Book Review 1


Olive Senior. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.

By Kwame Dawes

Originally published in CHIMO (Summer 1995)

Jamaican poet Olive Senior’s latest collection of poems Gardening in the Tropics is an impressive affirmation of Senior’s place as one of the most lucid of Caribbean poets writing today. It is her clarity of thought, her capacity to construct the clean precise line, and her direct commitment to political issues that make this collection such a welcome addition to West Indian writing.

Gardening in the Tropics is a carefully constructed series of poems that are organized around a quartet of movements: “Traveller's Tales,” a selection of poems that explore the pains and pleasures of immigration and constant movement by Caribbean people and, at the same time, chronicle the family history of one simple rural family through its varied experiences with hurricanes; “Nature Studies,” a cryptic series of witty poems that expand on themes of nature and the environment; “Gardening in the Tropics,” a tumbling movement of poems that make use of a natural speaking voice to convey the vicissitudes of living in a “third world space” under the dominating influence of colonial history and a present of imperialist exploitation of land and limb; and finally, “Mystery,” a homage to African deities that reads like a series of prayers echoing the praise poems of Brathwaite’s Mask sequence in his trilogy The Arrivants. Described as they are above, one may get the impression that these sequences or movements are independent entities with no thematic or stylistic cohesiveness. But this is just not so. Senior makes wonderful use of echoes, thematic repetition, and an intelligence that is at once spiritual and pragmatic to create a very clear pattern of journeying and discovery in the entire collection.

This collection is outstanding because of Senior’s ability to balance political advocacy, in poems such as “Meditations on Yellow” and “Amazon Women,” with profoundly intimate expositions of soul and heart, as in the impressive poem “Hurricane Story,” which tells the story of a mother who migrates to England to make a better life for her son, and the seemingly autobiographical and deftly ironic “All Clear, 1928,” which ends with the telling words:

  • gold bought him a very young girl of very
  • good family in Kingston. And they wed.
  • He, with a clear conscience.
  • She, with a clear complexion. (58)

At the heart of Senior’s poetic posture in this collection is the role of storyteller. It is the only way to describe what she is doing in many of the narrative pieces—and there are many of those. If she has any profound philosophical insights and musings, they are contained in some intriguing narrative that features multiple layers of meaning. And these narratives shift from almost folk-tale and fairy-tale imaginative flight, as in “Bamboo,” to the eclectic and expansive historical panorama of poems such as “Meditation on Yellow” and “Gardening on the Run.”

There is an important departure or development in this collection that is worth noting. In her first book, which received well-deserved positive critical support despite its modest publication values, Senior is very often clearly autobiographical and self-conscious about her own narrative voice. This inclination to find a certain security in autobiographical “truth” is discarded in Gardening in the Tropics, in which Senior flits from persona to persona with little regard for creating a facade of autobiographical authenticity. Indeed, this willingness to multiply the personae that are contained in her “I” narrator lends her work a certain layeredness that is, in many ways, missing in Talking of Trees. Here she happily, and without apology, appropriates the voices of men, women, Native North Americans, Africans, Amazon women, maroons and many others in a manner that subsumes the poet Olive Senior but reveals her soul and spirit in an even greater way. The resulting scope and depth of the collection is reminiscent of Brathwaite's use of the same technique in his The Arrivants trilogy. The difference here, however, is that Senior's “I” narrator is never exotic, never far removed from the poet Olive Senior. Consequently, the many voices sound like variations on a single imagination. By including a few touching autobiographical pieces such as “Meditation on Red,” her poem for Jean Rhys, and the deftly wrought “Bamboo,” which looks at the childhood introspection and isolation of Senior, she risks a certain vulnerability of emotion and thought, which move the poems from mere artifice to living and breathing storytelling.

This quality, I suspect, allows us to see with fresh vision her ideological pontifications that in another context would seem stale and rehashed. For instance, her poem “Seeing the Light” is a blatant polemic on the rape of the environment by the proverbial “you” of the Manichean construct, “you” being the white exploiter of the native. But Senior places this forthrightness beside more complex and delicately wrought pieces such as “The Tree of Life” and the folk-tale “The Colour of Birds,” such that the former is fed with resonance and depth. I think that this approach succeeds largely because the sequence “Gardening in the Tropics,” from which all these poems come, is really one long poem spoken in a series of improvised voices that combine song, incantation, folk-tale, allegory and historical narration to brilliant effect.

