“Teacher ask me to write composition about The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Meet and I write three page about Miss Rilla and Teacher tear it up and say that Miss Rilla not fit person to write composition about and right away I feel bad the same way I feel the day Miss Rilla go and die on me.”
This intriging start to the final story Ballad from the short story collection Summer Lightning1, is just a taste of why I loved reading this book.
A book where I can take on a character’s essence and walk around in their shoes is one that I know I will enjoy reading. This first passage just re-inforced that fact.
Summer Lightning was Olive Senior’s2 first short story collection. Published in 1986, it won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize3 and is a wonderfull collection of stories that center life in rural Jamaica during an undetermined era, but one I hazard a guess, could be anywhere between the 1950s and the 1970s.
Each story is different but the theme of life in rural Jamaica is strong, as are the voices of the central characters which are for the most part pre-teen children, growing in situations where they have no real agency or control over their own lives, but who are able to escape into their imaginations, crafting worlds and stories about the people around them, stories frequently based off half absorb local lore or snippets of conversations they were not meant to hear.
Each story garnered laughter but also some sadness at the things children often have to endure, and how you can get completely overwhelmed by situations outside of your control, if, as a child, you don’t have adults who will advocate for you. Whether you’re aware of this or not.
Senior Shows a different way to write
As a writer, I sometimes struggle with wanting to write stories in ’the right way’. Reading this collection, I struggled at first with the way Senior composed her prose. I am quite skilled in reading non standard english so it wasn’t that, but I did struggle for just a short time with the way the first couple of stories were structured, with how Senior, who is a poet and a journalist, punctuated the prose.
I read and re-read passages of the text to make sure I was understanding the meaning in the words I read, then I realised, I was letting that interrupt the joy of the story that was being told. There is a saying, you have to know the rules, before you can break them, this is true and I think Senior’s ability to break conventional rules in her writing just added to the authenticity of the writing, it did not detract from it.
Stories for life
This collection is one that I believe I will return to frequently, I so enjoyed Love Orange, Summer Lightning and Do Angels Wear Brassieres? in particular, but to be honest every story had something that made me ponder and had me lining up in the protagonists corner.
With themes of rural living, lonelinesss, the precocious child, endurance, cross generation friendships, we are treated to views of life from a perspective that we ourselves might remember and if not, ones that we will come to understand
I would highly recommend Olive Senior’s short story collection Summer Lightning. Buy it, read it, love it