FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
| Books by Gaelle Eizlini BUXTON SPICE Mercifully, young Guyanese author Oonya Kempadoo’s debut novel, Buxton Spice, doesn’t make a single reference to those bouncing British babes. The coming-of-age story about a Caribbean girl is a great escape from a dreary Canadian winter into a world of eroticism and the dark political forces of the 1970s in fictional Tamarind Grove. Two things set this apart from the traditional John Hughes teenage angst story – a deliciously authentic Caribbean voice that makes you feel like an insider and a tourist at the same time, and the unfolding of a girl‘s consciousness as she grows to discover not only erotic desires, but an awareness of the adult world around her. Kempadoo does a remarkable job of bringing out the darker aspects of Caribbean politics without hitting you on the head or pontificating. She does not forget that she is is telling the story of 15-year-old Lula, and retains a clear voice without resorting to the North American packaged version of adolescence. Even as Lula's world gets darker – her parents arrested, local murders, and neighbourhood mothers concerned about armed soldiers everywhere – Kempadoo's voice remains refreshingly young. Buxton Spice is not so much a tale of innocence corrupted as it is of innocence gaining an awareness that life is not as playful as it had once been. In the hands of a writer less able, the novel might have bogged down in a morass of moral choices and questions of identity. Kempadoo keeps her narrative focused on life through the eyes of a young girl. It is a life well worth looking in on. |
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