Senior’s other development (in this instance an ideological one) in this collection lies in her apparently unwavering and complete embrace of Afrocentric spirituality. In her first collection, she is totally sceptical about all things spiritual even as she acknowledges their presence in her life as a rural Jamaican girl. In Gardening in the Tropics, the Afrocentric spiritualism is the grounding that sustains these poems. It speaks into a greater embrace of the nativistic mysticism of aboriginal cultures, while celebrating the presence of Africa in rituals and practices in the Caribbean. Hers is not the kind of epic struggle of Odomankorna and Christ that we see at the end of Brathwaite’s The Arrivants, but a celebration of rituals as essential and undisturbed elements of African retention. Thus, her movements about Haitian refugees are as much about the politics of escape as they are a celebration of the spirit of survival contained in rituals of vodoun:

  • My mother sought a sign in the basin.
  • She said: sky's so clear nothing's given back here.
  • I said: Ague Lord of the Sea rules over me.
  • You can't keep a good man down.
  • if you born to hang
  • you can't drown. (30)

At the same time, she provides critics of the discourse of postcolonialism the kind of material that genuinely challenges the premise of post-coloniality as a basic reality of Caribbean society. Her poems that celebrate African deities, for instance, are unencumbered in large measure by comparisons with Christianity. Instead, they celebrate the connections between people of the African diaspora in a manner that speaks of origin and belonging—a language that transcends and, in the process, subverts the very premise of postcoloniality, which locates origin and identity in the colonial space:

  • mother of origins, guardian of passages;/ generator of new life in
  • flood waters, orgasm, /birth waters, baptism:/

Summon your children haul the rain down ...

  • From Caribbean shore
  • to far-off Angola, she'll
  • spread out her blue cloth
  • let us cross over. (131)

Poems such as these help us to understand why the natural instinct to compare Senior with a poet like Walcott--an instinct engendered by Senior's obvious preoccupation in Talking of Trees with the idea of being a mixed-race woman (a mullatta, if you will) “divided in the vein”—may not be a useful critical activity. For Senior, there is none of the tension of cultures or worlds that is the hallmark of Walcott’s poetic angst. Senior has, it would seem, left that twilight space and forged a sense of origin that is unfettered by historicity. She chooses her ancestors as she says in Talking of Trees, and in her latest book, it is clear who she chooses to celebrate and explore.

However, Senior shares much of Walcott’s distinctive and impressive capacity to render a line clearly and without encumbrance. Next to Walcott, Senior writes some of the “cleanest” lines in Caribbean poetry. By clean, I mean that preciseness of meaning and the ease with which her language flows. There is very little strain in her search for the right phrase, the right word. Indeed, this seeming fluency can lead us to ignore the rigorous technical virtuosity of Senior’s writing—her play with the iambic, her innovative use of line breaks and line shapes, and her fascinating and satisfying use of rhyme, particularly internal rhyme and assonance. These qualities do not announce themselves, they simply emerge as part of the musicality of the poems:

  • The third time,/ they put me to death. Released/ from all my fears
  • now I feel free/ to enter their dreams and to say: /You might kill me
  • but you'll never/ bury me. Forever I'll walk all/ over the pages of
  • your history. /Interleaved with the stories/ of your gallant soldiers.

Note the “eee” assonance in multiple variations that, while not announcing themselves, succeed in holding the passage together as a single, well-devised construct.

It is therefore ironic and amusing that, despite her clearly superior technical skill and her moving humanity of spirit, the publishers of her collection—McClelland and Stewart— still feel the need to try on the cover notes of the book to contextualize Senior within the Canadian environment. The effort is misguided largely because Senior's poetry works against such pigeonholing, but more importantly because it (the effort) smacks of a certain bureaucratic need to create “Can-Con” (Canadian Content) in any work that is published by “The Canadian Publishers” and that appears to have little direct relevance to Canada. I quote the passage from the cover notes: “This Caribbean world thrives in a Canada that is felt only briefly in the volume (as in an image of colourful shoes against snow), just enough to suggest a potential meeting between northern and tropical climates and ways.” The truth is that Senior’s entire collection is about that North/South dialogue—its politics, the exploitation that has characterized the activity of the north, and the suffering that has been felt by the south. Canadians do feature as antagonistic aluminium exploiters, tourist conquistadors, and rainforest devourers in many of Senior’s poems, a fact deftly ignored by the publishers.

Gardening in the Tropics is a strong collection and deserving of all attention. Senior was perhaps right when she declared to me, “This is perhaps my best literary work to date.” McClelland & Stewart has done well to publish this collection, for in so doing it has made accessible to more readers the work of an outstanding West Indian poet.