An interview with Olive Senior

Olive Senior has become a significant literary voice within Caribbean literature and the Caribbean diaspora, often providing light, sharp, subtle, and emotionally laden stories and poems of childhood and belonging. As she describes here, her work remains “embedded” in Jamaica, including its soundscape and its ecology, and stretches across fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and children’s literature. For decades she has enjoyed a growing international audience, and her work is taught in schools in the Caribbean as part of an evolving literary curriculum. Senior’s short stories, the primary focus of this discussion, are especially well known for their enchanting, vibrant, and insightful children and child narrators — a trait that situates Senior’s work in relation to other famed Caribbean authors (Sam Selvon, Michael Anthony, Jamaica Kincaid, Merle Collins, and many more). In this interview, explorations of some of her young female voices are set within Denise DeCairns Narain’s sense of Senior’s “oral poetics”, and are also explored in relation to issues of wealth, privilege, and emotional sincerity. Senior’s work — fictional and non-fictional — is also heavily invested in ideas of land, labour, and migrancy, and so her recent and striking short story “Coal”, from her latest collection The Pain Tree (2015), is considered alongside her enormously impressive historical study of the role of West Indian migrant labourers in the building of the Panama Canal, entitled Dying to Better Themselves (2014).

Under Children's Eyes: Becoming Pious in Tayeb Salih and Pramoedya Ananta Toer Short Stories

This research seeks to discuss how child characters navigate their interactions with the adults in two short stories set in the predominantly Islamic society of Sudan and Indonesia. It examines Tayeb Salih’s “A Handful of Dates” (1964) and Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s “Circumcision” (1950) by locating both texts in World Literature which is largely Western or Eurocentric. Both short stories belong to the genre of initiation fiction often included in world literature anthologies. This paper argues that both authors help contribute to not only the rethinking of World Literature concept and circulation thereof, but also balanced view of heterogonous, multicultural Muslim society. Using post-Genette focalization theory as conceptual framework, this study finds out that the child narrators play distinct roles as (1) the perceptual focalizer to reveal injustice and frivolity of the adults’ world; (2) the ideological focalizer to make meaning of children’s faith through their relationship with the grown-ups. [Penelitian ini bertujuan membahas bagaimana tokoh anak berinteraksi dengan orang-orang dewasa dalam dua cerita pendek dari negara berpenduduk mayoritas Islam, Sudan dan Indonesia. Karya Tayeb Shalih, "A Handful of Dates"[Segenggam Kurma] (1964) dan karya Pramoedya Ananta Toer "Sunat" (1950) dikaji dengan menempatkan kedua teks dalam Sastra Dunia yang cenderung berkiblat ke dunia Barat dan Eropa. Kedua cerita pendek bergenre fiksi inisiasi ini sering diikutkan dalam antologi sastra dunia. Makalah ini menunjukkan bahwa kedua penulis memberikan kontribusi dalam penafsiran ulang konsep dan peredaran Sastra Dunia, serta pandangan yang lebih seimbang terhadap masyarakat Muslim yang heterogen dan multikultural. Menggunakan Teori Fokalisasi Pasca-Genette sebagai kerangka konseptual, studi ini menyimpulkan bahwa tokoh anak dalam kedua cerpen memainkan peran yang berbeda sebagai (1) focalizer (penyuara) perseptif yang mengungkapkan ketidakadilan dan kedegilan dunia orang dewasa; (2) penyuara ideologis yang memaknai keimanan anak lewat relasi dengan orang-orang dewasa.]

“No more plastic balls”: Symbolic childhoods in Zimbabwean short stories of the crisis

Post-2000 Zimbabwean literature in English demonstrates an unprecedented fascination with the child narrator. While there is some precedence for the use of child narrators or narratives that focus on child experiences to grapple with sociopolitical issues, the wide extent to which this style has been used post-2000 is unparalleled. The post-2000 socioeconomic crisis in Zimbabwe has clear victims; however, owing to the intensely polarized perspectives on its origins and nature, the identity of the victimizers is not so clear and is in fact hotly contested and politicized. As typical and “known” victims, their victimization can furtively reveal and reflect on their victimizers and in the process subtly expose them for knowing. This form of “knowing” transcends a mere discernment of the victimizers’ physical identities; it goes to the heart of their motives, apparent and subterranean political objectives, and means of attaining them. Victim child characters are often used symbolically to represent the weak and vulnerable members of society who are exploited as political fodder by the powerful. The symbolic children are seen to be caught in between the political goals and strategies of the powerful, and their victimization reveals overt and covert markings of their political abuse. This makes child-narrated or child-centred narratives possible sites to encounter the nexus between children’s victimization and the underhand methods of creating and sustaining political hegemony. This article explores this connection, particularly focusing on the aesthetic subtlety with which child-centred or child-focused narratives proffer a counter-discursive discourse which unsettles the dominant narratives presently given of victims and victimizers in a post-2000 Zimbabwean context.