Kunapipi XXVI:1

HELEN GILBERT
‘Let them know you have broughtuptcy’: Childhood and Child-Subjects in Olive Senior’s Short Stories

Critical appraisals of Olive Senior’s fiction seldom fail to highlight its preoccupation with childhood as a powerful trope through which to express the personal and social legacies of Jamaica’s colonial history. This is to be expected given that over two-thirds of the stories in her three published collections, Summer Lightning (1986), Arrival of the Snake-Woman (1989) and Discerner of Hearts (1995), focus on a child’s experience or perspective, or both, with a significant number of these being told, in whole or in part, by child narrators. Senior’s particular interest in the vicissitudes of childhood is most readily interpreted in terms of identity politics. Scholars argue, for example, that her evocative portraits of marginalised and displaced children exemplify the alienated subjects of creolisation (see Barratt 270–73; Patteson 19–21); that her child characters typically face crises of identification that impel choices between different adult role models representing the apparently separate worlds of Jamaica’s middle-class and folk cultures (Thieme 90–93); or that her fiction participates in a more broadly practised, Caribbean literary model in which the ‘omnipresence of the child narrator or protagonist points to the difficulties of establishing one’s own voice’ (Misrahi-Barak 71). Autobiographical aspects of Senior’s writing are often referenced in support of this identity motif as critics note rough parallels between the author’s Jamaican girlhood and her (female) characters’ specific situations. These interpretive paradigms are undoubtedly useful, not only because they illuminate what Senior herself has described in interviews as a key issue in her work — ‘the struggle of individuals to affirm themselves’, to create a sense of self amid ‘chaotic personal and social history’ (1988 482) — but also because they connect her fiction to an important body of Caribbean writing which has examined childhood experience as part of the imperative of postcolonial self-definition.1 I wonder, however, if the identity politics approach, with its ultimate referent being the adult subject who develops — or will develop — from the child depicted, obscures a more complex picture of what Senior’s representations of children/childhood potentially do; what kinds of symbolic management they reveal as operative in Jamaican society, and what modes of social critique they enact.

In this essay, I will consider the ways in which children — as the foci of race, class and gender specific processes in the family, as objects of regulation and development in school, as targets of religious indoctrination, as sites of social and sexual anxiety, and as symbols of the future and what is at stake in ongoing negotiations of cultural (rather than individual) identity2 — are pivotal in structuring the communities that Senior sketches. In skewing the focus away from representations of individual subjectivity, I am inspired by Senior’s stated sense of childhood as a time/space for making connections to a much larger system: ‘The kind of existence I lived as a child also made me aware that … individual life was infinitesimally small in a larger and incomprehensible universe, in the pull and push of history’ (1988 482). That larger context is recorded in clinical detail in Working Miracles (1991), Senior’s sociological survey of women’s lives in the English-speaking Caribbean, whereas her stories proffer a deliberately partial (in the sense of incomplete and biased) vision of Jamaican culture. My reading of these texts takes a lead from an article by Alison Donnell that explores the interface between the material bodies and cultural practices imaged in Senior’s fiction. Donnell is somewhat wary of analytical models that stress a celebratory rhetoric of plural, provisional, syncretic identities in constructing notions of Caribbeanness. She argues that Senior’s achievement is to show the cultural tensions and values which ‘remain unresolved’ at the level of the body ‘in theories of creolisation and hybridity’ (1996 40). This critical focus on corporeality has important implications for a discussion of childhood and the child-subject, which are categories almost always marked by some notion of physical or behavioural difference from an adult norm. As I will suggest, it is through the body of the child as a particularly malleable subject-in-formation that so many forms of social desire are tacitly negotiated. Senior’s child-centred stories collectively register and critique these negotiations while simultaneously raising questions about (Western) models of development, and how they might relate to narrativity itself in postcolonial contexts.