‘Dancing Lessons’ by Olive Senior

Reviewed by Rob Sherren

Dancing Lessons, Olive Senior’s debut novel, reminds us that a community of senior citizens contains all the passions and problems found in any other segment of societyand perhaps even more. Senior is a Jamaican-Canadian writer of short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction; she won the Commonwealth Writer’s Award for her collection of short stories Summer Lightning in 1986.

In this new novel Senior tells the story of a woman known as G, or Mrs. Samphire, who moves into a senior’s lodge in Kingston, Jamaica after the humble dwelling where she raised her four children is destroyed by a hurricane. G uses selective muteness to separate herself from the other lodge residents, but her silence stands in dramatic contrast to dense inner dialogues that recall the emotional poverty of her life. She was the child that nobody wanted, born to a “slut… from the canefields” and a shell-shocked war veteran. She never met her mother or knew her name, and her father was institutionalized, so she was raised by a self-righteous and religious aunt who seemed to revile G for her coloring, and the shame her father brought to their aristocratic family.

G ran away young (on horseback) with a local rake, to whom she was also somehow related, and bore his philandering and beatings with the same silence she offered to their children. In her recollections she never even spoke when her eldest daughter Celia was given away or unofficially adopted by an American missionary couple. The eldest daughter does very well for herself, eventually becoming a TV-interviewing celebrity renowned for her compassion and accessibility. It is Celia who transplants G from the ruined country shack to the retirement lodge full of primping chatelaines and doddering cads, and sets G up in a new life with expensive clothes and make-up which at first she mulishly refuses to wear.

G revels in her ostracism, vengefully gaslighting other residents with low-level acts of kleptomania such as swiping their favourite crossword pencils. Eventually G’s natural pride asserts itself and she sets about to climb in the pecking order of lodge life. She pays attention to her appearance, begins to acquiesce in Celia’s attempted rapprochement, and puts her energies into the more positive self-expressive outlets of gardening and keeping a journal.

G presents many complexities as a character, some of which can be difficult to integrate.  She describes a life that is truly devoid of love or affirmation yet she exhibits and even confesses to a huge superiority complex. Her silence also has many facets: it is coquettish, as she uses it and a red dress to lure a widower; it is passive-aggressive as she holds herself apart from the regular dinner table companions who have lived at least two classes above her; it is the main source of the book’s dramatic tension as she refuses to answer Celia’s questions about the family’s history; and it is intermittent as she is skilled and articulate when it comes to questioning others, particularly Celia about her own life and those of G’s other children who all seem to have wandered away as a result of her perceived aloofness.

The early narrative is full, flowing through images, settings, and times, evoking and showcasing the tangled symbiosis of Jamaican landscape and society. Senior describes a seduction via mangos saying …

and I forgot everything, where we were, what I had done, as we tore into those mangos like children, peeling off the skin with our teeth, biting into the fruit and letting the juice run down our chins, sucking the seeds until they were white, then rushing to the river to wash our hands, splash water on our faces, the discarded mango skins glistening like flowers on the black sand.

The rhythms of lodge life are more quotidian as G continually justifies (to herself) her inability to connect with others as a self-protection mechanism. All the while she is setting about to seduce an eligible widower, not with mangos but with novels and her vegetable garden. She even entertains the notion of marrying him. The love interest resolves as the book’s main crisis, which is sequenced as an anti-climax, then followed by a clunky plot twist revealed via a device that the author almost apologizes for using. It drives G into a depression deeper than anything she demonstrated upon the departure of her husband or the loss of her children. Perhaps it all finally just catches up with her, but this response walks the line between testing the reader’s suspension of disbelief, and making G human by illustrating the flaw of her self-absorption.

The story returns to its central theme of intergenerational misunderstanding when it is affected by gang drug violence, which is also where this story of grace and shame from another era spins into its denouement. Dancing Lessons ends with one proud woman trying to look past her justifications, to finally see her own life and share it with her family. Readers may be challenged by the contradictions presented by G, but they will also be rewarded by the complex relationships she has with the women in her life, and by the simple humanity of a group of people who care deeply for one another, despite all the things that could come between them.