SOURCE: Thieme, John. “‘Mixed Worlds’: Olive Senior's Summer Lightning.” Kunapipi 16, no. 2 (1994): 90-5.

In the following essay, Thieme finds several of the stories in Summer Lightning to be autobiographical in nature and focused on the issue of identity.

Superficially the bulk of the stories in Olive Senior's Summer Lightning (1986) are primarily naturalistic accounts of a particular experience of growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1940's and 1950's. The stories repeatedly construct a situation in which a child-protagonist, usually a girl, has been displaced from the peasant home of her early youth and relocated in a middle-class household. Senior has said that this situation replicates the experience of her own youth,¹ which involved a similar movement between houses and made her socially, as well as racially, ‘a child of mixed worlds, socialized unwittingly and simultaneously into both’,² and the reader who knows this, even if s/he is anxious...