigmund. *The Ego and the Id*. 1923. Edited by James Strachey, Translated by Joan Riviere, W. W. Norton & Company, 1990, pp. 17-18). I am here expanding upon the original meaning to include, more broadly, the haunting structure of Mrs. Fennell's past.</footnote>
unearth – these roots can open '[t]he door into enchantment, into companionship' which allows humans to thrive (PT 178).

Senior's agenda regarding the topic of identity formation is thus clear: regardless of how unanswerable the question of origins may seem, it must still be asked. She formulates this stance even more explicitly at the beginning of her *Encyclopedia*, in which she defines 'heritage' as 'everything from the past (our inheritance) that shapes us and serves as pointers to who we are, both as individuals and a nation'<fnref n="145" />. This definition stresses the role of the past as an unavoidable step in the journey towards self-discovery – and as it turns out, the backward glance also stands out as an essential element in the author's creative process, since it shapes the two collections on a metatextual level. On the one hand, *The Pain Tree* is framed by two stories of homecoming, 'The Pain Tree' and 'Flying', which clearly set the tone for the stories in-between by foregrounding the geographic and symbolic return as an essential rite of passage in the process of identity formation. In *Gardening in the Tropics*, on the other hand, the question of origins takes on a more collective dimension as the opening poem, 'Gourd', serves as a poetic cosmogony for the rest of the collection, symbolically giving birth to the poems that follow. The poetic voice addresses the fruit and insists on its role as the beginning of all things: 'you were *womb*, you were heavenly *home*, the *birthplace* of life here on earth' (GT 7, my emphases). Through the emphasis on a return to origins in both collections, the author implicitly points to the human need to make sense of oneself and of the world, through *logos*, by looking back to where one comes from. This may be why, even though Reema's father remains unidentified, the girl still tries to create family links with the people around her, by calling her mother's boyfriend 'Uncle' or her caretaker 'Aunt'. The human predisposition to look for a centre of origins is also illustrated by the theme of the 2025 edition of the BOCAS Literature Festival in Trinidad and Tobago, entitled 'Always Coming Home'<fnref n="146" />, to which several Caribbean writers (including Olive Senior) were invited to discuss the ways in which the theme of home informs their worldview and their writing.

Consequently, all this shows that despite an apparent lack of common ground, the supposedly disunited members of the Caribbean community remain drawn to the idea(l) of roots. Unearthing these roots, then, may not be as pointless as previously suggested – but given

<footnote n="145">¹⁴⁵ Senior, Olive. *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage*. Op. cit., p. ix.</footnote>

<footnote n="146">¹⁴⁶ The programme of the festival is accessible here: '2025 Festival Programme'. *BOCAS Lit Fest*, https://www.bocaslitfest.com/programme/. Accessed 8 May 2025.</footnote>
the particularities of the Caribbean context, which by no means resembles the long, sedimented history of the Old World, one first needs to know what to look for beneath the surface.

### 1.3. Rhizomic roots

If the possibility to find roots for the Caribbean seems impossible at first glance, it is perhaps because the concept of roots itself is steeped in a Eurocentric imaginary which is inadequate to apprehend a region whose history and identity developed at the antipodes of the European world of monuments, battles and martyrs, in the words of Walcott. For unearthing to reveal anything at all, we must therefore rethink the way in which we approach the notions of roots, heritage, and identity, so as to adapt our framework to a geographic and historical context in which discontinuities take centre stage. We must consider, in other words, ‘the possibility of the impossible’, to quote Catherine Pélage’s poetic definition of Caribbean culture<fnref n="147" />.

