In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • 'Voicing the Text':The Making of an Oral Poetics in Olive Senior's Short Fiction
  • Hyacinth M. Simpson (bio)

Long before West Indian literature became a legitimate category of writing—brought about mainly by support for and the publication of novels by West Indians living in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s—among the 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 genre" of West Indian literature (2). The rise of small magazines in the 1930s and the 1940s in Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, and Guyana, and the existence of the influential London-based Caribbean Voices Programme (1945-1958) helped to support a regional creative writing community in which short story writing thrived. The emergence of the West Indian novel in the 1950s and 1960s somewhat overshadowed short story writing, but since the 1980s, the 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 the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1987— is generally regarded as the point at which the West Indian short story re-emerged from the literary underground. Since then, single-authored collections have been published with encouraging regularity, as have short story anthologies.

The re-emergence of the West Indian short story has also brought a revival of interest in oral traditions in the region and the 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 have been conscious of, and to some extent influenced by, those oral forms and the stories spun around figures like Anancy, the 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 the oral context and reimagined them in a literary context" (xviii).

The making of an oral poetics or the 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 the postcolonial period: the wily spider Anancy and his significations often form the metaphoric center of works—from authors as diverse as Andrew Salkey, Pauline Melville, and Narmala Shewcharan—highly ambivalent about the political achievements and climate of postindependence West Indian nations; and [End Page 829] specters of the soucouyant haunt the imagination of contemporary women writers concerned with reclaiming female agency in Caribbean literature. The making of an oral poetics is also readily discernable when local myths and legends provide inspiration for the creation of narratives that offer more liberating and self-affirming ontological realities and epistemologies for West Indians, as in Wilson Harris's richly textured oeuvre. Orality is a central literary device whenever folk religions (for example, shango, myalism, and pocomania), music and songs (including calypso and reggae), proverbs, riddles, tracings, and warnings affect both form and content in modern fiction. Perhaps the earliest example of a consideration of the literary possibilities of the oral culture among West Indian authors came in the form of a search for a literary language inflected by the habits of speech and expression characteristic of West Indian vernacular speakers. Pioneered in the work of Sam Selvon at a time when British standard English still reigned supreme as a marker of culture and sophistication, the use of the local tongue as a narrative medium marked both a turn in political consciousness in the region and a shift in perspective in the literature. It is in this tradition of writing that Senior participates, benefiting from and building on the oral poetics of her predecessors and contemporaries.

The concern with bridging the gap between speech and writing, oral and scribal, has always had political as well as literary ramifications among West Indian authors...

pdf

Share