Written by Jordan Stouck, University of British Columbia (Okanagan) and Hyacinth Simpson, Ryerson University.
In “Meditation on Red,” the speaker or poetic persona, who self identifies as a writer, directly addresses deceased author Jean Rhys. In the process of recalling some of the highs, lows, and literary achievements in Rhys’s life and writing career, the speaker sees a reflection of her poetic self. But even though it is not an exact reflection (Rhys’s life was filled with upheavals and personal trauma, for example) the speaker acknowledges Rhys as a literary influence. Both the flowers that the speaker brings to Rhys’s grave and the poem itself are a tribute to the Dominican-born writer. In the poem, one of the important genealogical links between the speaker and Rhys is their shared experience as migrants—of being Caribbean writers living away from and writing about the place of their birth. For example, in lines 234-236, the poetic persona admits to feeling “as divided” as Rhys did “by that sea.” “That sea”—the Sargassos Sea1 which appears in the title of what is perhaps Rhys’s most famous work—is at the centre of the poem’s network of water-based imagery. This network of images allows Senior to craft a poem that highlight’s Rhys’s experience as voyager and outsider. This theme, in part, accounts for the inclusion of “Meditation on Red” among the poems in the “Travellers’ Tale” section of Gardening in the Tropics.
As a voyager, Rhys spent much of her adult life criss-crossing Europe (mostly Paris and Vienna) and the UK, but she is often described as a Creole writer2. Her Creole designation is in part because she was born in colonial Dominica to a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother whose British family had lived in the colony for several generations. Rhys is considered a Creole or Caribbean writer because her Dominican childhood held great importance for her (she left Dominica for England when she was seventeen) and informed many of her novels and short stories. Importantly, Rhys’s work has been recognized by critics as having made a key contribution to the development of Caribbean writing3, and this is one sense in which Olive Senior draws on Rhys’s fiction and biography in “Meditation on Red.” Not surprisingly, then, the poetic persona says to Rhys:
While the speaker—whom Senior indicates is an authorial persona (On Gardens and Gardening)—recognizes that there are racial (hence “dark voyagers/ like me”) and other differences between them that perhaps inform their writing lives, she clearly sees Rhys as a literary foremother. The poem itself is a testament to Rhys’s influence since the poetic persona draws directly from Rhys’s books, letters, and unfinished autobiography for content; and the clever wordplay and double meanings that give the poem much of its emotional depth derive from the reader’s and speaker’s shared knowledge of the details of Rhys’s life and work.
The emotional tone of Rhys’s life during the years in Cheriton Fitzpaine, Devon, when she struggled to complete Wide Sargasso Sea in what she felt was increasingly becoming a hostile physical and social environment is effectively captured in the first part of the poem. Yet the reader hears Rhys’s voice directly only at those points in the poem where quotes from her letters are provided. That is because in Part 1 Rhys’s experiences and viewpoint are filtered through the perspective of the poetic persona who employs colour symbolism and imagery that capture the turbulence and sense of loss, but also the tenacity and determination, of Rhys’s Devon years. In Part 2, the narrative focus shifts, although it is still the same poetic persona who is speaking. In Part 2, the poetic persona provides details of her own visit to Cheriton Fitzpaine years after Rhys’s death and uses the occasion to confirm the latter’s status among Caribbean writers. In the process, the poetic persona counterbalances the sadness and gloom that pervade Part 1 by affirming—again through colour symbolism and imagery that resonate with those employed in Part 1— Rhys’s final triumph, even in death, over all the writerly and personal challenges she faced. The interplay between the symbols, images, sentiments, and tones of Part 1 and Part 2 helps facilitate one author’s expression of allegiance to, quiet reflection on, and appreciation of another author’s work and craft. Hence the use of the word “meditation” in the title as the poem is an actual contemplation on what it means to be a writer—and particularly a writer from the Caribbean who lives and writes away from home.
In her interview with Hyacinth Simpson, Olive Senior recalls reading “everything [she] could find by and about Jean Rhys” as a way of developing her vocabulary for the poem (On Gardens and Gardening). The poem contains many allusions to, and sometimes quotes directly from, letters Rhys wrote to various people when she lived in the village of Cheriton Fitzpaine between 1960 and the late 1970s. For example, the poem begins with references to the dampness of the Devonshire countryside. In the opening stanzas, the poetic persona echoes Rhys’s initial impressions of the place when she speaks of the “limitless …rain” (lines 10-11) and “perpetual flooding” (line 39) at Land Boat Bungalows, the aptly named group of cottages where Rhys lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine. In a letter to her daughter, Maryvonne, upon first arriving in the village Rhys wrote: “Above all Rain. It has hardly stopped since we came! (Wyndham and Melly 195). Rhys also complained about “bad floods” caused by the River Exeter overflowing its boundaries after months of unceasing rainfall (Wyndham and Melly 196). Alongside the rain, tears, drink/ing, and sailing are among other aqueous references in the poem, and together these form a network of water imagery that the poet (both Senior and her authorial persona) uses to underscore the sense of loss, overwhelm, and helplessness that dogged Rhys in the final decades of her life. Rhys’s letters indicate that she was often felt like she was drowning in depression brought on by having very little money, her own and her third husband’s illnesses, and the copious amounts of alcohol that she consumed. She was, indeed, often in “fear of being left/ high and dry” (lines 35-36) by family, friends, and the literary world. In a similar vein, the sense of steering a boat, often through threatening waters, becomes a recurring image in the poem for the art of writing, a “craft” (connoting both skill and vessel) (lines 55, 162, 241) that Rhys struggled with. But, as the poetic persona notes, despite her struggles, Rhys was able to launch a seaworthy craft that served both her and the writers she has influenced.