The conceptualisation of heritage as determined by a singular, stable foundation is anchored in Western thought. As Corentin Jégou has underscored in an analysis of Walcott’s *Omeros*, ‘the ideal of rootedness [...] is characteristic of the mythology of Romantic nationalism, with its valuation of cultural transmission and its emphasis on the native *land*’<fnref n="148" />. In fact, the word ‘nation’ itself, as Eric Hobsbawm reminds us, is saturated with connotations of origins and rightful descent<fnref n="149" /> – this is why, Hobsbawm notes, ‘[i]n Romance languages the word “nation” is indigenous. Elsewhere, insofar as it is used, it is a foreign loan’<fnref n="150" />. Whether it be on an individual or a collective scale, this indicates that the possibility of transmission in Western culture is predicated upon the notion of filiation, conceived as a patrilineal relationship between descendants and a *paterfamilias* who embodies a form of primeval paternity. The authoritative presence of an almighty father is similarly prevalent in Western monotheist religions, and it is also palpable in the French word ‘*patrie*’ (and its equivalents in other Romance languages) which stands for the umbilical – or rather phallic – link between individuals and their homeland. In addition to its clear patriarchal undertones, the Western notion of filiation hinges on unicity: in his essay about the origins of the modern family, Friedrich Engels indeed writes that the

<footnote n="147">¹⁴⁷ Pélage, Catherine. 'La culture des Caraïbes est la possibilité de l'impossible : entretien avec l'écrivain dominicain Rey Andújar'. *Leaves*, no. 15, 2023, pp. 177-83.</footnote>

<footnote n="148">¹⁴⁸ Jégou, Corentin. 'Tangled Routes, Translation, and Adulteration in Derek Walcott's *Omeros*. *Leaves*, no. 15, 2023, p. 142.</footnote>

<footnote n="149">¹⁴⁹ Hobsbawm, Eric. *Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality*. 1990. Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="150">¹⁵⁰ *Ibid.*, p. 16.</footnote>
concept of monogamy is ‘one of the signs of beginning civilization’ insofar as it ensures ‘indisputable paternal lineage’ and the rightful transmission of material inheritance between the father and his offspring<fnref n="151" />. However, such ideals of undisputed paternity are doomed to fail in the Caribbean: as Frederick Douglass writes in his autobiography, ‘[g]enealogical trees do not flourish among slaves’<fnref n="152" />, nor do they flourish among victims of genocide – and by extension, ideals of patriotism rooted in an undisputed sense of belonging to one’s country are jeopardised as well, as the original home is always bound to be out of reach.”

And yet, just because Caribbean heritage does not follow these patterns does not mean that it is non-existent; in fact, as we have seen, the region and its people *are* anchored in a long postcolonial history, which constitutes a different kind of legacy, made of (post)colonial hauntings, but also of unexpected, more positive forms of transmission. This is why Kerry-Jane Wallart and Nicole Ollier conceptualise transmission in the Caribbean through the prism of Foucauldian discontinuity, which posits that ‘through changes in chronology, scale, and characters, an identity remains stable where things communicate’<fnref n="153" />. In that sense, identity can be seen as something which is constructed *through* – and not despite – change and fragmentation, and which therefore suits the discontinuous reality of the archipelago. This conceptual shift lies at the core of the works of Édouard Glissant, who stands out in the landscape of Caribbean theory as the main thinker of his generation to recuperate the idea of roots – in addition to the seascape<fnref n="154" /> – and adapt it to the context of the Caribbean. Drawing from the framework of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who established a distinction between the tree and the rhizome as models of rootedness in *A Thousand Plateaus*<fnref n="155" />, Glissant reframes Caribbean identity as profoundly rhizomic:

> The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they [Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari] propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome

<footnote n="151">151 Engels, Friedrich. *The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State*. 1884. Translated by Ernest Untermann, Pathfinder Press, 1909, p. 76.</footnote>

<footnote n="152">152 Douglass, Frederick. *My Bondage and My Freedom*. 1855. Edited by David W. Blight, Yale University Press, 2014, p. 30.</footnote>

<footnote n="153">153 ‘À travers les changements de chronologie, d’échelle, de personnages, une identité se maintient par où les choses communiquent.’ Foucault, Michel. ‘À la recherche du présent perdu’. *Dits et écrits 1954-1975*, Gallimard, 2001, p. 505; quoted in Wallart, Kerry-Jane, and Nicole Ollier. ‘Transmettre (dans) la Caraïbe: Continuités, ruptures, passages et expériences’. *Leaves*, no. 15, 2023, pp. 1-2.</footnote>

