'Voicing the Text': The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior's Short Fiction

Abstract

Long before West Indian literature became a legitimate category of writing— brought about mainly by support for and publication of novels by West Indians living in Britain in 1950s and 1960s—among new literatures in English, West Indian writers had already begun to produce an impressive body of short fiction; short fiction is, indeed, as Kenneth Ramchand describes it, the founding of West Indian literature (2). The rise of small magazines in 1930s and 1940s in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Guyana, and existence of influential Lon- don-based Caribbean Voices Programme (1945-1958) helped to support a regional creative writing community in which short story writing thrived. The emergence of West Indian novel in 1950s and 1960s somewhat overshadowed short story writing, but since 1980s, shorter genre has been enjoying a renaissance. The publication of Olive Senior's first short story collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) —the inaugural winner of Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1987— is generally regarded as point at which West Indian short story re-emerged from literary underground. Since then, single-authored collections been published with encouraging regularity, as short story anthologies. The re-emergence of West Indian short story has also brought a revival of interest in oral traditions in region and promotion of local oral contexts as artistic resources for creative writers. Speaking of recent trends in West Indian short story writing, Stewart Brown and John Wickham note in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories that many, probably most, West Indian short story writers been conscious of, and to some extent influenced by, those oral forms and stories spun around figures like Anancy, West Indian trickster, or Amerindian spirits like Ol' Higue or Mantop (xvii). E.A. Markham makes a similar observation in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, noting that West Indian short story writers have taken stories and characters out of oral and reimagined them in a literary context (xviii). The making of an oral poetics or development of an aesthetic of orality, as it is variably termed, in modern West Indian fiction turns on transposing folk figures into literary works where they function as tropes for a number of conditions and issues pertinent to postcolonial period: wily spider Anancy and his significations often form metaphoric center of works—from authors as diverse as Andrew Salkey, Pauline Melville, and Narmala Shewcharan—highly ambivalent about political achievements and climate of postindependence West Indian nations; and