Review - Shell by Olive Senior

Shell
by Olive Senior
Insomniac, 2007

Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston

On one hand Senior views the Jamaican sugar cane fields with an objective eye, on the other she gets inside the heart and mind of the slave and shares the separation from homeland, the exposure to cruelty, with well-rendered poems. The poems sing with the rhythms and cadence of Jamaica and of passion.

Senior pulls no punches, hides nothing: from the overloaded tables while slaves starved, to the useless palaces while slaves froze, the reader becomes at one with the experience through the clear lens of Senior’s poetry. The shell is the linking image throughout the poems, whether as womb, token, or trumpet, always with new insights.

The breadth of the metaphor of the shell is indicated in the first poem, ‘Gastropoda’ (p.9) :

You think I’ve stayed home all my life,
moving at snail’s pace, sneakily living off
another’s labour? You think I’ve nought
to leave behind but empty shell? Come:
study me. Take my chambered shell apart.
Brace yourself for whirlwinds
coiled at my heart.

Senior disabuses the reader of any ideas of the sheltered or any thought of tedium in the life and death of the shell. She sets out the complications of the shell’s structure and content: there is no monotony here.

The shell has ‘crumbling walls / …set …/ for life/ for breaking’ (p.13) and may contain a seed of corn, a garden snail, or the eye of Sun which released the people of Cacibajagua. The history and legends of Senior’s culture sings in ‘Taíno Genesis’ (p.18/19):

… We would bleach in the sun
for nine days; then to the water to gather
the sacred herb digo, for the washing
to remove the last traces of our birth
passage.
… We were Taíno, the ones gifted
with guinep or jagua. With sacred bixa:
the herb anotto. The ones shelled out by Sun Father.

It is in poems such as ‘Shell blow’ (p.33ff) that Senior begins to expose the pain of the sugar cane slave. She instructs the reader to pick up a shell, put it to the ear, and hear ‘…the real thing, a blast-out, everybody’s/ history: areito, canto histórico, a full/ genealogy of this beach, this island people.’

…Been marking time
ever since. Convinced their name is
Nobody,

born in a place that is called Nothing,
for it is Historyless.’

She speaks of people who were considered less than people, less than nothing, having no name or identity for anyone but themselves. A people owned but not owning.

…
suddenly, a job lot. Indiscriminately
thrown in, we are jumbled, shaken up,
rolled together, little knowing our fate
or destination, till black and shriveled
… we are
tumbled into the hold of a ship …

Disgorged, spilled out, shell-shocked
I come parched and dried, my head
emptied, till shock-still I come to rest,
shelled out, buck naked. In the mad
ensuing scramble, who will come
who will come sample me,
view me, choose me, sort me out
for grade and quality, drive me home
to crush me, use me? Know that alone
I’m of little value, like a peppercorn
rental.

(Peppercorn p.46)

Senior reveals the bright beauty of the slave’s dreams in poems such as ‘Fishing in the waters where my dreams lie’ (p.60ff)

I’m homing these waters
now I sing the joys of knowing
scales fall from my eyes hail
my brothers that swim from my
homeland to greet me here
clothed in the same bright dress
wearing new names

Each night I dream my net breaks up water
as water breaks up the shell-like image of
the moon.

At the last, Senior shows the wealth of those who lived from the profits of the sugar cane in the portrait of a rich woman with her black slave, in ‘The poetics of a West India dinner party’ (p.79ff) where the menu, given in full, includes:

a Pasty of the side of a young Goate, and
a side of a fat
young Shot upon it, well season’d
with Pepper
and salt, and with some Nutmeg,
a loyne of Veale, to which there wants no
sauce being so
well finisht with Oranges, Lymons,
and Lymes,
three young Turkies in a dish,
two Capons, of which sort I have seen some
extreme large
and very fat,
two henns with eggs in a dish, ….

Senior recognizes ‘Our fragile fetishes of power’ and that ‘none can shackle/ passing time that is excavating from within, the/ promise of the silenced voices: the resonance of/ emptied shell.’ (p.92)

She writes strongly, sings clearly, revealing pain, giving context and insight. These are poems to be read and reread, to be drawn out, mulled over, and relished.

--
Joanna M. Weston

A SUMMER FATHER - poetry - Frontenac House
2006 ISBN: 1-89718105-1 $15.95
THOSE BLUE SHOES for ages 7-12
http://www3.telus.net/public/west34/