<footnote n="154">154 Glissant does not only focus on the land either: the first chapter of his *Poetics of Relation* (1990. Translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997) is entitled ‘The Open Boat’, and he repeatedly goes back to the image of the archipelago as a way to reclaim both the seascape and the landscape as part of the Caribbean reality.</footnote>

<footnote n="155">155 ‘... any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.’ Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, p. 7.</footnote>
maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.<fnref n="156" />

Through this angle, Glissant continues, ‘uprooting can work toward identity’<fnref n="157" />: in other words, the principles of relationality and heterogeneity replace the monolithic, hierarchical connotations underlying the Western conception of rootedness and posit identity construction as a continuous process of infinite encounters, rather than as the linear construction of a definitive, authoritarian label<fnref n="158" />. Although the land, unlike the sea, may evoke notions of stasis and boundedness<fnref n="159" /> at first glance, the image of the rhizome allows us to reframe it as a dynamic *locus*, where subjectivities can change and evolve all the while retaining a sense of anchoring.

Coincidentally, the image of the rhizome is present in Senior’s poem ‘Bamboo (*In Five Variations*)’, which uses the theme of bamboo as a rhizomic plant to portray identity as similarly shifting, relational, and paradoxically uprooted. In the fourth section of the poem, the poetic voice is that of a young girl who relates that she has gotten used to escaping the hostile household of her Great-Aunt by seeking shelter in a bamboo thicket, where she can read as she pleases and listen to the sounds of nature, including ‘dry leaves that rustle’ and ‘bamboo joints that creak’ (*GT 81*). Then, the fifth section of the poem gives voice to an older persona, who lives in Canada but who can still hear, in her imagination, ‘the wind dying in bamboo leaves’ and ‘the sound of wild bamboo flutes’ (*GT 82*) from her window. Even though it is not explicitly mentioned, the juxtaposition of those two parts suggests that the poetic voice belongs to the same person at different stages of her life; therefore, just as the poetic ‘I’ can sustain a sense of stability across the typographic separation of the two sections on the page, it appears that the speaker’s identity, too, is built through transitions. This is reminiscent of the dichotomy between roots and routes expounded by Paul Gilroy, who argues in favour of ‘seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation’<fnref n="160" /> in the context of the Black Atlantic. It comes as no surprise,

<footnote n="156">¹⁵⁶ Glissant, Édouard. *Poetics of Relation*. Op. cit., p. 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="157">¹⁵⁷ *Ibid*., p. 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="158">¹⁵⁸ Deleuze and Guattari summarise this dichotomy through the homophony between ‘est’ and ‘et’ in French: ‘The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and. . . and. . . and. . .”’. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. *A Thousand Plateaus. Op. cit.*, p. 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="159">¹⁵⁹ The opposition between the stasis of the land and the fluidity of the sea is, for instance, underlined by Salomé Montoriol and underpins her analysis of the significance of the sea in Caribbean women’s writing (Images of the Sea in Three Caribbean Women’s Texts. 2023. Sorbonne Nouvelle, Master’s Thesis, p. 93). Montoriol also asserts that Glissant ‘replaces the botanical metaphor of the rhizome’ expounded by Deleuze and Guattari with the archipelago (Ibid., p. 13); however, I argue that Glissant’s archipelagic framework is not so much a replacement as an enrichment of the initial botanical imagery. Even though Montoriol – among many other critics – goes on to interpret Glissant’s relational poetics through the prism of the sea, the idea of relation itself invites us to consider both the sea *and* the land together, as it is their geographic and historical interaction which has given birth to the Caribbean.</footnote>

