Jamaica’s newest laureate to focus on eco-poetics
Birdshooting season the men make marriages with their guns My father’s house turns macho as from far the hunters gather
All night long contentless women stir their brews: hot coffee chocolata, cerassie wrap pone and tie-leaf for tomorrow’s sport. Tonight the men drink white rum neat.
In darkness shouldering their packs, Their guns, they leave.
We stand quietly on the doorstep shivering. Little boys longing to grow up birdhunters too. Little girls whispering:
Fly birds Fly.
- Olive Senior
In classical times there was a custom in ancient Greece and Rome in which a wreath made of the green leaves of the laurel plant was ceremonially placed on the head of honourees, victors, champions, prize winning poets or playwrights. That ritual practice has survived and although we no longer crown heroes with laurel wreaths, we use the term “laureate” to describe those we honour, reward and celebrate.
Winners of the world’s most prestigious awards are called Nobel laureates; the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence borrows the title laureates for its annual honourees. Thankfully, poets are still honoured and crowned, and accorded high places of national honour. In the old tradition, the selected writer received a stipend to be the court poet, writing court odes; today, the laurel is still regarded as a symbol of victory or distinction in poetry.
Having a national poet laureate is a longstanding tradition in some countries and has been recently revived in others. Great Britain, for example, has had poets laureate right through the centuries, including a few famous names. Most recently, Simon Armitage succeeded Carol Ann Duffy. There was a time some 20 or so years ago when it was rumoured in London that Derek Walcott was being considered for the post.
Among the countries that have renewed the tradition is Jamaica. Its first poet laureate was Tom Redcam (whose real name was Thomas Henry McDermot), who had the honour bestowed upon him in 1933. But the practice did not continue unbroken. Since independence, it was revived with the appointment of Mervyn Morris in 2014. Morris, after a three-year term, was succeeded by Lorna Goodison who served from 2017 to 2021.
On Wednesday, March 17, Olive Senior was named poet laureate of Jamaica at an Investiture Ceremony held at King’s House in Kingston. Senior is to serve until 2024, and was bestowed with the national honour by Governor General Sir Patrick Allen.
According to Judana Murphy, who documented the ceremony, “A poet laureate is expected to stimulate a greater appreciation for Jamaican poetry, write poems for national occasions, preserve and disseminate the island’s cultural heritage through prose”. Murphy wrote that “during her tenure, Senior intends to engage the nation in the reading and writing of poetry that speaks to the land”.
In her acceptance speech, Senior explained her desire
“to use what is called eco-poetics to develop a lasting awareness, especially among youth, of the need for environmental protection, care, and ownership of Jamaica’s national resources. The urgency is great, as fragile Caribbean islands are in the forefront of the destructive challenges posed by global warming. . . I’d like to use my mandate as Poet Laureate to evoke in the young, especially, that sense of possession and being possessed by land and landscape which nurtured me as a child, and which has propelled me to this momentous day in my life”.
Senior comes to this assignment as a highly decorated and celebrated writer with several of the foremost international literary awards among her accomplishments. These include the Commonwealth Writers Prize for her first collection of short stories, Summer Lightning (1987). She was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize in the Canada and Caribbean Region for her only novel to date, Dancing Lessons (2012). She won the OCM Bocas Overall Prize for yet another short story collection, The Pain Tree, in 2016. In addition, a non-fiction work Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal, was on the short list in 2015.
Some of the stories in Summer Lightning were actually winners of Jamaica Festival Literary competitions, and Senior was awarded a number of high national literary awards. These include the Institute of Jamaica Centenary Medal for Creative Writing in 1979, the Musgrave Silver Medal from the Institute of Jamaica in 1988 and the Musgrave Gold Medal in 2005.
Among her other collections of poetry are Talking of Trees (1985) and Gardening in the Tropics (1994). Other short story collections are Arrival of the Snake Woman (1989), which is among her most acclaimed and includes the novella of the same title, and Discerner of Hearts (1995). Other works of non-fiction include The Message Is Change (1972), which is about Michael Manley’s first elections victory, and Encyclopaedia of Jamaican Heritage (2005).
The poem above, “Bird Shooting Season” is from Talking of Trees, and is expressive of a number of preoccupations found in her work throughout her career. These include her interest in the natural environment to which she has partially dedicated her poet laureateship. She grew up in the country and has had a lifelong appreciation of natural conservation, and of nature. In this poem is the little girl’s fear for the birds and her secret wish that they will “fly birds fly” away from their hunters. She mixes this with an interest in freedom of expression and against the macho inclination to kill.
It is a poem of feminist sensibilities, very conscious of the prevailing dominating patriarchy throughout the verses. It is the season of bird shooting and groups of men gather as is their custom when the season comes around, in her father’s house to prepare for their expedition into the fields or forests to shoot birds. They assemble overnight and depart before dawn in the early morning. The poem painstakingly delineates the activities with their sharp separation according to gender.
The first striking point is “Birdshooting season the men” – the opening line of the poem which clearly establishes that this is all about the men. There is no place for women; wives are excluded, set aside, and the guns take their place “the men make marriages with their guns”. As they spend the night preparing for the hunt, the house is taken over by “macho” activity, including the drinking of
white rum, “neat”.
Then the women are described as “contentless”, which is loaded with meaning. On the surface it simply means that the women are kept busy all night with no time to rest or sleep because they are helping the men in the preparations. But note the strict division of labour, which is also a division in the social order. The women’s role is very domestic and negatively gender specific. They prepare and serve food. This makes them contentless in a second sense – they are relegated to an inferior role; as mere supporters. There is no contentment in knowing that the guns and the hunting material are more important than they are and that they are mere servants to the men who take over the house for the night.
“Contentless” assumes a third meaning as we enter the mind of the poem’s persona – a little girl watching on and observing in wonder and a touch of disapproval. Her senses are very sharp, and she is conscious of what is taking place, especially the understanding that all this hustle and bustle is the doom-filled predawn prologue to a kill. It is an assault on the natural environment, with which her youthful sensitivity is sympathetic. The gender division shifts to the next generation – the little boys are in awe and anticipation of when they become men and can go hunting too. The little girls are in rebellion – willing the failure of all this grand elaborate enterprise being conspired under cloak of darkness, and that the birds will fly away to freedom.
This groups together in a compact way, several of Senior’s social, political and human concerns as expressed across her many books of poetry and prose. The humane spirit is resident in the fresh mind of the young girl, which will grow into a concern for womanhood, for gender inequalities and social injustice at the hands of men. There will be greater concern for a society under siege from crime and inhumanity, in which not birds are culled, but women, social justice, nature, the natural environment and humanity itself. Senior sees her laureateship as a mandate to continue her resistance of all this in poetry.