Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance Writer
The 2006 Academic Conference featured several of the region's most noted writers reflecting on various aspects of a writer's life. For her part, historian, poet and author Olive Senior reflected on what writing means to her, dubbing herself an interpreter, albeit a reluctant one.
Senior, whose most recent collection of poetry 'Over the Roofs of the World' was short-listed for the Governor-General's Award for Literature (Canada), was the first of the writers to present on the second day of the conference, Saturday, August 26.
Under the title 'The Reluctant Interpreter: My Role as a West Indian Writer' Senior presented alongside the St. Lucian poet Kendel Hippolyte and Trinidadian writer and lecturer Merle Hodge. Hippolyte would go on to explore what it means to write against the grain while Hodge explored the quandary in which the writing of Caribbean Creoles currently muddles about.
Senior noted that she believes her work should be universally understood. However, she writes with a sense of place which speaks to her primary audience, Jamaica and the wider Caribbean.
"I believe in doing the best job that I can and that is an honest job of representation and interpretation," Senior continued. She explained that the role of interpretation comes from asking questions about experiences, though the answers that art should provide are not the ones we get from daily life. "Art is either plagiarism or revolution," she said. She explained that to create a good interpretation of life writers must avoid "complacency", "comfort" and "the template".
Reluctance comes with heritage
Senior further explained that she dubs herself a reluctant interpreter because this reluctance comes with her heritage. "Resistance is embodied in the mythology of who we are as a people," she said. "That is, just being difficult."
Senior also noted that one can decide the kind of writer that one wants to be, and she delved into Jamaican mythology for allusions. She noted that one can be the Warner Woman who tells of terrifying things to come but offers no solutions. There is the monster such as the rolling calf or three-footed horse who is initially terrifying but easily defeated in the end. Then there is Anancy: the trickster and creative genius who seriously wants to disturb his neighbour. Senior described experience as the "raw material" for writing while language was its "only tool".
This state of the tool of language in the Caribbean would later come up for discussion through Hodge, author of Crick Crack Monkey. She explained that though Creole on the page had a long-standing tradition it still came under attack from the "anti-broken English brigade".
Hodge noted that under the pen, attempts to spell Creole has often resulted in "overzealous deforming of English" which plays into the notion that Creole is "English with omissions." According to Hodge, spelling Creole using English becomes particularly problematic when writers try to spell sounds for which English makes no provisions.
Hodge also explained that though Creole managed to have got by so far with the multiplicity of spellings for some words, there is need for some form of standardisation to remove the sense that the Caribbean Creoles are "makeshift".