Colour symbolism is the main literary device employed to create and extend meaning in the poem. Like "Meditation on Yellow", "Meditation on Red" is a colour poem because a significant portion of what it means—that is, the ideas and emotions it conveys—is realised through associations made with the colour red. In On Gardens and Gardening, Senior indicates that she uses red to structure the poem because it is the colour “most associated with [Rhys].” As with the water imagery, the poem mines Rhys’s fiction (particularly Wide Sargasso Sea) and letters for material through which such associations are made. Red features largely in the poem because Rhys seemed to have favoured the colour. She wore and surrounded herself with it whenever she wanted to bring some unaccustomed cheer into her life. When she first moved into No. 6 Land Boat Bungalows, Rhys told her daughter that “[the cottage] is already very comfortable–but I will make it glitter a bit, for it can be dark in the rain. It needs Red. A lot” (Wyndham and Melly 195). In line 106, the poetic persona recalls the red “Christmas cracker dress” that Rhys wrote about in a letter to her daughter in December 1961 (Wyndham and Melly 201). Rhys’s purchase of the dress (although she ended up not wearing it) apparently defied the social norms of Devon society because it led to gossip among her neighbours (Wyndham and Melly 209). The planting of poppies, the consumption of red pills, the wearing of a red wig, and the use of red and gilt décor, all mentioned in Rhys’s letters between 1960 and 1963, help to further develop the poem’s colour symbolism and the use of red as Rhys’s identifying colour.
The narrow-mindedness of Devon society hinted at in the reactions to the red dress eventually becomes a more dominant theme in Rhys’s letters from 1963 on. She claimed on more than one occasion that her neighbours accused her of being a witch; and she wrote to Selma Vaz Dias to say that her neighbours distrusted her because she was a writer, an occupation deemed suspect by the illiterate villagers (Wyndham and Melly 241). Senior carefully choses words such as “spell/ing,” “conjure,” “craft” and “ride” (rather than, as the poem notes, “write”) that allude to both Rhys’s supposed witchcraft and to her vocation as a writer. Senior’s diction in “Mediation in Red” is thus, like the poem’s perspective, dual, as it draws out Rhys’s meanings as well as those of the poetic persona.
The poem also makes numerous references to Rhys’s published novels and short stories. Voyage in the Dark was the first novel that Rhys wrote (although it was her fourth published work), and Senior plays with that title in lines 1-2, 141-142, and 246. Wide Sargasso Sea is also referenced. The lines “waiting for another explosion/ (like that/ which long ago/ came/ from the/ attic)” (108-113) refer to the first Mrs. Rochester, Rhys’s heroine in Wide Sargasso Sea who sets the house on fire after years of being imprisoned in the attic by her husband. Rhys’s heroine is inspired to burn the house down after seeing a red dress hanging in the attic closet, which makes the allusions to red—and to Rhys’s own red dress—discussed above even more nuanced. Later on, the poem again makes reference to Wide Sargasso Sea by quoting a sentence Rhys wrote about the novel’s ending in a letter to Vaz Dias in 1958: “She [the first Mrs. Rochester] is cold–and fire is the only warmth she knows in England” (Wyndham and Melly 157). The second part of Senior’s poem makes poignant and elegiac references to lesser known works by Rhys. Sleep it Off, Lady, alluded to in lines 186-187 of the poem, is the title of Rhys’s last published short story collection. Good Morning, Midnight (line 202), which is inscribed on Rhys’s tombstone, is the title of her fourth novel. “Smile Please,” the final words of the poem, is the title of Rhys’s posthumous memoir.
