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An Interview with Olive Senior … Calabash A JOURNAL OF CARIBBEAN ARTS AND LETTERS Volume 2, Number 2: Summer/Fall 2003 Dolace McLean & Jacqueline Bishop OF HEARTS REVEALED: AN INTERVIEW WITH OLIVE SENIOR … It is as if Olive Senior’s first and only pleasure has been in language and the choices that she makes in her writing are an explosion of that pleasure. For Olive Senior, language and its possibilities provide the components of passion that drive her fiction and her poetry. Her short stories and poems reflect a desire to capture something authentic about Jamaican life that can only be expressed through the memorable characters of Miss Rilla in "Ballad," or the accurate portrayal of class and social positioning in "Lily, Lily," or the honest depiction of women in "Discerner of Hearts." Jacqueline Bishop and I caught up with the author while she was teaching for a semester at Columbia University. We talked for a long time and we laughed and reminisced about the past, analyzed the present and proclaimed on the future of Senior's most intimate recipient of her "love orange": the island of Jamaica and the stories, poems, and social treatises that grew out of that love. In the conversation that follows, Olive Senior talks about writing, Jamaican culture and her position as a Caribbean writer living in North America. D.M.: Thank you so much for agreeing to meet with us. The first thing I want to ask deals with the issue of culture as related to your characters. Most of your characters are usually young children who are isolated and lonely, and the point of view from which they speak is one of what I call in my work, “Islandism” – the idea of being an island. It’s almost if they’re little islands in a sea of [adult] people who do not really care about them. Does that reflect something about Jamaican culture specifically or Caribbean culture in general? O.S.: My first book of short stories reflected those kinds of characters but I would say, looking at the body of my work, I have a much more varied range of characters, though people tend to focus on the children. And I like the use of the term, “Islanded.” In fact, I McClean & Bishop / 3 just wrote a whole set of poems called “Islanded” and I think that’s what my young characters are. I don’t think they reflect Jamaica, they just reflected me and how I felt as a child [who was] totally alienated from my environment. And although I’m not writing autobiographically, I think I’ve infused my characters with my own emotional states and feelings and so on. They reflected the fact that I felt like an isolated, lonely child. Totally alienated from adult culture. I don’t know that it’s more than that really. D.M.: So how would you then address someone who reads your work as somehow indicative of a larger Jamaican culture? Your work speaks for you as the writer who wants to break boundaries but at the same time it does seem to fit into certain categories…. O.S. I wasn’t writing about myself. I was writing about the people around me that I grew up with and so on. However, I’m just saying that as a writer I infused my feelings into the writing. I don’t see it from the point of view of the critic who’s reading it, as a paradigm of something else. That’s not how writers write. So, I’m [not sure if I can] answer that kind of question. It’s for the readers and the critics to bring that to bear on the work. I am just telling stories. D.M.: Oh so they’re stories. O.S.: Even my poems are stories. I’m a storyteller. D.M. Interesting that you should say that because it brings up a whole lot of questions, critical questions, which you say aren’t [necessarily] “writerly” questions, but at some level, it seems that the writer has to almost consciously say, I’m not going to be a critical writer, I’m going to be a writer’s writer. How do you make the distinction between just writing your work as stories and writing them for people? How do you negotiate that? How do you get your readers to know what it is that you’re trying to convey? To get what it is that you are trying to say? O.S. Well, you see, I don’t feel it’s my job to negotiate anything. It’s my job to tell a good story and to tell it in the best way that I can and to tell it honestly. I see my stories, or what I do, as part of a half of something and the reader then has to bring something to bear. It’s a kind of contract between myself and the reader and it’s up to me to be convincing and to touch the reader in some way. That’s my job. A story isn’t an essay. People can read politics into it, they can read all kinds of things into it but that’s not what I set out to put in. I set out to communicate something about one human being to another human being. That’s what I’m about. D.M. Interesting. So then who is your audience? The thing about writing is that writers write, they create. But it seems that writers actually have to create for someone and sometimes they have to think “How will I market this,” To whom will I target [my work],” “Who is my audience?” and so I’m just wondering if you have an audience in mind? McClean & Bishop / 4 O.S. None of that enters into mind. For me what matters is the writing. What I’m doing here and now. If it never gets published, it never gets published. I consider it my imperative to write and all these issues about getting published and so on have come long after I started to write. And I’m not even that concerned about them. I write what I want to write. I’m not writing for a particular audience. I’m not writing because I want to sell. That’s not my motivation at all. I’m just fulfilling a need in me to accomplish the most important thing in life which is to put stuff down on paper. D.M.: And if that never went anywhere beyond a let’s say self-published copy to your family, that would be okay? O.S.: Well, I’ve gone beyond that so it’s not really an issue. However, the thing is [that] when I wrote my first collection of stories I didn’t think of being published. You know in North America and in the metropole it’s interesting to see how people approach writing. It’s very different from how I approach writing. To me writing was something you did because you had to do it. It had nothing to do with a market. What’s a market? I knew nothing about that. And I still have this attitude. I teach writing and have students who have not published anything handing me a card which says, “So-and-so. Writer”. Or I know people who will say to me, “You’re writing something and it’s not commissioned? You mean nobody’s paying you to do it?” So my attitude towards writing is, I guess, a very old fashioned one, which I will not advocate for anybody else, but it is also the attitude of the people that I grew up with, people of my generation coming from the Caribbean. D.M.: And it’s interesting that you should say that because in very many ways what you are saying [“I write because I write”] is pretty much a luxury these days. O.S.: I agree that it is a luxury but I don’t think I write because I write. I think you become a writer because you can’t help it. It’s not a choice that you make, you are chosen. Its a burden that’s placed on you, and you just fulfill it, you just get on with it. I don’t see writing as a ‘career choice’ which is the way some people see writing now a days. I’ve never been to university to learn anything about writing. It’s just part of who I am. I think I’m coming from a very different place, than where people now a days are coming from, in relation to becoming writers. J.B.: I agree with everything you are saying right now and indeed as someone who writes myself I really do understand. So would you say then [that] you are writing to kind of understand something? For yourself? O.S.: Yes. I guess [my writing] began as a way of understanding myself. I started writing merely as therapy, in a sense that I just needed to work out a lot of things about my identity really, and that’s when I started to write. I didn’t start to write for other people but in the process of doing that, I discovered not just things about myself but about my society, about the people around me. So in a way it’s an interrogation. For me McClean & Bishop / 5 writing is an interrogation not just of myself but of my society and I think what has happened to me is that I’ve moved away from self.
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