Olive Senior is one of our pre-eminent Caribbean writers. Her second book of stories, Arrival of the Snake-Woman (TSAR), first published in England in 1989, has just been reissued.

Senior lives and teaches in Toronto, but her subject remains the country of her birth.

"What I'm trying to do with all my writing is to examine Jamaican history," she says, "to write the nation.

"Jamaica is very multicultural," she adds. "I'm trying to write about everybody in this place. And I'm also trying to put them in a historical and cultural framework."

The stories depict different periods and examine class, colonialism, race and the urban/rural divide. Her characters speak in a range of dialects reflecting the complexity of Jamaican society.

"I'm trying to write cadences of speech," Senior says. "We've two languages in Jamaica. We have English, of course, and what linguists now call Creole. When I was in high school, we were punished if we spoke dialect.

"I always wanted to be a writer," she adds, "but I didn't get anywhere until I let my characters speak their own way. I allowed my characters to speak the way they would in real life.

"But I've always been conscious of writing as communication. I'm not just writing for Jamaicans. I'm writing for everyone.

"Human beings all have the same hopes and dreams," she concludes. "I'm trying to capture the human condition. It just happens to be in this small place."

. . .

Chinua Achebe, Nobel Prize winner and author of Things Fall Apart, has published a new book of non-fiction, The Education of a British-Protected Child (Bond Street Books).

The book collects essays and speeches dating from the late 1980s to more recent times. They tackle Nigerian society, the use of English by African writers and Africa's post-colonial fate. Achebe is uncompromising on the evils of colonialism.

The title essay slyly refers to Nigeria's status as a British Protectorate during the author's childhood. ("The Chinese did not invent wall posters for cultural education. My father did." Impressed by a photo of George V, young Chinua is confused by "a funny-looking little man with an enormous stride," Johnnie Walker.)

He puzzles over an invitation to address a meeting of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development on neo-liberal economics, things such as the elimination of food subsidies. "I said that what was going on before me was a fiction workshop, no more and no less!

"For too long," he says later, "the world has been content to judge peoples and nations in distress largely on the basis of received stereotypes drawn from mythologies of oppression."

It's hard to argue with that.