SOURCE: Lalla, Barbara. “Registering Woman: Senior's Zig-zag Discourse and Code-Switching in Jamaican Narrative.” ARIEL 29, no. 4 (October 1998): 83-98.

In the following essay, Lalla traces the changing language in Senior's story “Zig-zag,” arguing that “the shifting experiences and perspectives of the child protagonist emerge through a multifaceted and shifting discourse.”

The traumatic process of becoming a woman, in the setting of a brown, rural, middle-class Jamaican family, is a dominant factor in shaping the language of Olive Senior's short story “Zig-zag,” in Discerner of Hearts. Jamaican Creole, Standard English, and intermediate varieties of these comprise Jamaican discourse, and “Zig-zag” shifts between the codes and intersects scribal discourse with suggestions of orality. Through these shifts, “Zig-zag” traces the emotional upheavals of its central character, Sadie, one of two daughters in a household fraught with tensions about mixed roots.

Sadie's sister, Muffet, is older, fairer, better behaved, admired, and inevitably politely spoken...