<footnote n="160">¹⁶⁰ Gilroy, Paul. *The Black Atlantic*. Op. cit., p. 19.</footnote>
then, that travellers should be given pride of place in the two collections under analysis, whether
it be Lorraine and Jonathan in *The Pain Tree* or the various voices of the ‘Travellers’ Tales’
section in *Gardening in the Tropics*: paradoxically enough, movement and encounters seem to
be the permanent, defining features of Caribbean identity. Yet, unlike the sea *topos*, the idea of
a rhizomic identity still preserves a form of rootedness and anchoring which is all the more
symbolic given that '[f]or the native, the history of colonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss
of locality to the outsider'<fnref n="161" />, as Edward Said has pointed out. Actualising the possibility to find
(or regrow) roots in the Caribbean therefore enables us to acknowledge the presence of the
Indigenous peoples who had already settled in the archipelago by the time Columbus set sail to
the New World, and it also encapsulates the experience of the Caribbean people who do still
live on the islands. In other words, rhizomic as it may be, the idea of rootedness allows for a
conceptual reclaiming of the place which was appropriated by the settlers and continues to be
seen as a playground of sorts by tourists and foreign companies. Nonetheless, this anchoring in
the place is not static, and unearthing the layers of the Caribbean identity will not unveil one
dominant root, leading to a single point of origin; on the contrary, one must be open to discover
unexpected subterraneous connections and regrowths.

Reframing the notion of roots as hybrid and shifting allows for a more nuanced
understanding of the kinds of ancestries which can be found in Senior’s two collections. One
could understand the motion of unearthing itself as part and parcel of this unique process of
identity formation, as it posits movement – that of tilling the soil, in our case – as intrinsic to
self-discovery and (rhizomic) rootedness. Fractures and fault lines, then, become sites of active
regeneration. Olive Senior’s work crystallises the dialectics between roots and routes and casts
a new light upon Caribbean identity, which, as it appears, thrives in multiplicity and can be
infinitely re-seeded. In doing so, Senior avoids the pitfalls of Afro-pessimism and delineates a
poetics of resilience, gesturing toward healing, continuity, and renewal.

## 2. Tracing routes of resilience

### 2.1. *Creolised ances-trees*

As Senior unearths the strata of the Caribbean landscape and reveals the fossils of the
‘disappeared ones’ (GT 85) who have long remained the buried victims of centuries of

<footnote n="161">¹⁶¹ Said, Edward. *Culture and Imperialism*. 1993. Vintage Books, 1994, p. 225.</footnote>
colonisation, she also retraces a long history of encounters between different cultures and peoples – the Indigenous inhabitants of the region, the Western European settlers, the African people who were forced into slavery, and later on, the Northern American influence and the influx of foreign tourists travelling from all over the world to the islands. Besides, even though the two collections under analysis do not directly tackle this aspect<fnref n="162" />, the region also welcomed several waves of immigration from the Asian continent from the late nineteenth century onwards<fnref n="163" />. It is thus paradoxical that the Caribbean should have been considered as a margin of the Empire during colonisation and that it remains partially seen as a marginal zone from a cultural and economic standpoint today in the West, as the region constitutes a melting pot of different elsewhere and, to that extent, can be considered as a nexus of globalisation, a place where the global merges with the local. These multicultural foundations are similarly highlighted by Guadeloupean-born writer Daniel Maximin in *Les fruits du cylone*, in which he stresses the role of Europe, Asia, America, and Africa in the formation of the archipelago: ‘four continents to build an island’, he writes<fnref n="164" />. Through the isotopy of construction, Maximin suggests that the fruit of these encounters does not merely amount to the synthesis of these four parts, but to the creation of a radically new, Creole identity, thereby evoking Glissant’s definition of Creolisation:

> If we posit *métissage* as, generally speaking, the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless *métissage*, its elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts, whereas certain forms of *métissage* can concentrate one more time.<fnref n="165" />

Identity and heritage, in the Caribbean, are necessarily composite. The birth of Creolisation
does not entail the negation or the destruction of its different roots, but it allows for the creation

