'Mixed Worlds': Olive Senior's Summer Lightning

Authors

John Thieme

Abstract

Superficially the bulk of the stories in Olive Senior's Summer Lightning (1986) are primarily naturalistic accounts of a particular experience of growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1940's and 1950's. The stories repeatedly construct a situation in which a child-protagonist, usually a girl, has been displaced from the peasant home of her early youth and relocated in a middle-class household. Senior has said that this situation replicates the experience of her own youth,1 which involved a similar movement between houses and made her socially, as well as racially, 'a child of mixed worlds, socialized unwittingly and simultaneously into both'/ and the reader who knows this, even if s/he is anxious to avoid seeing the text simply as a fictionalized transcription of aspects of the author's own experience, may well be tempted to assume that its range is narrowly circumscribed by the particular nature of this situation represented.

Recommended Citation

Thieme, John, 'Mixed Worlds': Olive Senior's Summer Lightning, Kunapipi, 16(2), 1994.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol16/iss2/15