Furthermore, the many allusions to Rhys’s work in the poem draw attention to other layers of intertextuality. For example, Wide Sargasso Sea is a rewriting of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, “Good Morning, Midnight” is the title of a poem by Emily Dickinson, and The Voyage Out was a novel by Virginia Woolf. Senior’s poetic persona explicitly recalls the latter in the phrase “when you voyaged out” (lines 141-142). Intertextuality, as Tobias Doring points out, allows multiple perspectives to exist within a work and offers a “network of exchange and circulation” (8) rather than a single authorial perspective. In the references to Rhys’s letters and books, Senior employs Rhys’s own cross-textual approach to facilitate a dialogue between past and current authors and texts. This intertextuality allows Senior to give validity to Rhys’s perspective while also asserting the poetic persona’s point of view. Rhys’s rewriting of Brontë’s Jane Eyre was a clear acknowledgement of the literary influence of the English novel, even as Wide Sargasso Sea was written as a counter narrative to, as Gayatri Spivak has famously argued, assert “the interest of the white Creole” (253). In a similar manner, Senior pays tribute to Rhys’s oeuvre while also affirming her poetic persona’s (and perhaps her own) perspective as a differently-positioned, contemporary Caribbean writer.
But the poetic persona does not share Rhys’s sense of alienation, even though they are both far away from home. True, the trope of the voyage used throughout the poem underscores their positioning as diasporic writers from the Caribbean. As well, not only does the image of steering a boat reference the craft of writing, as mentioned above, but the idea of traversing the Sargasso Sea, of voyaging out, of crossing and re-crossing the Atlantic is crucial to the experiences of alienation and belonging that the poem explores. Atlantic passages are fraught due to histories of colonialism and slavery, and Rhys’s voyage to and eventual marooning in England resulted in an ongoing sense of alienation that even her intelligence and writing (“crafts” both) could not overcome. But Senior’s poetic persona has found a means to belong— a “beacon/ to safe harbour/ in the islands” (lines 251-253)—seemingly through her mediation on Rhys’s life and work. Although “divided,” as Rhys was, “by that sea” (lines 234-236), Senior’s poetic persona remains confident and hopeful in her ability to speak and move between places. As Gyllian Phillips has noted, the speaker of the poem enacts a “rich transformation,” undoing “the binaries that would appear to inform her relationship with Rhys”—namely the binaries of race, age, and colonial history (202). At the end of the poem, it seems that Senior’s speaker breathes new life into Rhys. Imagining that Rhys wakes up from her deathly sleep to smile in the photograph with her, Senior’s speaker jubilantly observes that the rain Rhys so despised has stopped in honour of the moment. That final image of the two writers symmetrically arranged in the frame appears to be a homecoming for both of them; and it effects a seamless transition between past and contemporary traditions of Caribbean writing.
Notes
1 Named after the sargassum seaweed growing there, the Sargasso Sea is an area of the North Atlantic Ocean noted for its strong currents. It must be crossed in the passage between England and the Caribbean.
2 The term “creole,” which gained currency in the 18th and 19th centuries, has been used to refer to anyone born or long resident in the Caribbean. It has also been used to refer to people of mixed heritage, for whom other terms such as “brown” and “mulatto” have been employed. As well, “creole” is used in Caribbean literary and cultural criticism to refer to the unique historical conditions of slavery and plantation society under which several ethnicities and nationalities (African, British, Chinese, Indian, etc.) came into contact.
Several critics have also specifically identified Rhys as a creole writer. See, for example, Judith Raiskin’s Snow on the Canefields; Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity in which the author includes Rhys among a group of four British-connected creoles she discusses.
3 After Rhys’s final novel Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1966, it –and Rhys—were claimed by Caribbean literary critics as belonging to the Anglophone Caribbean (or West Indian) literary tradition. For example, in 1968, Wally Look Lai wrote; “[T]here can be little doubt that a serious reading will reveal Wide Sargasso Sea to be one of the genuine masterpieces of West Indian fiction” (38). John Hearne argued that Wide Sargasso Sea was “the touchstone against which to assay West Indian fiction before and after it” (323-324), while Kenneth Ramchand hailed Rhys’s reemergence and the novel’s publication as “the most spectacular turn of fortune” (xi) for west Indian literature.
Works Cited
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Cornhill, UK: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1847. Print.
Doring, Tobias. Caribbean-English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Hearne, John. "The Wide Sargasso Sea: A West Indian Reflection." Cornhill Magazine 1080 (Summer 1974): 323-333. Print.
Look Lai, Wally. "The Road to Thornfield Hall: An Analysis of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea." New Beacon Review.Ed. John La Rose. London: New Beacon Books Ltd., 1968. Print.
Lonsdale, Thorunn. "Literary Foremother: Jean Rhys's Sleep it Off, Lady and Two Jamaican Poems." Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English.Ed. Jacqueline Bardolph. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001. 145-155. Print.
On Gardens and Gardening. Prod. Hyacinth M. Simpson. Perf. Olive Senior. Toronto: Ryerson University, 2007. DVD.
Phillips, Gyllian. "Personal and Textual Geographies in Olive Senior's Literary Relationship with Jean Rhys."Journal of Caribbean Literatures 3.3 (1997): 199-206. Print.
Raiskin, Juditch. Snow on the Canefields; Women's Writing and Creole Subjectivity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Print.