<footnote n="162">¹⁶² The subject of Asian immigration to the Caribbean is addressed elsewhere in Senior’s works; see for instance the titular short story in Senior, Olive. *Arrival of the Snake Woman and Other Stories*. Longman, 1989.</footnote>

<footnote n="163">¹⁶³ Asian populations first started migrating to the Caribbean as indentured labourers after the abolition of slavery, and they would often return to their home continent. However, the later wave of Asian immigration to the Caribbean in the twentieth century was different as immigrants usually settled in the region for good. See Roopnarine, Lomarsh. 'South Asian Diaspora in the Caribbean'. *Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History*, Oxford University Press, 2022, https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.001.0001/acrefore-9780199366439-e-1131. Accessed 9 May 2025.</footnote>

<footnote n="164">¹⁶⁴ ‘Ma Caraïbe est telle : un archipel d’îles-roseaux nées de la résistance aux chaînes, brûlant les racines absentes en un feu sans foyer posé fier sur trois roches pour bricoler une humanité neuve et se forger des cœurs aux quatre sangs dispersés : l’Europe par erreur sans son humanité, l’Afrique en friche d’échardes et de rayons, l’Asie plus tard migrée, l’Amérique par et pour nous-mêmes recouvrée : quatre continents pour édifier une île.’ Maximin, Daniel. *Les fruits du cyclone : Une géopoétique de la Caraïbe*. Éditions du Seuil, 2006, p. 13.</footnote>

<footnote n="165">¹⁶⁵ Glissant, Édouard. *Poetics of Relation*. Op. cit., p. 34.</footnote>
of an identity which can look back on its foundations and build something new upon them,
rather than stay confined to the marginal status of being almost-something-else<fnref n="166" />.

This long history of encounters can be re-traced throughout Senior’s two collections. First, the initial encounter between the Indigenous peoples and the first European settlers takes pride of place in poems such as ‘Meditation on Yellow’ and ‘Seeing the Light’, which both portray Columbus’s so-called discovery from the point of view of the Taínos. Then, the next encounter, which corresponds to the arrival of the first slave ships to the region, is depicted in ‘Gardening on the Run’, in which the speaker is one of the first enslaved African people brought to Hispaniola by the Spaniards. As he runs away from the plantations, the speaker describes his encounter ‘with runaways who didn’t look like [him] though [...] their bodies were stained black’ (*GT* 107). These black stains denote the ritual use of guinep by the Taínos, who used the fruit as body paint<fnref n="167" /> – and this first hint is later confirmed when the speaker says that those other runaways are called ‘wild Indians’ by the white settlers (*Ibid*.). The arrival of African people to the islands is mentioned in several other poems and stories – in ‘Boxed-In’ and ‘Flying’, for instance – but this poem is particularly interesting because it shows that, contrary to popular belief, the Indigenous peoples had not been completely eradicated by the time plantations were starting to develop across the region, and therefore, through their interaction with both white settlers, who repressed them and chased them away, and some African individuals, they also contributed to shaping the Creole Caribbean identity as we know it today<fnref n="168" />. Even though the Indigenous presence in the Caribbean today may seem minimal compared to the influence of African cultures and traditions, foregrounding this presence remains significant as it also allows Senior to reclaim a form of historical anchoring in the place itself. With poems like ‘Seeing the Light’, which depicts traditional Indigenous farming practices, Senior points out that the Taínos had dropped anchor in the region and had started working with the soil long before Columbus effectively deprived the Indigenous inhabitants from their habits and traditions, anchored in local rootedness – hence why the Indigenous runaways in ‘Gardening on the Run’ are seen mourning ‘the loss of their homeland’ (*GT* 107). Even though they have not concretely left their homeland, they are no longer allowed to inhabit

<footnote n="166">166 In similar fashion, the authors of *Éloge de la Créolité* claimed: ‘Ni Européens, ni Africains, ni Asiatiques, nous nous proclamons Créoles’. Bernabé, Jean, et al. *Éloge de La Créolité*. 1989. Gallimard, 1993, p. 13.</footnote>

