Motifs in Gardening in the Tropics Kristie Nandalal 12th Grade

"I want my writing to present Caribbean people as real people, with dreams and hopes and fears and courage..." -Olive Senior. In the first section of her poetry collection, Olive Senior explores issues of migration and diaspora in an attempt to paint the Caribbean in a new light to the world. She thematically details the effects colonialism and post-colonialism has on the Caribbean in all of her poems in this section, and she unites them through one shared motif. The motif in 'Traveller's Tales', therefore, is traveling, and this is seen in three of her poems: 'Meditation on Yellow', 'Caribbean Basin Initiative' and 'Stowaway'.

In the first poem, 'Meditation on Yellow', the persona expresses the frustration and hardships she and her ancestors experience because of the traveling of foreigners. In the first part of the poem, she details the arrival of the European colonists, "At three in the afternoon/ you landed here at El Dorado..." With their arrival, they brought slavery and injustice to the Indigenous people, and the persona expresses how they felt, "Had I known I would have/ brewed you up some yellow fever-grass/ and arsenic..." The persona then goes on to explain, in the second part, the present day Caribbean, where...