SOURCE: Pollard, Velma. “Mothertongue Voices in the Writing of Olive Senior and Lorna Goodison.” In Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, edited by Susheila Nasta, pp. 238-53. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Pollard analyzes the language of Senior's stories and Lorna Goodison's verse in order to investigate how the two authors “use the complex language situation” of the West Indies “to their advantage in the act of creating, particularly in terms of character identification.”

Jean D'Costa, Jamaican linguist and foremost Caribbean writer of children's novels, contends that the West Indian writer who wishes to satisfy himself, his local audience and his foreign audience, must evolve a ‘literary dialect’ which not only satisfies both these audiences but also is an authentic representation of the ‘language culture’ of his community.¹ And Garth St Omer, one of the better known...