Hétérophonie: ce terme désigne un état intermédiaire entre monodie et polyphonie. Selon les chercheurs russes, l'hétérophonie présente les caractéristiques suivantes: (1) l'exécution simultanée de deux ou plusieurs réalisations variées d'un même canevas mélodique, (2) l'instabilité des relations verticales entre les voix et (3) une homorythmie plus ou moins rigoureuse. (Arom and Meyer, 1993: 167)

Introduction

The writings of the Jamaican author Olive Senior are renowned for their oral dimension. Born in rural Jamaica, Senior came into contact with all sorts of lects (Ferguson, 1959; Alleyne, 1980; Bernabé, 1983; Akai, 1997; Mufwene, 2002; Raguet, 2008) and quickly became aware of problems of communication between generations, social groups, city and country and cultures. While Senior's stories are all set in Jamaica and rooted in oral culture, the influence of Senior's Canadian education, through which Senior discovered other voices and cultures, is also strongly evident in her writings. Her experiences have led her to fashion a very personal voice, creating a world in which country life, so present in her stories, is endangered by city ways. Such a confrontation disrupts a difficult balance and somehow revives all the tensions inherited from colonization and slavery. Through her writing, Olive Senior succeeds in giving volume to her characters’ and narrators’ speech, and linking all these moments of danger in subtle fashion.

One of the key features of Senior's writing is its oraliture, a term first coined by Ernst Mirville in relation to Haitian literature, and related to the more common notion of ‘orality’ in fiction, whereby oral presentations, dually oriented (on the level of the individual utterer and on the social level through speech), are transferred to paper and result in the materialization of voiced speech. Oraliture, used by Maximilien Laroche and others to refer to orality in the Caribbean context, is not limited to the representation of language, but extends to any more or less audible ‘voiced’ expression. As Alison Calder (2012: 95) claimed, we are in the realm of postmodern writing using ‘hybrid narrative agents to produce a dialogic or polyphonic layering of concealed voices that challenges notions of the individual poet and re-views the relation between artist, material, and audience’. In any kind of poetic Caribbean piece of writing, the polyphonic, or rather ‘heterophonic’, layering of voices is prominent.