‘Let them know you have broughtuptcy’: Childhood and child-subjects in Olive Senior’s short stories

Critical appraisals of Olive Senior’s fiction seldom fail to highlight its preoccupation with childhood as a powerful trope through which to express the personal and social legacies of Jamaica’s colonial history. This is to be expected given that over two-thirds of the stories in her three published collections, Summer Lightning (1986), Arrival of the Snake-Woman (1989) and Discerner of Hearts (1995), focus on a child’s experience or perspective, or both, with a significant number of these being told, in whole or in part, by child narrators.