Brilliant and insightful writing

Laura Tanna, LETTER FROM LAURA

Today's Jamaican launch of Olive Senior's first novel, Dancing Lessons, at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona marks a milestone in this award-winning Jamaican author's achievements.

Her early childhood growing up between a poor rural family, as the seventh child among ten, in Trelawny and a more privileged home as the only child with relatives in Westmoreland, and the disparity between these two Jamaicas, has for decades provided the creative tension that fostered Senior's brilliant and insightful writing on Jamaica, both in fiction and non-fiction.

Her poetry books, short-story collections, editorship of Jamaica Journal, and non-fiction books - the most recent The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage - earned her a Musgrave Gold Medal in 2004.

When I first interviewed her in 2003, she mused: "If I wrote novels I'd be far more famous, richer and everything, because people don't treat you very seriously if you write only short stories and poetry. I like the short form. I feel most comfortable with it because I can indulge my desire for perfection. You can spend endless time polishing a poem or short story or changing a comma."

Now, eight years later, Senior has matured enough within her own skin as a writer to come out with a 369-page creation that encompasses a vast spectrum of Jamaican experiences, without losing any of the sensitivity and haunting country Jamaican eye that have made her such an accomplished author.

Initially set in a Kingston retirement community, the novel opens with the elderly Gertrude speaking directly to the reader and remains a constant narrator, sharing her prickly, acerbic thoughts as a darker-skinned resident, acutely conscious of being poorer and of a lower class than most of her fellow retirees, tolerated because of her estranged daughter's success as a television presenter. Senior's skill as a writer becomes increasingly apparent in the seamless manner in which she shifts from present to past and back to present, with the reader rarely noticing as she incrementally reveals Gertrude's life as an isolated country girl whose evolution into a lonely country wife whose wayward husband and three growing children lead her into confronting the reality of modern Jamaican life - rural, urban and in foreign - with Senior ultimately creating a novel of self-assertion. But oh, how painful are the scenes of insecurity and humiliation along the way, and no one writes them more sensitively than Senior.

Certainly, there are moments of laughter and the warm embrace of Jamaican lyrical references with the accoutrements of country: the tin cup to dip water, the breadfruit leaf with which to fan one's self, Anansi's web wreathing a face, John Crows wheeling far above, and the familiar aroma of dried Khus Khus root. But Senior is more open now, using the metaphor of a dancing lesson to introduce us to Gertrude's longing for the love she never felt she had, longing for closeness with her father, contrasted with the brutality of the husband's "dancing lesson", the deception of the "lover" and on until the finale, a metaphor for love - longing, passion and eventual acceptance.

Or as Senior says: "In the dance of life, you need to hear the music, learn the intricate steps, and move with other people. This is what my character Gertrude ultimately learns to do."

Though Senior swears that the novel is in no way autobiographical, anyone who knows her, knows that it is infused with her life's observations, and transformed to be shared with us all. In that interview in 2003 she said:

"We become writers or creative artists because it's a way of assuming masks. We're terrified maybe of revealing our self, and so we create persona to carry the weight of our story. Persona comes from the Greek notion of putting on a mask in the theatre and so I think this is probably why I'm a writer. I use writing as a way of mediating between myself and the world, and it's a way of writing about things that are painful to you without writing about them directly.

"All writers, we write our emotions out. I don't feel that I write autobiographically, but
certainly it's impossible to write about emotions you haven't experienced, and so a lot of my stories, especially my early stories, were a way of mine of getting rid of my pain, all my early-childhood experiences that were difficult for me. I just created these characters to carry the pain, and I think this is what all artists do. So I find it difficult to talk about myself. My way of talking about myself is to write. Because growing up I wasn't sure where I belonged. Or who I was, because I was moving between these worlds and I felt nobody loved me, which was totally untrue, because I realised that I had two families. But you know, it's how children perceive the world and I just felt that nobody wanted me, nobody loved me. That's how I felt. But looking back objectively that was totally untrue. I was very loved. I don't necessarily remember what happened. What was important is how I felt about it."

EXPLAINING THE PAIN

Later on in the interview she explained: "When I said there was a lot of pain in this process of finding out who I was, part of that process was finding a way of reconciling these two Jamaicas which I had been privileged to explore both, unlike most people. I had moved between the two Jamaicas. One was largely white, European, privileged and one was largely black - never mind my parents were light-skinned but we lived in a community of dark-skinned people and because we weren't wealthy, we shared in that community so I had those two experiences. But then you had to deny one if you were in the other, you know, because this was forced on you by the politics of the situation. So part of the process of discovering who I am - not discovering but deciding who I am, because I decided who I was, and I had the choice of rejecting one or the other, you know, which is what a lot of people did. But my decision was 'You know what? They're all me.' Both these Jamaicas have formed me. They're integrated in me and I think I use the writing as a way of further exploring that, not consciously but because I was writing about poor people who spoke 'broken English', that language that we were told to deny.

"The breakthrough for me as a writer was when I wrote a story called 'Ballad' which is in my first collection, and I spoke in the voice of a little country girl. She told her story in her own voice. It's one of the first stories I wrote and, for me as a writer - that is a seminal story for me, precisely because I proved it could be done."

Now, in Dancing Lessons, that country girl has become a country woman who speaks in her own voice, but we also hear that of Celia, the successful modern urban Jamaican woman.

Coming in part two: Olive Senior's comments on writing Dancing Lessons and the themes raised within this very Jamaican novel.