{"id":37849,"date":"2014-10-21T21:33:53","date_gmt":"2014-10-21T21:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=37849"},"modified":"2014-10-22T14:36:51","modified_gmt":"2014-10-22T14:36:51","slug":"olive-senior","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=37849","title":{"rendered":"Olive Senior"},"content":{"rendered":"

Olive Senior<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics<\/a>
\n2012<\/p>\n

Hyacinth M. Simpson<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of English
\nRyerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada<\/em><\/p>\n

Olive Marjorie Senior<\/a> was born in the parish of Trelawny<\/a> on the Caribbean<\/a> island of Jamaica<\/a> on 23 December 1941. The seventh of ten children, she grew up in the shadow of the Cockpit Mountains<\/a> and spent her formative years criss-crossing the adjoining western parishes of Westmoreland<\/a>, Hanover<\/a>, and St. James<\/a>. As Velma Pollard<\/a> points out, \u201c[t]his environment\u2014the topography and the people\u2014is continually reflected in Senior\u2019s poetry and prose\u201d (479). Moreover, as the daughter of a small farmer and a stay-at-home mother, Senior grew up close to the land. Her vast knowledge of local plants, their history, their medicinal and culinary uses, and the rich folklore associated with them\u2014 which is evident in a number of poems in Gardening in the Tropics<\/em><\/a> including \u201cGuinep,\u201d \u201cPineapple,\u2019 \u201cStarapple,\u201d and \u201cMountain Pride\u201d\u2014is rooted in this early experience. So too are the intimate portraits she paints, in this collection and her other works, of the people whose survival depends on how well they navigate both the physical and social landscape.<\/p>\n

In Senior\u2019s immediate family, money was scarce. While not auto-biographical, the poem \u201cMy Father\u2019s Blue Plantation\u201d provides insight into the lives of small rural farming families like the one Senior was born in and the hard graft that defines such existence. Even though Senior, who is of mixed race heritage, was born with what Jamaicans term \u201clight skin\u201d and \u201cgood hair,\u201d those usual markers of privilege did not set her, or her family, apart from their predominantly African-heritage neighbours in the village of Troy. Class, rather than race, as Senior explains in an interview with Anna Rutherford, was then and still is the main marker of difference in the complex web of Jamaica\u2019s social hierarchy. Because they were poor like their neighbours, the Seniors \u201clived as a part of the village\u201d (12-13).Troy was, like many other rural villages of the time, close knit. Everyone knew everyone else, and the Senior family was well integrated into their community. Village life was Senior\u2019s first school. A world away from the \u201crefinements\u201d of the city and with no television or cinema and very little radio for distraction, members of the community found instruction and entertainment in the only likely\/available source: the oral culture…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Olive Senior Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics 2012 Hyacinth M. Simpson, Associate Professor of English Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Olive Marjorie Senior was born in the parish of Trelawny on the Caribbean island of Jamaica on 23 December 1941. The seventh of ten children, she grew up in the shadow of the Cockpit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,21,8,25],"tags":[18225,18226,80,18220,18219,18221,18227],"class_list":["post-37849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-hyacinth-m-simpson","tag-hyacinth-simpson","tag-jamaica","tag-olive-m-senior","tag-olive-marjorie-senior","tag-olive-senior","tag-olive-seniors-gardening-in-the-tropics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}