Olive Senior launches second novel at UWI
Published:Sunday | September 21, 2025 | 12:07 AMMichael Reckord - Sunday Gleaner Writer
“My writing is my life,” Olive Senior, one of Jamaica’s most celebrated writers, told the packed Library Multifunctional Room at The University of the West Indies, Mona, on Thursday evening. In the course of the roughly two-hour-long celebration of her second novel, Paradise Once, her audience was able to understand some of the implications of the statement.
The explanation came not only from the author’s words during the event, called Conversations With Olive Senior – essentially an interview by Professor Opal Palmer Adisa – but from the attendant activities. They included music, song, a reading from the novel, a reading of a Senior poem, a display of African art, many questions and comments from the audience and, for refreshment, fish, bammy and fruit juices. “Every time you eat a bammy, you’re taking part in a Taino ritual,” Senior would tell the audience during the proceedings.
That refreshment and the artwork (in metal, painting and fabric by Alao Luqman Omotayo) were appropriate because the novel’s central characters are three Taino youngsters and an African. Those fictional creations are based on an actual event, the slaughter of an entire Taino village in Cuba by Spanish forces in 1513.
The mass killing is the opening incident in the novel, with the young people being the survivors. Characters in the book include Burning Spear, Corn Cob, Night Orchid, Pebble and Mocking Bird. Published this year, the novel has 352 pages and six sections: Part I – The Village, Part II – Survivors, Part III – The Chosen, Part IV – The Cave, Part V – Cimarrones, and a five-page Glossary of Taino words.
Insight into Senior’s approach to her 20 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and children’s literature came through her comments. “I don’t have any philosophy of writing,” she said. “I’m always taking in the world around me ... I’m always researching … for every poem I write”. About the novel, she said, “I didn’t set out to write a novel … [but] I had a lot of research material and wasn’t sure what to do with it … . I tried to stay true to the material I had. I tried to be accurate,” adding that she “never writes for a particular audience”.
Putting on her historian’s hat, Senior told the audience that for centuries the Tainos, who lived in the larger Caribbean islands, led a very peaceful, easy-going life in a sophisticated society with order, rules and leaders. When Columbus came, he sent a priest to stay with a Taino family to find out if they had a religion (for a major aim of the Spaniards was to make the natives Christian). In fact, the Tainos did have a religion, with a pantheon of spirits and a “high god “.
Senior said she wanted readers of Paradise Once to have an understanding of and interest in Taino society (past and present). The book is set two generations after Columbus came to the region in 1492, she said, adding that she wanted it to end on a positive note, with the meeting between the first Africans brought to the Caribbean and the native population.
Asked how long it took her to write the novel, Senior said that over many years she made attempts to write it, but was never satisfied with the result and put the unfinished work away for about six years. Subsequently, a discussion with a publisher led to her revisiting it, developing characters she had been thinking about “for decades”. She was able to focus on the rewriting, she said, and the completion of the novel “didn’t take long”.
A blurb on the inside cover of the novel ends with this paragraph: “In this love song to the Caribbean, Olive Senior authentically evokes the physical and spiritual worlds of the First Peoples and the survivors – Indigenous and African – who will become the resistance fighters known in history as the Cimarrones or Maroons.”
Dr Lisa Tomlinson, head of the Department of Literatures in English at the university, informed the audience that the launch of the book coincides with a West Indian Literature course in which Senior is the special author. “The alignment provides our literary and creative writing students – and indeed all aspiring writers – the invaluable opportunity to meet and engage with her in person,” she said.
She added, “Considering the state of the world in which some would prefer to revise history than recollect it, this novel is timely and necessary, embodying her characteristic blend of restraint and revelation. It is quietly insistent, historically grounded, and deeply humane, a testament to Senior’s exceptional contribution as a writer and cultural custodian.”
Senior was poet laureate of Jamaica from 2021 to 2024, and has received numerous awards and honours, including honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) and York University (Canada), the Gold Medal of the Institute of Jamaica, Canada’s Matt Cohen Award for Lifetime Achievement, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.