Oonya Kempadoo s Debut Novel Offers A Vivid Evocation Of Caribbean Community Life.
By Randall Holdridge
BUXTON SPICE IS the first book by Oonya Kempadoo,
a London-born black woman who grew up in Guyana on the Caribbean
coast of South America. She lives now in Grenada. Although it s
called a novel,
Buxton Spice is really a series of roughly
autobiographical vignettes which offer a charming, and often frankly
erotic, picture of Kempadoo s Guyanese girlhood. The narrator is Lula, the precocious 12-year-old daughter of
a racially mixed marriage. Lula is a shrewd observer of her neighborhood
in Tamarind Grove, a lush tropical township near the capital of