<footnote n="167">167 See Senior, Olive. *Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage. Op. cit.*, p. 103 and p. 225.</footnote>

<footnote n="168">168 In a different geographic context, Tiffany Lethabo King has endeavoured to show the ways in which Native American and enslaved African people shaped – or shoaled, to borrow her metaphor – white settler behaviour and ideology. Even though colonialism and imperialism were based on the invisibility of the racialised Others, the presence of these Others is precisely what shaped these two ideological pillars. See King, Tiffany Lethabo. *The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies*. Duke University Press, 2019.</footnote>
it, which is precisely what Edward Said has summarised as ‘the loss of locality to the outsider’ that inaugurates the colonisation process<fnref n="169" />.

Finally, the collections also illustrate a later stage of Creolisation in the contemporary period, through the growing presence of a Caribbean diaspora in other continents but also through the increasing influence of Western, particularly North American lifestyles on the Caribbean soil itself. On the one hand, the short story ‘Lollipop’ dramatises the disorientation which arises from emigration through the impressionable, fearful eyes of Katie, a young girl who was raised in rural Jamaica by her grandmother and whose childlike point of view renders the culture shock even more striking in the narration: the typography of ‘Fast Food’ with capital letters, for instance, denotes just how foreign this concept is to her as she was used to eat ‘food that came out of the ground or off a tree’ in Jamaica (PT 82), while the use of quotation marks to describe her neighbour’s toy, ‘a gadget which he called “Play-Station”’ (PT 81), similarly bespeaks its alienness to the girl’s eyes. On the other hand, while Katie highlights the initial shock of the encounter by insisting on differences, other characters embody the result of a longer process of Western acculturation which blurs those differences, conveying the impression of an indivisible whole instead: Jonathan’s mother in ‘Flying’, for instance, owns an ‘architect-designed bungalow in a smart new suburb’ (PT 156) and has adopted a ‘city-lady voice’ (PT 161) which brings her closer to archetypes of Northern American socialites than to her own mother, YaYa, who lives in a tiny home in the country.

All this illustrates that Senior’s portrayal of Caribbean history, which can be retraced across the two collections, allows her to unearth the multiple influences, encounters and interferences which have contributed to the process of Creolisation. In doing so, she further undermines the possibility of claiming one single point of origin in the Caribbean, as ances-trees, in the archipelago, are inevitably made of hybrid roots. The poem ‘Plants’ provides a useful metaphor in that regard, as the poet depicts the notion of origins as shifting and unpredictable through the image of ‘the original profligate, extravagant, reckless, improvident, weed’ (GT 64) – an imagery which is reminiscent of Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s definition of the centre of origins as a point that ‘is neither static nor localizable, but rather in continuous displacement’<fnref n="170" /> in the Caribbean. Tending to one’s roots, in Senior’s works, does not negate multiplicity and hybridity, which contrasts with Kamau Brathwaite’s definition of the Caribbean ‘literature of

<footnote n="169">¹⁶⁹ Said, Edward. *Culture and Imperialism. Op. cit.*, p. 225.</footnote>

<footnote n="170">¹⁷⁰ Benitez-Rojo, Antonio. *The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective*. 1992. Translated by James E. Maraniss, 2nd ed., Duke University Press, 1996, p. 187.</footnote>
reconnection'<fnref n="171" /> as a reconnection with the African 'spiritual heartland'<fnref n="172" />. Indeed, Senior also takes care to 'rebridge the gap'<fnref n="173" /> with the Indigenous peoples all the while foregrounding the Western influences on the region. Even in a story like 'Flying', in which YaYa, Jonathan's grandmother, seems to claim a single 'chain' (PT 168) linking her to Africa through her ancestors on her own grandmother's side, Senior still foregrounds rhizomic reconnections. Indeed, the fact that the great-great-grandmother is named Tano, a single letter short from 'Taíno', while YaYa herself bears the name of a Taíno deity<fnref n="174" />, implies that claiming only one inheritance in the Caribbean is impossible, as ideals of chain-like unicity are bound to be unsettled by the movements and mixtures which have shaped the region from the very beginning.

