Sankofa Survivance in Olive Senior’s Paradise Once

The Anishinaabe writer and literary critic Gerald Vizenor coined the term “survivance” to describe “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name.”¹ “Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry,” he elaborates. “Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy.”² This idea of claiming an estate, a right of succession, resonates with the West African concept of Sankofa, embraced in the diaspora as a right to return to claim that which has been lost. Olive Senior’s latest novel, Paradise Once, can be described as a work of Sankofa survivance. It is a powerful imagining of the complexities of the encounter between Indigeneity and colonialism, told through those Taino and African survivors and freedom fighters who become the ancestors of the emerging Caribbean people. The book enlivens and challenges the received history of that moment and persuasively demonstrates the continuity of Caribbean indigeneity, despite claims to the contrary. 

For Jamaicans of a certain age, knowledge of the people then referred to as the Arawaks first came from a comic book called The Story of Jamaica. Published by the newspaper The Gleaner in 1962 to commemorate Jamaica’s independence, its opening pages depict the Arawaks as peaceful fishing people who practiced various crafts and whose religion featured carvings of their gods and intercession by a medicine man / priest. Tellingly, none of the Arawaks is given an individual name, and their era is described as spanning a thousand, apparently unchanging, years. The arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1493 marks the Arawaks’ entry into a fatal linear history. One panel flatly states that it only took one hundred years for the Arawaks to die out completely. Senior reverses this erasure. She presents the colonizers as flat characters, known only through their actions or through others’ perceptions of them. Instead, it is those marginalized in the traditional narrative and deprived of interiority, the Tainos and Africans, whose histories, consciences, desires, foibles, spiritualities, and economies are foregrounded. The novel thus enters a space opened by ongoing projects of decolonizing history, similar to the work of Chinua Achebe’s 1959 Things Fall Apart, which recounts in depth the stories erased by a single paragraph in a British colonial officer’s report.

Paradise Once opens with an oracular prologue that immediately disrupts the dominant narrative of Indigenous peoples living outside history. It offers multiple, layered starting points: locally, in the introduction of a foreign rooster to a Taino village and the struggle for succession after the death of a kacike; regionally, in the tensions fostered by the arrival of the Spanish, creating both desire for and resistance to the novelties of the Europeans; and mythologically, in the split between founding twin gods. Senior signals that the story will depict Indigenous peoples who wrestle with the issues of social life just as modern people do: problems of succession, social conflict and factions, what and who to believe, and how to make meaning of events. This is the complex world the Spaniards entered, not some Edenic spectacle. Thus we are swiftly transported into an Indigenous history and epistemology informed by a dualistic mythology where the union and conflict of opposites are foundational.

Senior is well known as a skilled researcher, evidenced by her nonfiction works, such as the 2003 Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage and the 2014 Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal. Indeed, the instigating event of Paradise Once is based on a well-documented massacre in Cuba in 1513, witnessed by the priest Bartolomé de las Casas. Senior also draws on the increasing contemporary research into Taino culture and practices to underpin the vivid world-building in the novel, as readers are invited into the village of Maima. A bustling center of activity, Maima is an important Cuban settlement with a kacike and a ruling council, worthy of traders’ visits, and in communication with other settlements. While there are rhythms and rituals that connect daily life to the cosmological, there are also historical events and political maneuverings in turn linked to founding myths, themselves appropriated from earlier encounters among Indigenous groups.

Paradise Once centers on an ensemble of characters on the cusp of adulthood. Night Orchid, a skilled carver, is awaiting her first menses and the accompanying ceremonies that will celebrate her womanhood. Heart of Palm is a teenage village hero, competing with Flint, who is burdened by his mixed Ciboney/Taino heritage. Shark Tooth, an outsider, has designs on Night Orchid and village leadership. Sekou, an African of Jolof extraction born in Spain, was taken from his mother at the age of six to serve various Spanish masters. Equally vivid are the village elders, among them Matron Greenstone, leader of a traditionalist faction struggling for power; Candlewood, the village shaman; and Crab Claw, Flint’s Ciboney mother who wants full village membership for her half-Taino son. Intriguingly, each is not fully accepted by the village: Night Orchid suffered from seizures as a child, and although she was healed by the shaman, her strangeness is not forgotten by the village; Flint, half-Ciboney, is not accepted as an equal; Heart of Palm chooses to align himself with a nontraditional movement in the village; and Sekou is an African raised by the Spanish. Their preexisting knowledge of conflict becomes a crucial quality as they become the Chosen, an assemblage particularly equipped to become the founders of a new people by virtue of their more tenuous inclusion in the status quo.

After the vicious Spanish destruction of Maima, the Chosen—violently separated from each other and their homes, pursued by Shark Tooth, and spiritually protected by Candlewood—begin a quest across Cuba that serves as a rite of passage. Individually, they navigate physical, emotional, and spiritual hardships, with few resources and no certain endpoint. As they meet up, allegiances are formed and dissolved. They learn more about their own and the land’s vulnerabilities and capacity for sustenance. The closing of the door of return to what was compels them to pursue Sankofa survivance, drawing on the old to form a new people, finding each other and ways to live in a defamiliarized landscape that they will soon be defending in the Maroon wars. Candlewood enjoins the Chosen: “Know that the thread that binds you now stretches from the Old Ones descended from the Snow People at the top of the world and our Taíno peoples of the floating worlds through Flint to Sekou, descended from people at the other end of the world, who holds the thread of the new” (328). Ronald Cummings’s deployment of Maroon in/securities aptly renders the precarity and possibility of such a moment, “attending to marronage as an assemblage, marked by repeated practices of flight, and as a remaking of structures and possibilities of community and a renegotiation of relationships to space, land, and territoriality in response to ongoing structures of colonial violence and the forging of a range of practices.”³

Paradise Once, through its compelling characters and storytelling, invites readers to revise assumptions about Caribbean Indigenous history and to restore to the Taino their status as a living people making both tangible and intangible contributions to Caribbean identities and meanings, then and now. Such a revision compels reconsideration of Maroon history, national and Caribbean histories, and global history as well. The so-called conquest did not succeed. Historically, the griot, the West African storyteller, mediates between “tradition and destiny, a mediation balancing the competing claims of memory and of renewed vision and insight.”⁴ Central to the griot’s concerns is the ethical development of the community. The griot thus reaches into the past to inform the present. Because the contemporary moment is fraught with environmental danger, authoritarian resurgence, gross inequality, and other threats to humane life, Olive Senior, as griot, has provided readers with the timely reminder that, even in the face of overwhelming forces, Sankofa survivance as process is both necessary and possible.  

Randi Gray Kristensen is a fiction writer, poet, story coach, and retired scholar in Caribbean studies. She is presently writing a novel that opens with the murder of a World Bank employee a week after President Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984. The novel unravels not only that crime but also the complex connections between people and institutions in the United States and the Caribbean in an effort to answer how those relationships have changed, or not, since then. She also maintains an interest in creative portrayals of marronage and in creative Caribbean responses to the damages of neoliberalism, disaster capitalism, and humanitarianism.

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[1] Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” in Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 19.

[2] Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), vii.

[3] Ronald Cummings, “Maroon In/Securities,” Small Axe, no. 57 (November 2018): 49, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-7249126.

[4] Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee, introduction to Fred Lee Hord and Jonathan Scott Lee, eds., I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Philosophy (University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 11.