Birdshooting Season (Olive Senior)

The poem ‘Birdshooting Season’ is reminiscent of the prominent bird poems, especially Dennis
Scott’s ‘Bird.’ Significantly, while Senior’s gender roles are sharply defined in her poem, the 10-
year-old boy in ‘Bird’ takes exactly the same position as the little girls in Senior’s poem who
whisper “Fly Birds Fly.”

Apart from the sensitivity which is identified with the female side in ‘Birdshooting Season’ there is
the strong sense of patriarchy and the clearly divided gender roles and gender positions. First of
all, the men “make marriages with their guns” in the preparation for the hunt. The guns replace
and displace their wives. Implied in the poem is that the guns get all their attention, all their care.
The weapons are fussed over and treasured while the wives and the women are relegated to
secondary subservient roles. These are ‘feminine’ roles like preparing food for the men to carry –
background supporting roles. The house “turns macho” in a stamp of patriarchy.

Note Senior’s careful word choice in “contentless women.” She means that they work “all night
long” in serving the men and helping their preparations; they get no ‘content’ meaning they get no
rest or quiet moments. It also means ‘tireless.’ But the word is so precisely chosen that it also
means ‘not happy,’ ‘not satisfied’ ‘not content’ in their relegated supporting gender roles.

In the hands of good poets no word is wasted. Note Senior’s observation of the “macho”
atmosphere while the women are secondary. It is further dramatised – “drinking white rum neat”
is a ‘man’s thing,’ a macho achievement, as is the “sport” of birdshooting. Then the children are
“shivering” because of the chill of the early morning, but the little girls shiver as well out of fright
for the birds and horror at the ‘sport’ – the thrill of the slaughter that is about to take place. The
poet divides the genders; the female concerns are in the right place.

The poem is also modernist like one of the forms taken in the contemporary West Indian work.
Senior employs a peculiar use of capital letters in a poem that follows the modernist, rather than
the older convention of beginning each line with capitals. She discards conventions of
capitalisation while employing capitals in a post-modernist way. In the final line they dramatise
the sense of freedom – the girls wish this escape for the birds and the poem associates a quest, a
need for freedom on the part of women in this “macho” patriarchal society.

Senior might well have witnessed these bird-shooting events as a child. She turns it into a
commentary on many issues that reflect a society and its concerns. The poem has the stylistic
characteristics referred to above and lends itself perfectly for a feminist reading.