Consequently, all this goes to show that the Creolised identity can be considered as a product of the tectonics intrinsic to Caribbean history and geology, which is in keeping with Glissant's definition of Creolisation as an 'unforeseeable'<fnref n="175" /> process. Yet, Senior's works stand out through their ability to celebrate change and diversity all the while raising the possibility of reconnecting with one's ancestors, including long-lost Indigenous and African roots: reconnection, as it turns out, lies at the core of Senior's recovery of the multicultural foundations of the islands. Therefore, if Creolisation corresponds to the product of these multiple roots, and if their recovery is made possible through careful unearthing, it appears that unexpected forms of continuity have also been at play in the formation of the Creole identity.

## 2.2. (En)gendering transmission

Although Senior celebrates the hybridity of the Caribbean landscape by including diasporic individuals, Indigenous and Afro-descendant voices, as well as European characters in the two collections, unearthing the strata of the soil and of history also helps her highlight the importance of actively reconnecting with one's heritage in order to find a sense of grounding, without rejecting change and multiplicity for all that. Several figures of stability and continuity emerge in the poems and short stories and testify to the possibility of dropping anchor within a

<footnote n="171">¹⁷¹ Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 'The African Presence in Caribbean Literature'. *Daedalus*, vol. 103, no. 2, 1974, p. 81.</footnote>

<footnote n="172">¹⁷² *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="173">¹⁷³ *Ibid*.</footnote>

<footnote n="174">¹⁷⁴ Wilkinson, Phillip. *Myths and Legends: An Illustrated Guide to Their Origins and Meanings*. DK Publishing, 2009, p. 306.</footnote>

<footnote n="175">¹⁷⁵ Glissant, Édouard. *Poetics of Relation*. Op. cit., p. 34.</footnote>
history of movement and fractures; and very often, these figures of stability are women who
are portrayed as the bearers of community bonds.

Throughout the two collections, men are indeed strikingly absent, with figures of absent fathers in ‘All Clear, 1928’ and ‘A Father Like That’, as well as absent husbands in ‘The Goodness of My Heart’ and ‘Hurricane Story, 1944’, among many others. No matter the reason behind their absence, whether it be death, emigration, infidelity or emotional immaturity, it ultimately results in a gynocentric portrayal of the community, since women are often led to make up for the men’s absence by taking on multiple roles in the household and the wider social sphere. For example, in the short story ‘The Goodness of My Heart’, Mrs. Bailiff takes on the role of a mother figure for the children whom her husband had with his mistresses, welcoming them all (or so she thought) under her roof, and she is also described as a ‘prominent social worker’ (*PT* 56) beloved by the community, which characterises her as the mender of the social and family bonds which her husband’s infidelity threatened to destroy. Similarly, Richard Patteson has commented on the role of the Caribbean mother as ‘a cohesive agent within the family structure for generations’, but also as a cohesive agent for ‘the wider community’<fnref n="176" />. For all that, this does not mean that Olive Senior puts forward an idealistic, essentialising representation of gender; in fact, the collections are also ripe with physically and emotionally absent mothers, as is illustrated in ‘Lollipop’ or ‘The Pain Tree’, while the resilience displayed by the women who stay behind could also be interpreted as a blurring of gender roles – in that regard, one may recall the title of Edith Clarke’s landmark sociological study of the Jamaican family unit, *My Mother Who Fathered Me*<fnref n="177" />, which clearly evokes the role of the mother (and the grandmother, by extension) as a substitute father as well and casts motherhood in a very different light than the Victorian *topos* of the angel in the house.

