Hurricane Story (with special reference to the poetry of Olive Senior)

Much of the reportage of hurricane is a numbers game of weather statistics and dollars lost. But the personal/affective impact of these numbers on individuals and communities can be found in the work of creative writers, like Jamaican-Canadian poet, Olive Senior. Senior places hurricane at the heart of the Caribbean story. It is a story of losses and gains, of grief and surprisingly, of humour. Importantly, Senior’s “hurricane stories” in Gardening in the Tropics suggest that resilience lies within Jamaican capacity to “orchestrate disaster” which in turn lies in the power of story. Story is knowledge: knowledge that accretes over time and in whose light we make changes to how we think, understand, and act – how we respond to geo-political climactic events.