A literary laureate honoured

JIS:

Award-winning author, Olive Senior, is still beaming with gratitude after being conferred with the Order of Distinction in the rank of Commander for her contribution to Jamaica’s literary arts.

Senior, who served as Jamaica’s third poet laureate from 2021 to 2024, acknowledged the significance of being recognised at home. “I’m very honoured. It’s good to be honoured in your own country, so it matters. It’s very important to me,” she shared.

Growing up in the lush, mountainous region of Trelawny, a young Senior was surrounded by a world rich in natural beauty and cultural complexity. Although she lived in a rural area of Jamaica, her early environment was anything but limiting. She shared that it was a world of oral traditions, vibrant landscapes, and a community that shaped her poetic imagination long before she understood the power of the written word. “I grew up in deep rural Jamaica. We didn’t even have a radio in those days. We had our own little world, which existed,” she shared.

This underscores how her childhood was more influenced by class distinctions and the intimate rhythms of rural life than by the broader societal constructs that would later inform her work. “I was aware from a young age of the class structure, that there were people who were wealthy and people who were not. It wasn’t much later as an adult that I started to be conscious of these things around me and reflect on them,” she said. “But I feel, to be honest, very privileged to grow up in a society that is so diverse, racially, socially, culturally, in every way. I’ve been exposed to most things, both rural and urban, and I couldn’t ask for a better background,” Senior added.

This grounding in a diverse and layered society, where both rural and urban became the bedrock of her literary voice, sees her writing being deeply intertwined with themes of identity, heritage, and colonial history. She sees her role as a writer as both a preserver and a challenger of Jamaican cultural narratives. “It is the role of the writer to challenge the mainstream. It’s our job to enable people to see things differently or to see things in ways they have never thought about before. And that’s how I see my work,” Senior said.

ACCLAIMED WORK

Her work holds up a mirror to society, inviting readers to rethink history and recognise the richness of their own cultural inheritance. Senior’s poetry and fiction often arise organically, shaped by the form the story demands. “Poems arise out of imagery, whereas fiction arises out of character,” she explained. This intuitive approach allows her to explore a wide range of subjects, from mythology and plants to human relationships and social realities with authenticity and depth.

One of her most beloved and acclaimed works, Gardening in the Tropics, has become a staple in Caribbean literature, especially among high-school students. Senior hopes that young readers take away a deeper understanding of their heritage and the importance of preserving it. “I feel I have a job, in terms of preservation, for young people coming up who did not have the opportunities I had to live in a Jamaica where the oral culture was driving us,” she said. Referencing her efforts to document Jamaican heritage through projects like her Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage and the Jamaica Poetry Archive, Senior added, “I have that role, to talk about things, but also to try and keep them in people’s attention.”

Senior’s tenure as poet laureate was marked by initiatives aimed at promoting poetry among youth. “What was meaningful, really, was having some kind of audience. We celebrated World Poetry Day and enabled people to think about poetry as something that was important in their lives, not just something they learned in school,” she said. She remains passionate about fostering appreciation for poetry in everyday life, whether through hymns, popular songs, or the voices of Jamaican poets, past and present. “I’m trying to say to people, look, you are surrounded by poetry from birth,” Senior said.

Her latest novel, Paradise Once, is a testament to her commitment to telling stories that honour indigenous histories. Inspired by decades of research into Jamaica’s first indigenous people, the Taino, the book blends fiction with historical truth, offering readers a nuanced portrayal of a sophisticated society often overlooked in mainstream narratives. “I’m so interested in the indigenous people and the fact that when I went to school, we were told, Columbus met these primitive little people, and they vanished, which is so untrue. It’s set in Cuba, actually, but the Taino occupied all the Greater Antilles,” Senior shared. “I’m telling the story from the point of view of the Taino, which I think is the interesting aspect of it. I want us, as Jamaicans, to start rethinking how we view our history. I’ve tried to be true to that world and true to these people in fiction,” she added. Through her words, Senior continues to inspire, educate, and challenge readers to see Jamaica and themselves with fresh eyes.

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