Nevertheless, the recurring emphasis on women as culture-bearers depicts transmission and
continuity as a form of resistance against the centripetal threat of change and movement,
represented by the men who keep leaving them. In doing so, Senior subverts the traditional
misogynistic undertones of what Elizabeth DeLoughrey describes as ‘the gendered conflation
of women with land’ or, in other words, ‘the association of women with space and men with

<footnote n="176">¹⁷⁶ Patteson, Richard F. ‘Introduction: The Third Wave’. *Caribbean Passages, op. cit.*, p. 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="177">¹⁷⁷ Clarke, Edith. *My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Families in Three Selected Communities of Jamaica*. 1967. 3rd ed., University Press of the West Indies, 2002. Clarke conducted her research in three Jamaican communities, each representing a different socioeconomic milieu, and demonstrated the central role of mothers and grandmothers in the Jamaican family unit. Her title borrows from Lamming’s *In the Castle of My Skin* (see Lamming, George. *In the Castle of My Skin*. 1953. Collier Books, 1970, p. 4).</footnote>
time'<fnref n="178" />. Not only are these gendered stereotypes omnipresent in the literary canon – one may
recall Odysseus’s decade-long journey while Penelope patiently waits for him at home – but
they were also part of the ideological foundations of colonial discourse, as has been
demonstrated by Anne McClintock<fnref n="179" />. The feminisation of the landscape, for McClintock,
represents ‘both a *poetics* of ambivalence and a *politics* of violence’<fnref n="180" />, meaning that it
legitimised the conquest of the land precisely *because* of its misogynistic undertones: the
dynamics and ideology behind colonial settlement, therefore, were not much different from
those behind rape<fnref n="181" />. However, while the conflation of women and land has historically served
as justification for the subjection of both subjects to the desires of men, this *topos* is co-opted
by Senior into a form of strength which elevates women as repositors of community bonds,
local knowledge and cultural transmission.

Indeed, these women often display a conscious relationship with the soil and are thus
physically and symbolically associated with rootedness. A prime example of this point is the
old lady in the poem ‘The Immovable Tenant’. She is represented as the embodiment of
stability, in contrast to the ‘succession of husbands’ (*GT* 101) who have come and gone from
her life, but also to the rapid changes in urban planning happening all around her due to the
almighty influence of a mysterious landlord who has undertaken to buy everything, from the
‘ground’ and the ‘seas and beaches’ to the ‘air’ itself (*GT* 102), and has proceeded to reshape
the landscape drastically in order to attract tourists and foreign companies. This man, whom the
speaker refers to as ‘Uncle’, embodies the fast pace of capitalism, as everything is considered
with regards to its final purpose – that is, consumption. This quick, linear trajectory between
object and consumer is rendered through a play on assonances between ‘ripe for *felling*’ and
‘priced for *selling*’ as well as the alliterations in ‘minerals to be *mined*’ in the following segment,
as the musical echoes between the resultative clauses drive the poem forward just as fast as the
landlord buys out the land (*GT* 103). And yet, the seemingly harmless ‘miserable old lady’ (*GT*

<footnote n="178">¹⁷⁸ DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. *Routes and Roots. Op.cit.*, p. 24.</footnote>

<footnote n="179">¹⁷⁹ McClintock argues that ‘as European men crossed the dangerous thresholds of their known worlds, they ritualistically feminized borders and boundaries’. McClintock, Anne. *Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest*. Routledge, 1995, p. 25. This does not mean, however, that the land was no longer feminised in postcolonial and/or anticolonial discourses – for instance, it is a recurring trope in Walcott’s *The Arkansas Testament*, a poetry collection in which meditations about the landscape often interfere and overlap with mentions of feminine figures. See Walcott, Derek. *The Arkansas Testament*. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987.</footnote>

<footnote n="180">¹⁸⁰ McClintock, Anne. *Imperial Leather*. Op. cit., p. 28. Emphases in the original.</footnote>

<footnote n="181">¹⁸¹ Likewise, M. NourbeSe Philip uses the word ‘enc(o)unter’ to describe the way in which for Columbus, ‘[t]he New World would become both womb (*cunt*) and wound (*cut*).’ NourbeSe Philip, M. ‘A Piece of Land Surrounded’. *Writing It Down for James*, op. cit., p. 34.</footnote>